Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak

simply because they hated to leave; there wasn’t much there for them, but Alden is a lovely planet.”
    “It is that,” I said. “I came there to attend university. Until now I never quite worked up the nerve to leave.”
    “Where did you come from, Fletcher?”
    “Rattlesnake,” I told her. “You have heard of it?”
    She shook her head.
    “You’re lucky, then,” I said. “Don’t ask. And please go on.”
    “Myself, I suppose,” she said. “A little background on myself. I set out to make something of myself. I would imagine that through the years many of the Lansings did the same, but it came to nothing. As I may come to nothing. It is a little late in the day to do much for the Lansing image. My father died when I was young. He owned a fairly prosperous farm—not an outstanding farm, but one that made a living and a little more. My mother managed it after his death and there was enough to send me to the university. My interest was history. I dreamed that in time I might hold a chair in history and do learned research and write penetrating papers. I did well in my studies. I should have. I spent all my time at them. I missed many of the other things that college life can give you. I recognize that now, but I didn’t mind. There was nothing in the world that fascinated me like history. I simply wallowed in it—far places and far people and far times. At night when I was in bed, in the dark, I’d imagine a time machine and travel through far time to those distant places to observe those ancient people. I’d lie there in the dark and imagine that I was lying in my time machine, in those far lands and times and that just beyond the wall of darkened time moved and lived and breathed those people I had come to spy upon and that all about me those great events were happening that form the tide of history. When the time came to specialize, to follow one specific line of study, I found myself drawn irresistibly to the study of the ancient Earth. My adviser warned me against it. He pointed out that the field was narrow and the resource material very limited. I knew that he was right and I tried to reason with myself, but it did no good. I was obsessed with Earth.
    “My obsession with the Earth,” she said, “I am quite certain, was in part a rapport with the past, a deep concern for the old beginnings. My father’s farm was only a few miles from the locality where the first Lansings had settled on Alden, or so the legend ran. Nestled in a little rocky canyon, at a point where it opened on what at one time must have been a wide, rich valley suitable for farming, was an old stone house, or what at one time had been a stone house. Large parts of it had crumbled, the very stones weathering away with time, disturbed by the small shiftings of the ground that would become significant only after many centuries. There were no stories about it. It was not a haunted house. It was too old to be a haunted house. It simply stood there. Time had made it a part of the landscape. It was not noticed. It was too old and self-effacing to attract human notice, although many little wild creatures, I found when I went to visit it, had made it their home. The land on which it stood and the land around it was so poor and worthless that it interfered with nothing, so it had escaped the tearing down and razing that is so common a fate of many ancient things. The area, in fact, is so worn out for any economic use, ruined by centuries of forgotten farming, that it is seldom visited. Legend said—I must admit, a very shaky legend—that it had been, at one time, the residence of a very early Lansing.
    “I visited it, I suppose, because of its very oldness. Not because it may have been Lansing, but simply because it was so old—old beyond the memory of man, a structure from the deeper past. I expected nothing from it. The visit, you must understand, was just a holiday, the filling of an empty day. I had known of it, of course, for a