Shakespeare's Planet by Clifford D. Simak Read Free Book Online

you’d better get to bed now. The Carnivore will be coming to meet you in the morning, and you should get some sleep .

8
    But sleep came hard.
    Lying on his back, staring up into the blackness, the strangeness and the loneliness came pouring in upon him, the strangeness and the loneliness that had been held off till now.
    Only yesterday , Nicodemus had said to him. It was only yesterday that you went into cold-sleep, because all the centuries that have come and gone since then mean less than nothing to you .
    It had been, he thought, with some surprise and bitterness, only yesterday. And now alone, to remember and to mourn. To mourn, here in the darkness of a planet far from Earth, arrived at, so far as he was concerned, in the twinkling of an eye, to find the home planet and the people of that yesterday sunk in the depths of time.
    Helen dead, he thought. Dead and lying underneath the steely glitter of stranger stars on an unknown planet of an unrecorded sun, where the glaciers of frozen oxygen reared their bulk against the black of space and the primal rock lay uneroded through millennia piled upon millennia, a planet as unchanging as was death itself.
    The three of them together—Helen, Mary, Tom. Only he was missing—missing because he had been in cubicle number one, because a stupid, flat-footed, oafish robot could think of no other system than doing a task by numbers.
    Ship , he whispered in his mind.
    Go to sleep , said Ship.
    To hell with you , said Horton. You can’t baby me. You can’t tell me what to do. Go to sleep, you say. Take a lead, you say. Forget it all, you say .
    We do not tell you to forget , said Ship. The memory is a precious one, and while you must mourn, hold the memory fast. When you mourn, know that we mourn with you. For we remember Earth as well .
    But you won’t go back to it. You plan to go on. After this planet, you plan to go on. What do you expect to find? What are you looking for?
    There is no way of knowing. We have no expectations .
    And I go with you?
    Of course , said Ship. We are a company, and you are part of it .
    The planet? We’ll take time to look it over?
    There is no hurry , said Ship. We have all the time there is .
    What we felt this evening? That’s a part of it? A part of this unknown that we’re going to?
    Good night, Carter Horton , said Ship. We will talk again. Think of pleasant things and try to go to sleep .
    Pleasant things, he thought. Yes, there had been pleasantness back where the sky was blue, with white clouds floating in it, with a picture-ocean running its long fingers up and down a picture-beach, with Helen’s body whiter than the sands they lay upon. There had been picnic fires with the night-wind moving through the half-seen trees. There had been candlelight upon a snow-white cloth, with gleaming china and sparkling glass set upon the table, with music in the background and contentment everywhere.
    Somewhere in the outer darkness, Nicodemus moved clumsily about, trying to be quiet, and through the open port came a far-off strident fiddling of what he told himself were insects. If there were insects here, he thought.
    He tried to think of the planet that lay beyond the port, but it seemed he could not think of it. It was too new and strange for him to think of it. But he found that he could conjure up the frightening concept of that vast, silent depth of space that lay between this place and Earth, and he saw in his mind’s eye the tiny mote of Ship floating through that awesome immensity of nothingness. The nothingness translated into loneliness, and with a groan, he turned over and clutched the pillow tight about his head.

9
    Carnivore showed up shortly after morning light.
    â€œGood,” he said. “You’re ready. We travel in no hurry. Is not far to go. I checked the tunnel before I left. It had not fixed itself.”
    He led the way, up the sharp pitch of the hill, then down into a valley that lay