Clifford D. Simak - Heritage of Stars

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By Clifford D. Simak

One of the curious customs to arise out of the Collapse was the practice of pyramiding robotic

brain cases, in the same manner that certain ancient Asiatic barbarians raised pyramids of human

heads that later turned to skulls, to commemorate a battle. While the brain-case custom is not

universal, there is enough evidence from travelers’ tales to show that it is practiced by many

sedentary tribes. Nomadic peoples, as well, may have collections of brain cases, but these are not

pyramided except on ceremonial occasions. Ordinarily they are stored in sacred chests which,

when the band is on the march, are given positions of honor, carried in wagons at the head of the

column.

Generally, it has been believed that this fascination with robotic brain cases may

commemorate man’s triumph over the machines But there is no undeniable evidence that this is

so. It is possible that the symmetry of the cases may have an esthetic appeal quite apart from any

other real or imagined significance. Or it may be that their preservation is an unconscious

reaction to a symbolic permanence~ for of all things created by technological man, they are the

most durable, being constructed of a magic metal that defies both time and weather.

From Wilson’s History of the End of Civilization

Thomas Cushing hoed potatoes all the afternoon, in the small patch on the bench above the river,

between the river and the wall. The patch was doing well. If some unforeseen disease did not fasten on it,

if it were not raided on some dark night by one of the tribes across the river, if no other evil fell upon it,

come harvest time it would yield up many bushels. He had worked hard to produce that final harvest. He

had crept on hands and knees between the rows, knocking potato beetles off the vines with a small stick

he held in one hand and catching them as they fell in the bark container he held in the other hand.

Catching them so they would not crawl from where they fell into the vines again, to feast upon the leaves.

Crawling up and down the rows on his hands and knees, with his muscles screaming at the punishment,

with a pitiless sun hammering at him so that he seemed to creep in a miasmatic fog composed of dead

and heated air mixed finely with the dust that his crawling raised. At intervals, when the bark container

was nearly full of the squirming, confused and deprived bugs, he’d go down to the riverbank, first

marking the spot where he had ceased his labor, with the stick planted in the soil; then, squatting on the

bank, he’d reach far out to empty the container into the flowing stream, shaking it vigorously to dislodge

the last of the beetles, launching them upon a journey that few of them would survive, and carrying those

few that would survive far from his potato patch.

In his mind, at times, he had talked to them. I wish you no harm, he’d told them; I do this not out of

malice but to protect myself and others of my kind, removing you so you’ll not eat the food on which I

and others count. Apologizing to them, explaining to them to take away their wrath as ancient, prehistoric

hunters had apologized and explained ritually to the bears they had slaughtered for a feast.

In bed, before he went to sleep, he’d think on them again, seeing them once again, a striped golden

scum caught in the swirl of water and carried rapidly away to a fate they could not understand, not

knowing why or how they’d come to such a fate, powerless to prevent it, with no means of escaping it.

And having dumped them in the river, back to crawling between the rows once more to gather other

bugs to consign to the selfsame fate.

Then, later in the summer, when days went by with no rain falling, with the sun striking down out of the

cloudless blue bowl of the sky, carrying buckets of water from the river on a yoke slung across his

shoulders to supply the thirsty plants the moisture that they lacked; day after day trudging from the river’s

edge up the sharp slope to the bench, lugging water for his crop, then going back again to get two more

pails of water, on an endless treadmill so the plants would grow and thrive and there would be potatoes

stored against the winter. Existence, he had thought, survival so hard and dearly bought—a continual fight

to assure survival. Not like those ancient days Wilson had written about so long ago, reaching back with

fumbling fingers to try to create the past that had come to an end centuries before he had put quill to

paper, forced to exercise a niggling economy of paper—writing on both sides of each sheet, leaving no

margins on either side of the page, with no whiteness left at either top or bottom. And always that small

and niggardly, that painfully small, script, so that he could cram in all the words seething in his brain.

Agonizing over the concern that he mentioned time and time again—that the history he wrote was based

more on myth and legend than on fact, a situation that could not be avoided since so little fact remained.

Yet, convinced it was paramount that the history be written before what little fact remained completely

disappeared, before the myth and legend had become more distorted than they already were. Agonizing,

as well, over his measurement of myth and legend, sweating over his evaluation of them; asking himself,

time and time again, “What should I put in? What should I leave out?” For he did not put in all of it; some

he had left out. The myth about the Place of Going to the Stars he had left out.

But enough of Wilson, Cushing told himself; he must get back to his hoeing and his weeding. Weeds

and bugs were enemies. The lack of rain, an enemy. The too hot sun, an enemy. It was not only he who

thought SO: there were others working patches of corn and potatoes that lay on other tiny benches, so

much like his own, all up and down the river, close enough to the walls to gain some protection against

the occasional raiders from across the river.

He had hoed all the afternoon and now, with the sun finally gone behind the river bluffs looming to the

west, he crouched beside the river and stared across the water. Upstream, a mile or so, stood the stone

piers of a ruined bridge, with some of the bridge’s superstructure still remaining, but nothing one could

use to cross the river. Still farther upstream, two great towers rose up, former living structures that the old

books called high rises. There had been, it appeared, two such types of structures—ordinary high rises

and high rises for the elderly—and he wondered briefly why there should have been such age distinction.

No such thing was true today. There was no distinction between the young and old. They lived together

and needed one another. The young provided strength and the old provided wisdom and they worked

together for the benefit of all.

This he had seen when he first came to the university and had experienced himself when he had been

taken in under the sponsorship of Monty and Nancy Montrose, the sponsorship in time becoming more

than a formal sponsorship, for he had lived with them and had become, in effect, their son. The university

and, most of all, Monty and Nancy, had given him equality and kindness. He had, in the last five years,

become as truly a part of the university as if he had been born to it and had known what he came to

recognize as a unique kind of happiness that, in his years of wandering, he had not known elsewhere.

Now, hunkering on the river’s bank, he admitted to himself that it had become a nagging happiness, a

happiness of guilt, chained here by the sense of affectionate loyalty to the aged couple who had taken him

in and made him a part of them. He had gained much from his five years here: the ability to read and

write; some acquaintance with the books that, rank on rank, lined the stacks of the library; a better

understanding of what the world was all about, of what it once had been and what it was at the present

moment. Given, too, within the security of the walls, the time to think, to work out what he wanted of

himself. But though he’d worked at it, he still did not quite know what he wanted of or for himself.

He remembered, once again, that rainy day of early spring when he had sat at a desk in the library

stacks. What he had been doing there he had now forgotten—perhaps simply sitting there while he read

a book which presently he would replace upon the shelves. But he did recall with startling clarity how, in

an idle moment, he had pulled out the desk drawer and there had found the small pile of notes written on

flyleaves that had been torn from books, written in a small and crabbed hand, niggardly of space. He

recalled that he had sat there, frozen in surprise, for there was no mistaking that cramped and economic

writing. He had read the Wilson history time and time again, strangely fascinated by it, and there was no

question in his mind, not the slightest question, that these were Wilson’s notes, left here in the desk

drawer to await discovery a millennium after they’d been written.

With trembling hands he had taken them from the drawer and laid them reverently on the desk top.

Slowly he read through them in the waning light of the rainy afternoon and there was in them much

material that he recognized, material that eventually had found its way into the history. But there was a

page of notes—really a page and a half—that had not been used, a myth so outrageous that Wilson must

finally have decided it should not be included, a myth of which Cushing had never heard and of which, he

found upon cautious inquiry later, no one else had ever heard.

The notes told about a Place of Going to the Stars, located somewhere to the west, although there

was no further clue to its location—simply “in the west.” It all was horribly fuzzy and it sounded, in all

truth, more like myth than fact—too outrageous to be fact. But ever since that rainy afternoon, the very

Outrageousness of it had haunted Cushing and would not let him be.

Across the wide turbulence of the river, the bluffs rose sheer above the water, topped by a heavy

growth of trees. The river made sucking sounds as it rushed along, a hurrying tide that stormed along its

path and, beneath the sucking sounds, a rumbling of power that swept all in its course. A powerful thing,

the river, and somehow conscious and jealous of its power, reaching out and taking all that it could

reach—a piece of driftwood, a leaf, a bevy of potato bugs, or a human being, if one could be caught up.

Looking at it, Cushing shivered at its threat, although he was not one who should have felt its threat. He

was as much at home in or on the river as he would be in the woods. This feeling of threat, he knew, was

brought on only by a present weakness, born of vague indecision and not knowing.

Wilson, he thought—if it had not been for that page and a half of Wilson’s notes, he’d be feeling none

of this. Or would he? Was it only Wilson’s note, or was it the urge to escape these walls, back to the

untrammeled freedom of the woods?

He was, he told himself somewhat angrily, obsessed with Wilson. Ever since the day he had first read

the history, the man had lodged himself inside his mind and was never far away.

How had it been with Wilson, he wondered, on that day of almost a thousand years ago, when he first

had sat down to begin the history, haunted by what he knew would be its inadequacy? Had the leaves

outside the window whispered in the wind? Had the candle guttered (for in his mind the writing always

took place in candlelight)? Had there been an owl outside, hooting in derision at the task the man had set

himself to do?

How had it been with Wilson, that night in the distant past?

I must write it clearly, Hiram Wilson told himself, so that in the years to come all who wish may read

it. I must compose it clearly and I must inscribe it neatly, and most importantly, I must write it small, since

I am short of paper.

I wish, he thought, that I had more to go on, that I had more actual fact, that the myth content were

less, but I must console myself in the thought that historians in the past have also relied on myth,

recognizing that although myth maybe romanticized and woefully short of fact, it must, by definition, have

some foundation in lost happenings.

The candle’s flame flared in the gust of wind that came through the window. In a tree outside, a tiny

fluffed-out screech owl made a chilling sound.

Wilson dipped the quill in ink and wrote, close to the top of the page, for he must conserve the paper:

An Account of Those Disturbances Which Brought About an End to the First Human

Civilization (always in the hope there will be a second, for what we have now is no civilization,

but an anarchy)

Written by Hiram Wilson at the University of Minnesota on the Banks of River Mississippi,

This Account

Being Started the First Day of October, 2952

He laid the quill aside and read what he had written. Dissatisfied, he added another line:

Composed of Facts Gathered From Still Existing Books Dating From Earlier Days, From

Hearsay Evidence

Passed on by Word of Mouth From the Times of Trouble and From Ancient Myths and

Folklore Assiduously

Examined for Those Kernels of Truth That They May Contain

There, he thought, that at least is honest. It will put the reader on his guard that there may he errors,

but giving him assurance that I have labored for the truth as best I can.

He picked up the quill again and wrote:

There is no question that at one time, perhaps five hundred years ago, Earth was possessed of an

intricate and sophisticated technological civilization. Of this, nothing operational remains. The machines

and the technology were destroyed, perhaps in a few months’ time. And not only that, but, at least at this

university, and we suppose otherwhere as well, all or most of the literary mention of the technology also

was destroyed. Here, certainly, all the technological texts are gone and in many instances allusions to

technology contained in other books, not technological in nature, have been edited by the ripping out of

pages. What remains of the printed word concerning technology and science is only general in nature and

may relate to a technology that at the time of the destruction was considered so outdated there seemed

no threat in allowing it to survive. From these remaining allusions we get some hint of what the situation

might have been, but not enough information to perceive the full scope of the old technology nor its

impact upon the culture. Old maps of the campus show that at one time there were several buildings that

were devoted to the teaching of technology and engineering. These buildings now are missing. There is a

legend that the stones of which the buildings were constructed were used to build the defensive wall that

now rings in the cam-

The completeness of the destruction and the apparently methodical manner in which it was carried out

indicate an unreasoning rage and a fine-honed fanaticism. Seeking for cause, the first reaction is to

conclude that it came about through an anger born of a hatred of what technology had brought

about—the depletion of non-renewable resources, pollution of the environment, the loss of jobs resulting

in massive unemployment. But this sort of reasoning, once it is examined, seems far too simplistic. On

further thought, it would seem that the basic grievance that triggered the destruction must have lain in the

social, economic and political systems technology had fostered.

A technological society, to be utilized to its fullest, would call for bigness.....bigness in the corporate

structure, in government, in finance and in the service areas. Bigness, so long as it is manageable offers

many advantages, but at a certain point in its growth it becomes unmanageable. At about the time bigness

reaches that critical size where it tends to become unmanageable, it also develops the capability to run on

its own momentum and, in consequence, gets even farther out of control. Running out of control, failures

and errors would creep into its operation and there would be little possibility of correction. Uncorrected,

the failures and errors would be perpetuated and would feed upon themselves to achieve greater failures

and even greater errors. This would happen not only in the machines themselves, but as well in top-heavy

governmental and financial structures. Human managers might realize what was happening, but would be

powerless in the face of it. The machines by this time would be running wild and taking along with them

the complicated social and economic structures that they had made not only possible, but necessary.

Long before the final crash, when the systems failed, there would have been a rising tide of anger in the

land. When the crash finally came, the anger would have flashed out into an orgy of destruction, a striking

back to utterly wipe out the systems and the technology that had failed, so that they never could be used

again, so they would never have the chance to fail again. When this anger finished its work not only the

machines were destroyed, but the very concept of technology. That the work of destruction may have

been somewhat misdirected there is no question, but it must be considered that the destruction must have

been carried out by fanatics. One characteristic of the fanatic is that he must have a target against which

to direct his rage. Technology, or at least the outward evidences of it, would be not only highly visible,

but safe as well. A machine perforce must sit and take it. It has no way of hitting back.

That the old texts and records relating to technology were destroyed along with the machines, but only

those books or the parts of those books which touched upon technology, would indicate that the sole

target was technology—that the destroyers had no objection to books or learning as such. It might even

be argued that they may have had a high respect for books, for even in the heat of their anger they did no

damage to those which did not touch upon technology.

It makes one shudder to think of the terrible and persistent anger that must have built up to a point

which made it possible to bring all this about. The misery and chaos that must have resulted from this

deliberate wrecking of a way of life mankind had so laboriously built up through centuries of effort is

impossible to imagine. Thousands must have died in the violence that accompanied the wrecking, and

other thousands later of less violent forms of death. All that mankind had counted on and relied upon was

uprooted. Anarchy replaced law and order. Communications were so thoroughly wiped out that one

township scarcely knew what was happening in the next. The complex distribution system came to a halt

and there was famine and starvation. Energy systems and networks were destroyed and the world went

down to darkness. Medical facilities were crippled. Epidemics swept the land. We can only imagine that

which happened, for there is no record left. At this late date, our darkest imagery must fail to dredge up

the totality of the horror. From where we stand today, what happened would appear the result of

madness rather than of simple anger, but, even so, we must realize that there must have been—must have

been—seeming reason for the madness.

When the situation stabilized—if we can imagine anything like stabilization following such a

catastrophe—we can only speculate on what an observer would have found. We have a few clues from

present circumstances. We can see the broad Outline, but that is all. In some areas, groups of farmers

formed communes, holding their crop-producing acreages and their livestock by force of arms against

hungry roving mobs. The cities became jungles in which pillaging combinations fought one another for the

privilege of looting. Perhaps then, as now, local warlords attempted to found ruling houses, fighting with

other warlords and, as now, going down one by one. In such a world—and this is true today as well as

then—it was not possible for any man or band of men to achieve a power base that would serve for the

building of an all-inclusive government.

The closest thing insofar as we are aware of in this area to the achievement of any sort of continuing

and enduring social order is this university. Exactly how this center of relative order came about on these

few acres is not known. That, once having established such order, we have endured may be explained by

the fact that we are entirely defensive, at no time having sought to extend our domain or impose our will,

willing to leave everyone else alone if they return the favor.

Many of the people who live beyond our walls may hate us, others will despise us as cowards who

cower behind our walls, but there are some, I am sure, to whom this university has become a mystery

and perhaps a magic and it may be for this reason that for the last hundred years or more we have been

left alone.

The temper of communities and their intellectual environment would dictate their reaction to a situation

such as the destruction of a technological society. Most would react in anger, despair and fear, taking a

short-term view of the situation. A few, perhaps a very few, would be inclined to take the long-term

view. In a university community the inclination would be to take a long-range view, looking not so much

at the present moment but at the impact of the moment ten years from the present, or perhaps a century

into the future. A university or college community, under conditions that existed before the breakup came,

would have been a loosely knitted group~ although perhaps more closely knitted than many of its

members would have been willing to admit. All would have been inclined to regard themselves as

rampant individualists, but when it came down to the crunch, most would have been brought to the

realization that underlying all the fancied individualism lay a common way of thought. Instead of running

and hiding, as would be the case with those who took the short-range view, a university community

would have soon realized that the best course would be to stay where they were and attempt, in the

midst of chaos, to form a social order based so far as possible upon the traditional values that institutions

of higher learning had held throughout the years. Small areas of security and sanity, they would have

reminded themselves, had persisted historically in other times of trouble. Most, when they thought of this,

would have thought of the monasteries that existed as islands of tranquility through the time of Europe’s

Dark Ages. Naturally, there would have been some who talked loftily of holding high the torch of learning

as night fell upon the rest of mankind and there may even have been those who sincerely believed what

they were saying. But, by and large, the decision would have been generally recognized as a simple

matter of survival—the selection of a pattern that held a good chance of survival.

Even here, there must have been a period of stress and confusion during those early years when the

destructive forces were leveling the scientific and technological centers on the campus and editing books

in the libraries to eliminate all significant mention of technology. It may have been that in the heated

enthusiasm of the destruction certain faculty members associated with the hated institutions may have met

their deaths. The thought even occurs that certain members of the faculty may have played a part in the

destruction. Reluctant as one may be to think so, it must be recognized that in that older faculty body,

intense and dedicated men and women built up storied animosities, based on conflicts of principles and

beliefs, with these sometimes heightened by clashing personalities.

Once the destruction was done, however, the university community, or what was left of it, must have

pulled together again, burying whatever old differences that might still exist, and set about the work of

establishing an enclave that stood apart from the rest of the world, designed to preserve at least some

fraction of human sanity. Times would have been perilous for many years, as the protective wall built

above this small segment of the campus must testify. The building of the wall would have been a long and

arduous chore, but sufficiently effective leadership must have emerged to see that it was done. The

university, during this period, probably was the target of many sporadic forays, although undoubtedly the

dedicated looting of the city across the river and the other city to the east may have distracted some of

the pressure on the campus. The contents of the stores, the shops, the homes within the cities, probably

were far more attractive than anything the campus had to offer.

Since there are no communications with the world outside the wall and all the news we get are the

tales told by occasional travelers, we cannot pretend to know what may be happening otherwhere than

here. Many events may be taking place of which we know nothing. But in the small area that we do

know, or of which we have some fragmentary knowledge, the highest level of social organization seems

to be the tribe or those farming communes, with one which we have set up rudimentary trade relations.

Immediately to the east and west of us, in what once were fair and pleasant cities, now largely gone to

ruin, are several tribes grubbing a bare existence from the land and occasionally warring with one another

over imagined grievances or to gain some coveted territory (although only Cod knows why coveted) or

simply for the illusionary glory that may be gained from combat. To the north is a farm commune or

perhaps a dozen families with which we have made trade accommodations, their produce serving to

augment the vegetables we grow in gardens and our potato patches. For this food, we pay in

trinketry—beadwork, badly constructed jewelry, leather goods—which they, in their simple-mindedness,

are avid to obtain for their personal adornment. To such an extent have we fallen—that a once-proud

university should manufacture and trade trinkets for its food.

At one time, family groups may have held on to small homesteads, hiding from the world. Many of

these homesteads no longer exist, either wiped out or their members forced to join a tribe for the

protection that it offered. And there are always the nomads, the roving, far-wandering bands with their

cattle and their horses, at times sending out war parties to pillage, although there now is little enough to

pillage. Such is the state of the world as we are acquainted with it; such is our own state, and sorry as it

may be, in certain ways we are far better off than many of the others.

To a certain small extent we have kept alive the flame of learning. Our children are taught to read and

write and cipher. Those who wish may gain additional rudimentary learning and there are books to be

read, of course, tons of books, and from the reading of those, many in the community are fairly well

informed. Reading and writing are skills that few have today, even those basic skills being lost through the

lack of anyone to teach them. Occasionally, there are a few who make their way to us to gain the little

education we can offer, but not many, for education apparently is not highly regarded. Some of those

who come continue to stay on with us and thus some diversity is added to our gene poe1, a diversity of

which we stand in need. It may be that some of those who come to us, professing a wish for education,

may actually come to seek the security of our walls, fleeing the rough justice of their fellows. This we do

not mind; we take them in. So long as they come in peace and keep the peace once they are here, they

are welcome.

Anyone with half an eye, however, should be able to see that we have lost much of our effectiveness

as an educational institution. We can teach the simple things, but since the second generation of the

enclave’s establishment, there has been none qualified to teach anything approaching a higher education.

We have no teachers of physics or chemistry, of philosophy or psychology, of medicine or of many other

disciplines. Even if we had, there would be little need. Who in this environment needs physics or

chemistry? What is the use of medicine if drugs are unobtainable, if there is no equipment for therapy of

surgery?

We have often idly speculated among ourselves whether there may be other colleges or universities

still existing in the same manner as we exist. It would seem reasonable that there might be, but we’ve had

no word of them. In turn, we have not attempted to find out and have not seen fit to unduly advertise our

presence.

In books that I have read, there are contained many considered and logical prophesies that such a

catastrophe as came about would come to pass. But, in all cases, war was foreseen as the cause of it.

Armed with incalculable engines of destruction, the major powers of that olden day possessed the

capability to annihilate one another (and, in a smaller sense, the world) in a few hours ‘time. This,

however, did not come about. There is no evidence of the ravages of war and there are no legends that

tell of such a war.

From all indications that we have at this date, the collapse of civilization came about because of an

outrage on the part of what must have been a substantial portion of the Populace against the kind of

world that technology had created, although the outrage, in many instances, may have been misdirected. .

.Dwight Cleveland Montrose was a lithe, lean man, his face a seasoned leather, the brownness of it set

off by the snow-white hair, the bristling grayness of the mustache, the heavy eyebrows that were

exclamation points above the bright eyes of washed-out blue. He sat straight upright in the chair, shoving

away the dinner plate he had polished clean. He wiped his mustache with a napkin and pushed hack from

the table.

“How did the potatoes go today?” he asked.

“I finished hoeing them,” said Cushing. “I think this is the last time. We can lay them by. Even a spell

of drought shouldn’t hurt them too much now.”

“You work too hard,” said Nancy. “You work harder than you should.”

She was a bright little birdlike woman, shrunken by her years, a wisp of a woman with sweetness in

her face. She looked fondly at Cushing in the flare of candlelight.

“I like to work,” he told her. “I enjoy it. And a little proud of

it, perhaps. Other people can do other things. I grow good potatoes.”

“And now,” said Monty, brusquely, brushing at his mustache, “I suppose you will be leaving.”

“Leaving!”

“Tom,” he said, “you’ve been with us how long? Six years, am I right?”

“Five years,” said Cushing. “Five years last month.”

“Five years,” said Monty. “Five years. That’s long enough to know you. As close as we all have

been, long enough to know you. And during the last few months, you’ve been jumpy as a cat. I’ve never

asked you why. We, Nancy and I, never asked you why. On anything at all.”

“No, you never did,” said Cushing. “There must have been times when I was a trial

“Never a trial,” said Monty. “No, sir, never that. We had a son, you know...

“He was with us just a while,” said Nancy. “Six years. That was all. If he had lived, he’d be the same

age as you are now.

“Measles,” said Monty. “Measles, for the love of God. There was a time when men knew how to

deal with measles, how to prevent them. There was a time when measles were almost never heard of.”

“There were sixteen others,” Nancy said, remembering. “Seventeen, with John. All with measles. It

was a terrible Winter The worst we’ve ever known.”

“I am sorry,” Cushing said.

“The sorrow is over now,” said Monty. “The surface sorrow, that is. There is a deeper sorrow that

will be with us all our lives. We speak very seldom of it because we do not want you to think you are

standing in his stead, that you are taking his Place, that we love you because of him.”

“We love you,” said Nancy, speaking gently, “because you’re Thomas Cushing. No one but yourself.

We sorrow less, I think, because of you. Some of the old-time hurt is gone because of you. Tom, we

owe you more than the two of us can tell you.

“We owe you enough,” said Monty, “to talk as we do now—a strange kind of talk, indeed. It was

becoming intolerable, you know. You not saying anything to us because you thought we’d not

understand, held to us because of a mistaken loyalty. We knowing from the things you did and the way

you acted what you had in mind and yet compelled to hold our peace because we did not think we

should be the ones who brought what you were thinking out into the open. We had feared that if we said

anything about it, you might think we wanted you to leave, and you know well enough that we never

would want that. But this foolishness has gone on long enough and now we think that we should tell you

that we hold enough affection for you to let you go if you feel you really have to, or if you only want to. If

you must leave us, we would not have you go with guilt, feeling you have run out on us. We’ve watched

you the last few months, wanting to tell us, shying away from telling us. Nervous as a cat. Itching to go

free.”

“It’s not that,” said Cushing. “Not itching to go free.”

“It’s this Place of Going to the Stars,” said Monty. “I would suppose that’s it. If I were a younger

man, I think that I’d be going, too. Although, I’m not sure that I could force myself to go. I think that

through the centuries we people in this university have become agoraphobes. All of us have stayed so

long, huddled on this campus, that none of us ever thinks of going anywhere.”

“Can I take this to mean,” asked Cushing, “that you are trying to say you think there maybe something

to this business Wilson wrote down in his notes—that there could be a Place of Going to the Stars?”

“I do not know,” said Monty. “I would not even try to guess. Ever since you showed me the notes

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ByCliffordD.SimakCopyright1977OneofthecuriouscustomstoariseoutoftheCollapsewasthepracticeofpyramidingroboticbraincases,inthesamemannerthatcertainancientAsiaticbarbariansraisedpyramidsofhumanheadsthatlaterturnedtoskulls,tocommemorateabattle.Whilethebrain-casecustomisnotuniversal,thereisenoughevidence...

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Clifford D. Simak - Heritage of Stars

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