Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online

brooding place. There was a sameness to it and an endless order that was monotonous, and over all of it hung a sense of death and great Finality.
    I hadn’t had time to worry before, but now I began to worry. What worried me the most, strangely enough, was that Cemetery, after a fairly feeble effort, had made no real attempt to stop us. Although, I told myself, if Elmer had not been able to burst out of his crate, Reilly and his men would have stopped me cold. But as it was, it almost seemed that Bell figured he could let us go, knowing that any time he wished he could reach out and grab us. I didn’t try to fool myself about Maxwell Peter Bell.
    I wondered, too, if any further attempts would be made upon us. Perhaps there didn’t have to be; more than likely Bell and Cemetery might be no longer too much concerned with us. We could go wherever we wished and it would make no difference. For no matter where we went or what we did, there was no chance of leaving Earth without Cemetery’s help.
    I had made a mess of it, I told myself. I had gone in and played smart-aleck to Bell’s pompousness and had thrown away any chance I had of any sort of working relationship with Bell or Cemetery. Although, I realized, it might have made no difference no matter what I’d done. I should have realized that on Earth you played along with Cemetery or you did not play at all. The whole damn venture had been doomed from the very start.
    It hadn’t seemed so long to me, although it may have been quite a while—I had been so sunk in worry I’d lost all track of time—but finally the road climbed up a hill and there came to an end, and the end of the Cemetery as well.
    I stared at the valley below us and the hills that climbed in seried ranks above it, sucking in my breath in astonishment at the sight of it. It was a strangely wooded land dressed in flaming color that shone like glowing fires in the sun of afternoon.
    “Autumn” Elmer said. “I had forgotten that Earth had autumn. Back there you couldn’t tell. All the trees were green.”
    “Autumn?” I asked.
    “A season,” Elmer told me. “A certain time of year when all the trees are colored. I had forgotten it “
    He twisted his head around so he could look up at me If he could have wept, he would have.
    “One forgets so many things,” he said.

Chapter 5
     
     
     
    It was a world of beauty, but of lusty, two-fisted, brooding beauty unlike the delicate, almost fragile beauty of my world of Alden. It was solemn and impressive and there was a dash of wonder and a streak of fear intertwined into the structure and the color of it.
    I sat on a moss-grown boulder beside a brawling, dark-brown stream that carried on its surface the fairy boats of red and gold and yellow that were the fallen leaves. If one listened sharply he could pick out, at the edge of the throaty gurgle of the dark-brown water, the faint, far-off pattering of other leaves falling to the earth. And for all the color and the beauty, there was an ancient sadness there. I sat and listened to the liquid sliding of the water and the faint patter of the leaves, and looking at the trees, I saw that they were massive growths, exuding a sense of age, and that there was something secure and homelike and comfortable about them. There was color here and mood and sound, quality and structure, and a texture that could be felt with the fingers of the mind.
    The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to camp. But I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated