Read Online Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak - Free Book Online

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 Alden—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