If there were, he asked himself, a common chemistry and a common biochemistry, then did it not seem likely, as well, for there to exist a concept that would point toward common justice?
Not just yet, perhaps. But ten thousand years from now. Or a million years from now.
He started up the path again and his step was lighter than it had been for years, and the future brighter—not his future only, but the future of everything that was.
This was a thing he’d taught and preached for years—the hope that in some future time the law might represent some great and final truth.
It did a man’s heart good, he thought, to find that there were others who felt the same as he, and who were at work on it.
No Old Folks’ Home, he thought, and he was glad of that. For an Old Folks’ Home was a dead end, and this was a bright beginning.
In a little while the phone would ring and there’d be a voice asking if he’d serve.
But he’d not wait for that. There was work to do—a great deal of work to do. There was the file to read and those strange books that he must study, and references that he would have to find and much thinking to be done.
He entered the house and shut the door behind him. He hung up his cap and coat.
Picking up the file, he went into the study and laid it on the desk.
He pulled out a drawer and took out pad and pencils and ranged them neatly, close at hand.
He sat down and entered upon the practice of interstellar law.
The Questing of Foster Adams
Set, like many of his short works, in the vicinity of Clifford Simak’s birthplace, this story is nonetheless uncharacteristic of his work, a conclusion that may be demonstrated by the fact that after being written, it was first sent to Weird Tales (in May 1948), which was not a usual market for Simak stories. But after its apparent rejection, the tale was ultimately accepted by Fantastic Universe and appeared in the August-September1948 issue.
—dww
There can be no denial that the hobby of Foster Adams was a strange one. One must bear in mind that Foster Adams was a strange man. Whether Adams, himself, considered his research as a hobby or an occupation no one can ever say. It may have been a hobby or an obsession—or it may have been no more than the misdirection of a brilliant mind.
How he had come to take up his research, what deep-laid motive drove him to carry it out to its logical and deadly conclusion, I have no idea. Come to think of it, there is very little that I do know of Foster Adams. There is very little anyone knows.
I do not know where he was born nor who his parents were nor what became of them, although I always took it for granted they had died many years ago. I know nothing of his education except that it must have been extensive. I have no knowledge as to how or when or why he came into possession of the old Smith farm. Nor why he sought an answer to a question to which no man of this day and age would give more than passing notice, although there was a time not too many centuries removed when men must have spent much thought upon the matter.
That some deep compelling motive lay within his mind there can be no doubt. Certainly toward the end, when he had reason to believe the solution he sought might be within his grasp, he must have realized the danger of such knowledge.
Perhaps Foster Adams counted himself of stouter fiber than he really was or it may have been that in his most considered judgment, or even in his wildest imaginings, he never once came close to guessing what the answer really was. And this would seem most strange, for his questing was bolstered by many years of study.
I first heard of Foster Adams from an acquaintance in the history department at State University.
“Foster Adams is your man,” he told me. “He lives down in your part of the country now. He probably has more historic insignificance packed inside his skull than any other living person.”
It seemed strange to me, and I said so, that a professor of English history could not tell me about the eating habits of the English middle class in the fifteenth century, but he shook his head.
“I can tell you in a general way,” he said, “but not down to the last crumb of barley bread as Foster Adams can.”
When I asked who Adams was he couldn’t tell me. He was not connected with any university, he had never published anything and he was not an authority, not a recognized authority, at any rate. But he did know what people had worn and eaten from Egypt down to the last century’s turn—what tools they had used, what crops they raised, how they traveled—all the little trivial things that went to make up daily living down through the centuries.
“It’s a hobby,” my acquaintance said. And that’s as close an explanation as I ever got from anyone.
The Smith farm is a stark weather-beaten place set upon a wind-scarred rocky ridge. It has no grace or character and no dignity. Notwithstanding what happened there of a late November night it even now fails to achieve a patina of terror or the somber greatness of dark happenings.
I still recall my first sight of it and the depression and melancholy that gripped me as I drove up the rocky road, winding up the hill to reach the ridge.
The house was grey, not with the greyness of old lumber, but with the flat, unhealthy grey of lumber that had known a coat of paint which long since has scaled and peeled and been dissolved in wind and weather. The barn’s ridgepole sagged in the middle, for all the world like a swaybacked horse, and another building, which may have been a hoghouse, had fallen completely in upon itself. Seeing it for the first time I had the distinct impression that it had grown tired one day and simply given up.
At one time there had been an extensive orchard back of the house but now there were only ghosts of trees, strange humped things that stood in the sun like gnarled old men. A windmill sporting a buckled tower stood with bowed head above the dying orchard and the wind that never ceased to blow across the ridge flapped the great metal vane back and forth in a futile and nerve-grating monotony.
As I stopped the car I saw that the ravages of neglect reached even to the smallest item. Flower-beds struggled with encroaching weeds. The sloping doors that covered the outside stairway to the cellar were half rotted away and part of them had fallen in.
A shutter hung canted at one window, at another both shutters were missing and I saw where they had fallen to the ground, with grass and weeds growing through the interstices. The porch sagged, its posts canted dangerously, and the floor creaked and shifted underneath my feet as I walked to the door.
An old man, wearing a uniform so ancient that its black was turning green, opened the door in answer to my knock and never in my life have I seen a sight so incongruous. For this was an old worn-out Wisconsin farm and the man who stood in the door was straight out of Dickens.
I asked for Adams and the man held the door a little wider and asked me to come in. His voice croaked harshly and sent echoes sounding through the old high-ceilinged rooms.
The house was almost bare of furniture. There was a woodstove in the kitchen and a few old chairs and a table covered with a piece of greasy oilcloth. In what had been the wainscoated dining-room packing boxes were lined against the wall and stacks of books were piled here and there, apparently at random. The windows gaped upon the world with empty eyes, without a curtain to their name.
In the front parlor green windowshades were drawn and the room was dark with a darkness that was deeper than the dusk.
Foster Adams heaved his bulky body from a leather chair standing in one corner and came across the room to shake my hand. His handclasp was cold and flabby, indifferent if not bored.
“Not many find their way here,” he said. “I am glad you came.”
But I am sure he wasn’t. I am sure he wished I hadn’t bothered him by coming.
We sat there in the dusk behind the drawn shades and we talked in hushed voices, for the very room whispered not to speak aloud
. Foster Adams, if no more could be said for him, had perfect manners. Prim, precise, even a little fussy—and disquieting.
It was queer, I thought, to hear the thin, high, cold and hostile whining of the wind at August noon against the sides and around the corners of the house. For there was no friendliness in hill or house. Whatever warmth they may have held had been leached away with the ruin of the acres and the callous abandonment of the buildings to wind and rain and sun.
Yes, Adams said, he could tell me the things I wished to know. And he told them to me without recourse to note or book, speaking as if he were drawing upon personal observation, as if he were talking of a time that was contemporaneous, as if he himself had lived in fifteenth-century England.
“Such things,” he said, “have always interested me. What kind of petticoats a woman wore or the kind of herbs that went into the pot. And even more—” he lowered his voice a trifle—“even more, the way that men have died.”
He sat motionless in his chair and it was as if he might be listening for something that he knew was there—rats in the cellar, perhaps, or crickets in the drapes.
“Men,” he stated, “have died in many ways.” He made it sound as if he were the first man who had ever thought or said it.
In the silence I heard the clumping tread of the old manservant walking about in the dining-room just outside the door. Faintly from the orchard came the muted metallic thumping of the wind-tossed windmill vane.
Foster Adams rose abruptly from his chair. “It was nice seeing you,” he said. “I hope you come again.”
And that is exactly how it was. I was literally thrown out, told to go like a gawping schoolboy who has overstayed his welcome.
But I couldn’t get the man out of my mind. There was a fascination about him that kept tugging at me to go back to the old grey farmhouse atop the bleak unfriendly ridge. Like a man who keeps going back to a certain cage in a zoo, to stand and stare and shiver at the sight of the beast it houses.
I finished my book, using Adams’ information to good advantage, and sent it off to the publisher.
Then, one day, scarcely knowing what I was doing, never for a moment admitting to myself that I was doing it, I found myself once more among the tangled hills of the lower Wisconsin.
The old farmhouse looked just the same as it had before.
I had told myself that probably Adams had just moved in shortly before my visit and that, given time, he would fix up the place. A coat of paint most certainly would have helped. A fireplace would have done wonders to bring some cheer into the house. Flowers and rock gardens and some terracing would have given its gaunt lines a softer setting, while a poplar or two at the corners would have broken the stark dreariness that reared against the sky.
But Adams had done nothing. The house was just the way I remembered it.
He said that he was glad to see me but his handshake was still a flabby gesture and he was as prim and straight as ever.
He sat in his deep leather chair and talked and I knew that if he were glad to see me it was only because it gave him a chance to hear his own voice. For he didn’t talk to me, he didn’t even look at me. it was as if he were talking to himself and there were times when I caught a querulousness in his voice as though he were arguing with himself.
“There is a streak of cruelty,” he said, “that runs through the human race. You find it everywhere you look, on every page of recorded history. Man is not satisfied with inflicting death alone, he must inflict it with many painful frills.
“A boy pulls the wings off flies and ties tin cans to a dog’s tail. The Assyrians flayed screaming thousands while they were still alive.”
There was a feeling of mustiness in the house—a feeling, not a smell. A sense of dusty time that had long since run through the glass.
“The Aztecs,” said Foster Adams, “cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices with a blunt stone knife. The Saxons threw men into the serpent pits or flayed them living and rubbed salt into the quivering flesh as the pelt peeled off.”
The talk sickened me—not the things he told me but the way he talked of them, the smooth professional talk of a man who knows his subject and views it objectively as something to be probed and studied and catalogued as neatly as a merchant would invoice his stock.
For to him, I realize now, the flayed men and the men in the serpent pits and the men who hung on crosses along the Roman roads were not flesh and blood but certain facts that someday might fall into a pattern under the persistent probing of his mind.
Not that he was callous. His interest was real and alive and personal—that his interest became acutely personal in his last few hours of sanity and life there can be small doubt.
He must have seen that his monologue disturbed me for he suddenly changed the subject and we talked of other things, of the country and the view from the hill, of the pleasant weather, for it was late October, and of the irritating curiosity of the natives concerning his reason for living at the farm and what he might be doing. I could see that he was disturbed by their actions.
More than a year elapsed before I saw Foster Adams again and then only by accidental circumstance.
Driving home from a brief visit to Chicago, a violent autumn storm caught me on the road just as night was lowering. Rain turned into ice, ice to snow. As the storm grew worse and the car was reduced to a mere crawl I realized that I could not continue much further and must soon seek shelter. And with this realization came another, that I was at that moment no more than two miles or so from the old Smith farm.
I found the side road that turned off the main highway and half an hour later came to the foot of the hill that ran to the ridge above. Knowing the car had no chance to make the slope I got out and walked, floundering in the wet and heavy snow, guided by a feeble beam of light from one of the farmhouse windows.
By daylight the wind on the hill had been merely vicious, a thin-flanked wind with a snarl between its teeth. Now it was filled with a terrible anger as it howled across the ridge and went booming down into the hollow.
Pausing to get my breath, I listened to it and heard the howling of a pack of hellish hounds, the screams of hunted harried victims, the slow wet whimpering gurgle of a cornered creature that foundered in a deep ravine.
I hurried on, ridden by senseless terror, and it was not until I was almost at the house that I realized I was running, driven by the throng of imagined horrors that pressed up the slope behind me.
I reached the porch and hung onto a canted post to regain my breath and beat back the illogical fear that had gathered in the dark. I was almost myself again when I knocked upon the door—and had to knock a second and a third time because the howling of the storm drowned out the sound of knuckles.
The old manservant let me in and it seemed to me that he moved more slowly on feet that dragged a little more than I had remembered, that he talked more thickly, as if a hand were at his throat.
Adams had changed too. He still was stiff and formal, almost distant, but he was prim no longer. He had not shaved for a day or two and his eyes were haggard and there was a sly nervousness about him that put me on edge.
He did not seem surprised to see me and when I mentioned the storm that had driven me to cover he passed over it with agreement that it was a dirty night. It was as if I lived just across the way and had dropped in for an hour or two.
There was no mention of anything to eat, no indication that he even suspected I hoped to spend the night.
Awkwardly, or at least awkwardly on my part, we talked of inconsequential things. Adams seemed wholly at ease although his face and hands were nervous.
Shortly the talk veered to his studies and I gathered from his words that he had dropped all other phases of his research to concentrate upon the punishments and tortures man had inflicted upon his fellows from the advent of historic time.
Hun
ched in his chair, staring at the wall, he called up the bloody sadism that had left a trail of blood and pain across the centuries, linking the old Egyptian king whose proudest title had been the Cracker of Foreheads to the man whose smoking revolver piled the dead knee-deep in Russian cellars.
He knew in detail how men had been staked out for the ants, how others had been buried to the neck in desert sands, and he assured me most solemnly that the American Indian had been a past master at the art of burning, that the expert “questioners” of the Inquisition, in this respect at least, had been no more than quasi-efficient bunglers.
He talked of racks and quarterings, of hooks that ripped out a man’s insides—and behind the hard cold words of erudition that he spoke I smelled the smoke and blood and heard the screams and the creaking of the ropes and the clanking of the chains.
But he did not, I am sure, know anything of this.
Then it came, the topic he had been leading up to, the quicksilver problem that slid within his brain, waiting to be grasped and solved—the end product of all the things he knew.
“But they all fall short of perfect,” he said. “There is no such thing as a perfect torture, for always in the end the victim dies or gives in and the torture halts. There is no way of measuring what a man’s resistance is. Sometimes you overdo it and he dies, other times you allow the victim to escape the full rigor of the execution for fear that he has reached the limit of endurance, which he hasn’t.”
“A perfect torture!” I said and I know my words must have been both a question and an exclamation point. For even then I didn’t understand. Even then I couldn’t understand why a man should be interested, even academically, in a perfect torture. Such interest seemed to verge on madness.