considered the papers worthless, although how they would have known I had no idea. They were a small batch of papers, pretty small potatoes in a place like that. They had been placed in a single envelope and sealed. There was no evidence they had ever been examined; they were all haphazard and mixed up. If they had been examined, they would have been sorted and labelled, but it was fairly evident the original seal never had been broken. The whole bunch of papers had been simply filed away and forgotten.'
She stopped talking and looked hard at me. I said nothing. In her own time, she'd get around to it. Maybe she had a reason for telling it like this. Maybe she had to live it all over again, to re-examine it all again, to be certain (once again? How many times again?) that she had not erred in judgement, that what she had done was right. I was not about to hurry her, although, God knows, I was a bit impatient.
'There wasn't much,' she said. 'A series of letters that shed a little light on the first human colonization of Al-den-nothing startling, nothing new, but they gave one the feeling of the times. A small sheaf of rather amateurish poems written by a girl in her teens or early twenties. Invoices from a small business firm that might have been of some slight interest to an economic historian, and a memorandum written in rather ponderous language by an old man setting down a story that he had been told by his grandfather, who had been one of the original settlers from Earth.'
'And the memorandum?'
'It told a strange story,' she said. 'I took it to Professor Thorndyke and told him what I've just told you and asked him to read the memo and after he had read it he sat there for a time, not looking at me or the memo or anything at all and then said a word I'd never heard before-Anachron.'
'What is Anachron?' asked Elmer.
'It's a mythical planet,' I said, 'a sort of never-never land. Something the archaeologists dreamed up, a place they theorize…'
'A coined word,' said Cynthia. 'I didn't ask Dr. Thorndyke, but I suspect it comes from anachronism- something out of place in time, very much out of place. You see, for years the archaeologists have been finding evidence of an unknown race that left their inscriptions on a number of other planets, perhaps on many more other planets than they know, for their fragmentary inscriptions have been found only in association with the native artifacts…'
'As if they were visitors,' I said, 'who had left behind a trinket or two. They could have visited many planets and their trinkets would be found only on a few of them, by sheer chance.'
'You said there was a memo?' Elmer asked. 'I have it here,' said Cynthia. She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and brought out a long billfold. From it she took a sheaf of folded paper. 'Not the original,' she said. 'A copy. The original was old and fragile. It would not take much handling.'
She handed the papers to Elmer and he unfolded them, took a quick look at them, and handed them to me. 'I'll poke up the fire,' he said, 'so there will be light. You read it aloud so we all can hear it.'
The memo was written in a crabbed hand, the hand, most likely, of an old and feeble man. In places the writing was a little blurred, but was fairly. legible. There was a number at the top of the first page-2305.
Cynthia was watching me. 'The year date,' she said. 'That is what I took it for and Professor Thorndyke thought the same. It would be about right if the man who wrote it is who I think he was.'
Elmer had poked up the fire, pushing the wood and coals together, and the light was good. Elmer said, 'All right, Fletch. Why don't you begin?' So I began:
Chapter 6
2305
… To my grandson, Howard Lansing:
My grandfather, when I was a young man, told me of an event which he experienced when he was a young man of about my age and now that I am as old as he was when he told me of it, or older, I pass it on to you, but because you are still a youngster, I am writing it down so that when you have grown older you may read it and understand it and the implications of it the better.
At the time he related the happening to me he was of sound mind, with no mental and only those physical infirmities which steal upon a man as the years go by. And strange as the tale may be, there is about it, or so it has always seemed to me, a certain logical honesty that marks it as the truth.
My grandfather, as you must realize, was born on Earth and came to our planet of Alden in his middle age. He was born into the early days of the Final War when two great blocs of nations loosed upon the Earth a horror and destruction that can scarcely be imagined. During the days of his youth he took part in this war-as much a part as a man could take, for in truth it was not a war in which men fought one another so much as a war in which machines and instruments fought one another with a mindless fury that was an extension of their makers' fury. In the end with all his family and most of his friends either dead or lost (I don't know which and I'm not sure that he did, either), he finally was among that contingent of human beings, a small fraction of the hordes that once had peopled Earth, that went out in the great starships to people other planets.
But the story he told me had nothing to do with either the war or the going out in space, but with an incident that he did not place at all in time and only approximately in space. I have the impression that it happened when he was still a comparatively young man, although I cannot remember now if he actually told me this or if I have conjectured it from some now forgotten details of the tale itself. I freely admit that there are many parts of it that I have forgotten through the years, although the major facts of it are still sharp within my mind.
Through some circumstance which I have now forgotten (if, in fact, he ever told me), my grandfather found himself in what he called a safe zone, a little area, a pocket of geography in which through some happenstance of location with regard to topography or meteorology, the land was less poisoned, or perhaps not poisoned at all by the agents of the war, and where a man might live in comparative safety without the massive protection that was required in other less fortunate areas. I have said he was not specific as to where this place actually had been, but he did tell me that it was at a point where a small river coming from the north flowed into a larger river, the Ohio.
I gained the impression (although he did not tell me, nor did I question him on the point) that my grandfather at the time was not engaged in any actual task or mission, but that once he found the area, quite by accident, he simply stayed on there, taking advantage of the comparative security that it offered. Which, in view of the situation, would have made uncommonly good sense. How long he stayed there altogether, I have no idea nor how long he had been there when the event took place. Nor why, finally, he left. All of which, of course, is extraneous to what actually happened. But, one day, he told me, he saw the ship arrive. There were, at that time, very few air-traveling ships in existence, most of them having been destroyed, and even if there had been, they would have counted, should they be used as such, as very feeble weapons in the war then being waged. And it was, besides, a ship such as he had never seen before. I remember that he told me the manner in which it differed from ships that he had seen, but the details have grown a little fuzzy in my mind and if I tried to set them down, I know I'd get them wrong.
Being a cautious man, as all men must be in those days, my grandfather hid himself as well as he could manage and kept as close a watch as possible upon what was happening.
The ship had landed on the point of one of the hills that stood above the river and once it had settled five robots came out from it and another person that was not a robot-appearing, indeed, to be a man, but my grandfather, from his hiding place, had the feeling that it was not a man, but something with only the outward appearance of a man. When I asked my grandfather why he might have thought this, he was hard put to put a finger on it. It was not the way he walked nor the way he stood nor, later, the way he talked, but there was a strangeness, perhaps a psychic scent, a subconscious triggering of the brain, that told him that this creature that was not a robot was not yet a man.
Two of the robots walked a short distance from the ship and seemed to stand as sentinels, not facing in the same direction all the time, but turning occasionally as if they were studying or sensing the terrain on every side. The rest of them began unloading a large pile of boxes and what appeared to be equipment.
My grandfather thought that he was well hidden. He was crouching in a thicket close beside the stream and
