I heard all this and was surprised, of course, but not as surprised as I should have been, somewhat after the fashion of a man who dreams a fantasy and knows even as he dreams it that it is a fantasy, but one that seems beyond his power to do anything about.
“I have tried to imagine,” said our host, “the various ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it—the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many years before. Would you not say so, Mr. Carson?”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose I would.”
“I have wondered, too,” he went on, “by what criterion one should select the experiences to be packaged. Would it be wise to pick only the joyful ones or should one mix in a few that are somewhat less than joyful? Perhaps it might be well to preserve a few that carried a keen embarrassment, if for no other reason than to remind one’s self to be humble.”
“I think,” said Cynthia, “that one should select a wide spectrum, being sure, of course, to lay in a large supply of the more satisfactory ones. If there should be no later urge to use some of the less satisfactory ones they could be safely left upon the shelf, untouched.”
“Now, do you know,” said our host, “that had been my thought exactly.”
It was all so fine and comfortable and friendly, so very civilized. Even if it were not true, one wanted to believe it was; I found myself holding my breath, as if, by breathing, I might shatter an illusion.
“There is another thing one must take into consideration also,” he said. “Given such an ability, does one remain satisfied with the harvesting of experiences in the natural course of life or does one attempt to create experiences he has reason to believe may serve him in the future?”
“I believe,” I told him, “that it might be best to gather as one goes along, without making any special effort. It would seem more honest that way.”
“As an auxiliary to all of this,” he said, “I have found myself speculating upon a world in which no one ever grew up. I admit, of course, that it is a rather acrobatic feat of thinking, not entirely consistent, to leap from the one idea to the other. In a world where one was able to package his experiences, he merely would be able to relive at some future time the experiences of the past. But in a world of the eternally young he’d have no need of such packaging. Each new day would bring the same freshness and the everlasting wonder inherent in the world of children. There would be no realization of death and no fear born of the knowledge of the future. Life would be eternal and there’d be no thought of change. One would exist in an everlasting matrix and while there would be little variation from one day to the next, one would not be aware of this and there’d be no boredom. But I think I may have dwelled upon this subject for too great a length of time. I have something here to show you. A recent acquisition.”
He rose from the table and strode over to the sideboard, picking up the jug. He brought it back and handed it to Cynthia.
“It is a hydria,” he said. “A water jug. Sixth-century Athenian, a fine example of the black-figure style. The potter took the red clay and tamed it a little with an admixture of the yellow and filled out the engravings with a brilliant black glaze. If you’ll look down at the base of it, you’ll see the potter’s mark.”
Cynthia twisted the jug about. “Here it is,” she said. “In translation,” said our host, “it reads ‘Nicosthenes made me.’”
She handed it across the table to me. It was heavier than I’d thought. Engraved upon its side, inlaid with the glaze, a stricken warrior lay, with his shield still strapped upon his arm, grasping his spear, butt upon the ground, with the blade pointed upward. Twirling the jug, another figure came into view—another warrior leaning dejectedly upon his shield, with his broken spear trailing on the ground. You could see that he was tired and beaten; fatigue and defeat were etched into every line of him. “Athenian, you say?”
He nodded. “It was a most lucky find. A prime example of the best of Greek ceramics of the period. You will notice that the figures are stylized. The potters of those days never thought of realistic accuracy. They were concerned with ornament, not with form.”
He took the jug from me and put it back upon the sideboard.
“I fear,” said Cynthia, “that we must leave. It is getting late. It was a lovely lunch.”
It all had been strange before, although quite comfortable, but now the strangeness deepened and reality got foggy and I do not recall much more until we were out the door and going through the gate of the picket fence.
Then the reality came back again and I spun around. The house was there, but it was more weather-beaten, more ruined than it had seemed. The door stood half open, swinging in the gale that swept the hilltop and the ridgepole sagged to give it a swayback look. Panes of glass were broken from the windows. There was no picket fence or roses, no blooming tree beside the door … “We’ve been had,” I said.
Cynthia gasped. “It was so real,” she said.
The thing that hammered in my brain was why he, whoever he had been, had done it. Why play so elaborate a piece of magic? Why, when it might have served his purpose better, had he not allowed us to come upon a deserted and time-ruined house in which it would have been apparent no one had lived for years? In such a case we’d simply have looked it over and then gone away.
I strode up to the door, with Cynthia following, and into the house. Basically it was the same as it had been, although no longer neat and gracious. There was no carpet on the floor, no paintings on the wall. The table stood in the center of the room and the chairs were there, as we had sat in them, pushed back the way we’d left them when we’d gotten up to leave. But the table was bare. The sideboard stood against the wall and the jug still stood upon it.
I went across the room and picked it up. I carried it to the door where the light was better. It was the same piece, as far as I could see, as the one our host had shown us. “Do you know anything of Greek ceramics?” I asked Cynthia.
“All that I know is that there was black-figure pottery and red-figure pottery. The black came first.” I rubbed a thumb across the potter’s mark. “You don’t know, then, if this says what he said it did.” She shook her head. “I know potters used such marks. But I couldn’t read one. There’s something else about it, though. It looks too new, too recent, as if it had come out of the kiln only a little while ago. It shows no weathering or aging. Usually such pottery is found in excavations. It has been in the soil for years. This one looks as if it never had been buried.”
“I don’t think it ever has-been buried, I mean,” I said. “The Anachronian would have picked it up at the time that it was made, or very shortly after, as a prime example of the best work being done. It has been carefully taken care of as a part of his collection through all the centuries.”
“You think that’s who he is?”
“Who else could he be? Who else, in this battered age, would have a piece like this?”
“But he is so many people. He is the census-taker and the distinguished man who had us to lunch and the other, different kind of man my old ancestor saw.” I “I have a hunch,” I said, “he can be anything at all. Or at least make one think he’s anything at all. I rather suspect that, as the census-taker, he shows us his actual self.”
“Then in that case,” said Cynthia, “there is a treasure trove underneath our feet, deep down in the rock. All we have to do is find the entrance to the tunnel.”
“Yes,” I said, “and once we found it, what would we do with it? Just sit around and look at it? Pick up a piece and fondle it?”
“But now we know where it is.”
; “Exactly. If we can get back to our own present, if the shades know what they’re doing, if there really is a time-trap, and if there is, it doesn’t take us ten thousand years into the future as measured by our natural present time …”
“You believe all these things you’re saying?”
“Let’s say this: I recognize them as possibilities.”
“And, Fletch, if there is no time-trap? If we’re stuck back here?”
“We’ll do the best we can. We’ll find a way.”
We went out the door and started down the bluff. Below us lay the river and the cornfield, the house where the dead man lay, the weedy garden by the house.
“I don’t think,” said Cynthia, “that there will be a time-trap. The shades are no scientists; they are bunglers. A fraction of a second, they said, and then they sent us here “
I grunted at her. This was no time for talk like that. But she persisted. She put out a hand to stop me and I turned to face her.
“Fletch,” she said, “there has to be an answer. If there is no time-trap.”
“There may be one,” I said.
“But if there’s not?”
“In such a case,” I said, “we’ll come back to that house down there. We’ll clean it out. It’s a place to live, there are tools to work with. We’ll save seed from the garden so we can plant other gardens. We’ll fish, we’ll hunt, we’ll live.”
“And you’ll love me, Fletch?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’ll love you. I guess I already do.”
Chapter 19
We went down across the cornfield and I wondered as we went if Cynthia might be right—not because O’Gillicuddy and his band were bunglers, but because they were Cemetery. O’Gillicuddy, when I’d asked him, had carefully pointed out that Cemetery had no hold on them because there was nothing Cemetery could do against them and nothing that they wanted. On the face of it, this would seem to be quite true, but how could one be certain it was true? And what better tool could Cemetery use to get rid of us than O’Gillicuddy and his time ability? Surely if we were placed in another time and no way to get back Cemetery would be certain of no further interference.
I thought of my own pink world of Alden—Cynthia’s world, as well. I thought of Thorney pacing up and down his study, talking of the long-lost Anachronians and fuming at the indiscriminate treasure-hunters who looted primitive sites and robbed archaeologists of their chance to study ancient cultures. And I thought with a bit of bitterness of my own fine plans to make a composition of the Earth. But mostly, I guess, I thought of Cynthia and the rotten deal she’d gotten. She, of all of us, had had the least to gain from this wild adventure. She had started out by serving as an errand boy for good old Thorney and see what it had got her.
If there were no time-trap, what could we do other than what I’d told her we would do? I could think of nothing else to do, but it would be a bleak life at the best. It was not the kind of life for Cynthia—nor for me. Winter would be coming soon, most likely, and if there were no time-trap, we’d have little time to get ready for it. We’d have to tough it through somehow, and when spring had come around we might have, by that time, figured out a better way.
I tried to quit thinking about it, for it hadn’t happened yet and there might be no need to think of it, but try as I might I couldn’t seem to get my mind away from it. The very horror of the prospect seemed to fascinate me.
We came down into the river valley and walked along the river until we came to the hollow that led to the cliff where we’d holed up after fleeing from the ghouls. Neither of us were saying anything. Neither of us, I suspect, trusted ourselves to speak.
We started up the hollow and when we turned the bend just ahead of us, we could see the cliffs and we’d be almost there. We’d not have long to wait. Fairly soon we’d know.
We rounded the bend and stopped dead in our tracks.
Standing just this side of the cliffs were two war machines.
There was no mistaking them. I think I would have known what they were in any case, but from having heard Elmer talk of them so often, I recognized them immediately.
They were huge. They had to be huge, to carry all the armaments they packed. A hundred feet long at least, and probably half as wide and looming twenty feet or more into the air. They stood side by side and they were most unlovely things. There was strength and ugliness in them.
They were monstrous blobs. It made a man shiver just to look at them.
We stood there looking at them and they looked back at us. You could feel them look.
One of the machines spoke to us—or at least someone in their direction spoke to us. There was no way to tell which machine was speaking.
“Don’t run away,” it said. “Don’t be frightened of us. We want to talk with you.”
“We won’t run,” I said. There’d have been little use in running. If they wanted us, they’d have us in a minute. I was sure of that.
“No one will listen,” said the machine, rather piteously.
“Everyone flees from us. We would be friends to the human race, for we ourselves are human.”
“We’ll listen to you,” said Cynthia. “What have you to say?”
“Let us introduce ourselves,” it said. “I am Joe and the other one is Ivan.”
“I am Cynthia,” said Cynthia, “and the other one is Fletcher.”
“Why don’t you run from us?”
“Because we’re not afraid,” said Cynthia. I could tell from the way she said it she was very much afraid. “Because,” I said, “there’d be no use of running.”
“We are two old veterans,” said Joe, “long home from the wars and most desirous of doing what we can to help rebuild a peaceful world. We have wandered very far and the few humans we have found have had no interest in what we might do for them. In fact, it seems they have a great aversion to us.”
“That is understandable,” I said. “You, or others like you, probably shot the hell out of them before the war came to an end.”
“We shot the hell out of no one,” said Joe. “We never fired a shot in anger. Neither one of us. The war was done with before we got into it.”
“And how long ago was that?”
“By the best computation that we have, a little over fifteen hundred years ago.”
“Are you sure of that?” I asked.
“Very sure,” said Joe. “We can calculate it more closely if it means that much to you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Fifteen hundred is quite close enough.”
And so, I told myself, O’Gillicuddy’s fraction of a second had turned out to be more than eighty centuries.
“I wonder,” said Cynthia, “if either one of you recall a robot by the name of Elmer …”
“Elmer!”
“Yes, Elmer. He said he was a supervisor of some sort on the building of the last of the war machines.”
“How do you know Elmer? Can you tell me where he is?”
“We met him,” I said, “in the future.”
“That can’t be true,” said Joe. “You do not meet people in the future.”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “We’ll tell it to you sometime.”
“But you must tell me now,” said Joe. “Elmer is an ancient friend. He worked on me. Not on Ivan. Ivan is a Russian.’
It was quite apparent there was no way to get away from them. Ivan hadn’t said a word, but Joe was set to talk. Having finally found someone who would listen to him, he was not about to quit.
“There isn’t any sense of you standing out there and us sitting here,” said Joe. “Why don’t you come aboard?” A panel slid down in his front and a stairway came telescoping out. When the panel slid down it revealed a small, lighted room.
“It’s a mechanic’s berth,” said Joe. “Place for the mechanics to stay and be protected if they have to work on me. Not that I suspect any of them ever did with any war machine. They never did with me, of course, but I don’t think they
did with many of the others, either. When something happened to us it was usually pretty bad. It took a lot to send us running for repairs. By the time we came to run there wasn’t too much left. Few of us, I imagine, ever made it back to home. That was the tradition in those days. Of course we were self-repairing, to a degree at least. We could keep ourselves in operation, but we couldn’t do too much when the damage got too massive. “Well, come on aboard.”
“I think it will be all right,” said Cynthia. I wasn’t as sure as she was.
“Of course it will be all right,” boomed Joe. “It is quite comfortable. Small, but comfortable. If you are hungry, I have the capacity to mix you nourishment. Not very tasty, I suppose, but with some value as a nutrient. A quick snack for our hypothetical mechanic if he should get hungry on the job.”
“No, thank you very much,” said Cynthia. “We just now had lunch.”
We climbed the stairs into the room. There was a table in one corner, a double-decker bunk, a couch along one wall. We sat down on the couch. The place was, as Joe had said, small, but comfortable.
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