Clifford D. Simak

He stood astounded in the vast immensity, an immensity not of boundless sky, for the sky was far from boundless, nor from great distances, for the distances were not great, but immensity that was measured as a room would be, as if one were in a giant’s house and lost and were looking for a door, and without a clue as to where a door might be. A place with no distinguishing features, with each pillar like the next, with no cloud in the sky (if it were a sky), with each foot, each mile like every other foot and mile, level and paved with a crystal paving that stretched out in all directions.

He wanted to cry out, to ask if anyone were there, but was afraid to cry out-perhaps in the fear, although he did not realize it then and only thought it later, that a single sound would send all this cold and shining splendor shimmering into a cloud of frosty dust. For the place was silent, with no slightest whisper of a sound. Silent and cold and lonely, all its splendor and its whiteness lost in the loneliness.

Slowly, carefully, fearing that the scuff of his moving feet might bring this whole world into dust, he pivoted and out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse-not of motion, but the flickering sense of motion, as if something had been there, but had moved so fast that his eye had failed to catch it. He halted, the short hairs prickling on the back of his neck, engulfed by the sense of utter strangeness rather than of actual danger, apprehensive of a strangeness so distorted and so twisted out of the normal human context that a man gazing at it might go mad before he had a chance to jerk his eyes away.

Nothing happened and he moved again, pivoting inch by cautious inch, and now he saw that he had been standing with his back turned on what appeared to be an assemblage of some sort-an engine? an instrument? a machine?

And all at once he knew. Here was the strange contraption that had brought him here, this crazy crystal world’s equivalent of a matter transmitter and receiver.

But this, he knew at once, was not the Coonskin system. It was no place he had ever heard of. Nowhere in the known universe was there a place like this. Something had gone wrong and he had been hurled, not to the Coonskin planet which had been his destination, but to some far, forgotten corner of the universe, to some area, perhaps, where man would not penetrate for another million years, so far away from Earth that the distances involved became unimaginable.

Now again there were flickering motions, as if living shadows moved against the crystal background. As he watched, the flickering flowed into shifting shape and form and he could see that there were many moving shapes, all of them, strangely, separate entities that seemed to hold, within the flicker of them, individual personalities. As if, he thought in horror, they were things that had once been people-as if they might be alien ghosts.

“And I accepted them,” he said to Oop. “I accepted them-on faith, perhaps. It was either that or reject them and be left there, standing all alone upon that crystal plain. A man of a century ago, perhaps, would not have accepted them. He would have been inclined to sweep them out of his mind as pure imagination. But I had spent too many hours with Ghost to gag at the thought of ghosts. I had worked too long with supernatural phenomena to quibble at the idea of creatures and of circumstances beyond the human pale.

“And the strange thing about it, the comforting thing about it, is that they sensed that I accepted them.”

“And that is it?” asked Oop. “A planet full of ghosts?” Maxwell nodded, “Perhaps that’s one way of looking at it. But let me ask you-what really is a ghost?”

“A spook,” said Oop. “A spirit.”

“But what do you mean by spook? Define a spirit for me.”

“I know,” said Oop regretfully. “I was being a bit facetious and there was no excuse for it. We don’t know what a ghost is. Even Ghost doesn’t know exactly what he is. He simply knows that he exists-and if anyone should know, he should. He has mulled over it a lot. He’s thought about it deeply. He has communed with fellow ghosts and there is no evidence. So you fall back upon the supernatural…”

“Which is not understood,” said Maxwell.

“A mutation of some sort,” suggested Oop.

“Collins thought so,” said Maxwell. “But he stood alone. I know I didn’t agree with him, but that was before I was on the crystal planet. Now I’m not so sure. What happens when a race reaches an end, when, as a race, it has passed through childhood and middle age and now has reached old age? A race dying as a man does, dying of old age. What does it do, then? It could die, of course. That’s what one would expect of it. But suppose there was a reason that it couldn’t die, suppose it had to hang on, had to stay alive for some overriding reason, that it could not allow itself to die?”

“If ghostliness really is a mutation,” said Oop, “if they knew it was a mutation, if they were so far advanced they could control mutation-”