Cemetery World Read Online Free PDF

going out to the shed,” she said, “to uncrate Elmer and Bronco. I could drive you out there.”
    “Is there anything,” I asked, “that you don’t know about me?”
    She did smile then. “I knew that as soon as you got in you’d have to pay a courtesy call on Maxwell Peter Bell. How did you make out?”
    “In Maxwell Peter’s book I achieved the rating of a heel.”
    “Then he didn’t take you over?”
    I shook my head. I didn’t quite trust myself to speak.
    How the hell, I wondered, could she know all she seemed to know? There was only one place she could have learned any of it at all—on Alden at the university. Those old friends of mine, I told myself, might have hearts of gold, but they were blabbermouths.
    “Come on, get in,” she said. “We can talk on the way out to the shed. And I want to see this wondrous robot, Elmer.”
    I got into the car. There was an envelope lying in her lap and she handed it to me.
    “For you,” she said.
    It had my name scrawled across the face of it and there was no mistaking that misshapen scrawl. Thorney, I told myself. What the hell did Thorney have to do with Cynthia Lansing ambushing me as soon as I got to Earth?
    She started up the car and headed down the driveway. I ripped the letter open. It was a sheet of official University of Alden stationery and in the upper left-hand corner was neatly printed: William J. Thorndyke, Ph.D., Department of Archaeology.
    The letter itself was in the same scrawl as the name upon the envelope. It read:

    Dear Fletch: The bearer of this letter is Miss Cynthia Lansing and I would impress upon you that whatever she may tell you is the truth; I have examined the evidence and I would pledge my reputation that it is authentic. She will be wanting to accompany you on your trip and I would take it as the greatest favor you could do me if you should bear with her and supply her with all co-operation and assistance that is possible. She will be taking a Pilgrim ship to Earth and should be there and waiting for you when you arrive. I have placed some departmental funds at her disposal and you are to make use of them if there is any need. All that I need tell you is—that her presence on the Earth has to do with what we talked about that last time, when you came to see me just before you left.

    I sat with the letter in my hand and I could see him as he had been on that last time I had seen him, in the fire-lit littered room that he called his study, with books shelved to the ceiling, with the shabby furniture, the dog curled upon the hearth rug, the cat upon its cushion. He had sat on a hassock and rolled the brandy glass between his palms, and he had said, “Fletch, I am certain I am right, that my theory’s right. The Anachronians were not galactic traders, as so many of my colleagues think. They were observers; they were cultural spies. It makes a deal of sense when you look at it. Let us say that a great civilization had the capacity to roam among the stars. Let us say that in some manner they could spot a planet where an intellectual culture was rising or about to rise. So they plant an observer on that planet and keep him there, alert to developments that might be of value. As we know, cultures vary greatly. This can be observed even among the human colonies that were planted from the Earth. Even a few centuries are enough to provide some variations. The variations are much greater, of course, among those planets that still have or at one time had alien cultures—alien as opposed to human. No two groups of intelligences ever go at anything in parallel manner. They may arrive, eventually, at the same result, or at an approximation of the same result, but they go about it differently, and in the process each develops some capability or some concept which the other does not have. Even a great galactic culture would have developed in this fashion, and because it did develop in this fashion there would be many approaches, many concepts,