Read New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) for Free Online

so the water could run out.
    To be reviewed, that first page had said, under universal law. And was there, he wondered, such a thing as universal law?
    Law could be approached in many ways, he thought. As pure philosophy, as political theory, as a history of moral ideas, as a social system, or as a set of rules. But however it was viewed, however studied, no matter what the emphasis, it had one basic function, the providing of a framework that would solve all social conflict.
    Law was no static thing; it must, and did, evolve. No matter how laggard it might be, still it followed in the footsteps of the society it served.
    He grinned wryly in the darkness, staring at the foaming river, remembering how, for years, he had hammered on that viewpoint in seminar and lecture.
    On one planet, given time and patience and the slow process of evolution, the law could be made to square with all social concepts and with the ordered knowledge of society at large.
    But was there any chance to broaden this flexibility and this logic to include not one, but many planets. Did there exist somewhere a basis for a legal concept that would apply to society in the universal sense?
    It could be true, he thought. Given wisdom and work, there was a bare chance of it.
    And if this should be the case, then he might be of service, or more correctly, perhaps, the law of Earth might be of help. For Earth need not be ashamed of what it had to offer. The mind of Man had lent itself to law. For more than five thousand years there was a record of Man’s concern with law and from that deep concern had come a legal evolution—or, more correctly, many evolutions. And in it might be found a point or two that could be incorporated in a universal code.
    There was, throughout the universe, a common chemistry, and because of this there were those who thought that there was a common biochemistry as well.
    Those other beings on those two other planets who had been named with him to review the issue set forth in the transcript could not be expected to be men, or even close to men. But given a common biochemistry, they would be basically the same sort of life as Man. They would be protoplasmic. They would make use of oxygen. The kind of things they were would be determined by nucleic acids. And their minds, while more than likely a far cry from a human mind, still would be based upon the same mechanism as the minds of Man.
    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