living witnesses. There is no more ceremony than there is with you and me.'
'It is good of you to do this for me,' David said.
'We would do the same for any of our people who should doubt the Truth,' said Jed. 'We are a very simple people and we do not believe in red tape or rules. All we do is live.
'In just a little while,' he said, 'you will understand why we are simple people.'
He swung the door wide open and stepped to one side so that
David might walk in ahead of him. The place was one large room and it was neat and orderly. There was some dust, but not very much.
Half the room was filled to three quarters of its height with a machine that gleamed in the dull light that came from some source high in the roof.
'This is our machine,' said Jed.
And so it was gadgetry, after all. It was another machine, perhaps a cleverer and sleeker machine, but it was still a gadget and the human race were still gadgeteers.
'Doubtless you wondered why you found no machines,' said Jed. 'The answer is that there is only one, and this is it.' 'Just one machine!'
'It is an answerer,' said Jed. 'A logic. With this machine, there is no need of any others.'
'You mean it answers questions?'
'It did at one time,' said Jed. 'I presume it still would if there were any of us who knew how to operate it. But there is no need of asking further questions.'
'You can depend on it?' asked David. 'That is, you can be sure that it tells the truth?'
'My son,' Jed said soberly, 'our ancestors spent thousands of years making sure that it would tell the truth. They did nothing else. It was not only the life work of each trained technician, but the life work of the race. And when they were sure that it would know and tell the truth, when they were certain that there could be no slightest error in the logic of its calculations, they asked two questions of it.'
'Two questions?'
'Two questions,' Jed said. 'And they found the Truth.' 'And the Truth?'
'The Truth,' Jed said, 'is here for you to read. Just as it came out those centuries ago.'
He led the way to a table that stood in front of one panel of the great machine. There were two tapes upon the table, lying side by side. The tapes were covered by some sort of transparent preservative.
'The first question,' said Jed, 'was this: `What is the purpose of the universe?' Now read the top tape, for that is the answer.'
David bent above the table and the answer was upon the tape:
The universe has no purpose. The universe just happened.
'And the second question…' said Jed, but there was no need for him to finish, for what the question had been was implicit in the wording of the second tape:
Life has no significance. Life is an accident.
'And that,' said Jed, 'is the Truth we found. That is why we are a simple people.'
David lifted stricken eyes and looked at Jed, the descendant of that mutant race that was to have brought power and glory, respect and dignity, to the gadgeteering humans.
'I am sorry, son,' said Jed. 'That is all there is.'
They walked out of the room, and Jed locked the door and put the key into his pocket.
'They'll be coming soon,' said Jed, 'the ones who will be sent out to explore the village. I suppose you will be waiting for them?' David shook his head. 'Let's go back home,' he said.
The Thing in the Stone
1
He walked the hills and knew what the hills had seen through geologic time. He listened to the stars and spelled out what the stars were saying. He had found the creature that lay imprisoned in the stone. He had climbed the tree that in other days had been climbed by homing wildcats to reach the den gouged by time and weather out of the cliff's sheer face. He lived alone on a worn-out farm perched on a high and narrow ridge that overlooked the confluence of two rivers. And his next-door neighbor, a most ill-favored man, drove to the county seat, thirty miles away, to tell the sheriff that this reader of the hills, this listener to the stars was a chicken thief.
The sheriff dropped by within a week or so and walked across the yard to where the man was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch that faced the river hills. The sheriff came to a halt at the foot of the stairs that ran up to the porch.
'I'm Sheriff Harley Shepherd,' he said. 'I was just driving by. Been some years since I been out in this neck of the woods. You are new here, aren't you?'
The man rose to his feet and gestured at another chair. 'Been here three years or so,' he said. 'The name is Wallace Daniels. Come up and sit with me.'
The sheriff climbed the stairs and the two shook hands, then sat down in the chairs.
'You don't farm the place,' the sheriff said.
The weed-grown fields came up to the fence that hemmed in the yard.
Daniels shook his head. 'Subsistence farming, if you can call it that. A few chickens for eggs. A couple of cows for milk and butter. Some hogs for meat — the neighbors help me butcher. A garden of course, but that's about the story.'
'Just as well,' the sheriff said. 'The place is all played out. Old Amos Williams, he let it go to ruin. He never was no farmer.'
'The land is resting now,' said Daniels. 'Give it ten years — twenty might be better — and it will be ready once again. The only things it's good for now are the rabbits and the woodchucks and the meadow mice. A lot of birds, of course. I've got the finest covey of quail a man has ever seen.'
'Used to be good squirrel country,' said the sheriff. 'Coon, too. I suppose you still have coon. You have a hunter, Mr. Daniels?'
'I don't own a gun,' said Daniels.
The sheriff settled deeply into the chair, rocking gently.
'Pretty country out here,' he declared. 'Especially with the leaves turning colors. A lot of hardwood and they are colorful. Rough as hell, of course, this land of yours. Straight up and down, the most of it. But pretty.'
'It's old country,' Daniels said. 'The last sea retreated from this area more than four hundred million years ago. It has stood as dry land since the end of the Silurian. Unless you go up north, on to the Canadian Shield, there aren't many places in this country you can find as old as this.'
'You a geologist, Mr. Daniels?'
'Not really. Interested, is all. The rankest amateur. I need something to fill my time and I do a lot of hiking, scrambling up and down these hills. And you can't do that without coming face to face with a lot of geology. I got interested. Found some fossil brachiopods and got to wondering about them. Sent off for some books and read up on them. One thing led to another and — '
'Brachiopods? Would they be dinosaurs, or what? I never knew there were dinosaurs out this way.'
'Not dinosaurs,' said Daniels. 'Earlier than dinosaurs, at least the ones I found. They're small. Something like clams or oysters. But the shells are hinged in a different sort of way. These were old ones, extinct millions of years ago. But we still have a few brachiopods living now. Not too many of them.'
'It must be interesting.'
'I find it so,' said Daniels.
'You knew old Amos Williams?'
'No. He was dead before I came here. Bought the land from the bank that was settling his estate.'
