Then the reality came back again and I spun around. The house was there, but it was more weatherbeaten, 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, so 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 was 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 ancestor saw.”
“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 that?”
“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.”
XIX
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 Anachrons 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. We want to talk to 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 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.
“Welcome aboard,” said Joe. “I am very glad to have you.”
“One thing you said interests me,” said Cynthia. “You said Ivan is a Russian.”
“Ah, yes, indeed he is. I suppose you think that the Russian was an enemy, as he surely was. But how we came together is the story of our life. Once I had been fitted out and made ready for the war, loaded with munitions and all equipment tested, I set out across Canada and Alaska for the Bering Strait, traveling underwater for a few short miles to reach Siberia. I reported back occasionally on my progress, but not too often, for to do so might have meant detection. I had been given certain objectives, of course, and one by one I reached them, to find in every instance they had been neutralized. Shortly after I reached the first objective I could not raise the homeland and, in fact, after that, I never raised home base. I was quite cut off. At first I thought it was only a temporary failure of communications, but after a time concluded that there was something much more significant than communication failure. I wondered if my country had been finally beaten to its knees or if the few military centers might have gone even deeper underground, but whatever might be the reason for the failure, I told myself, I would carry out my duty. I was a patriot, a true-blue patriot. You understand the term?”
“I am a history student,” Cynthia said. “I understand the concept.”
“So, driven by my bitter patriotism, I went on. I visited all my assigned objectives and they all had been reduced. I did not stop there. I prowled, seeking what in those days were called targets of opportunity. I monitored the atmosphere for signals that might betray hidden bases. But there were no signals, neither ours or theirs. There were no targets of opportunity. At times I came upon small communities of people who ran or hid from me. I did not bother them. As targets, they were too insignificant. You do not use a nuclear charge to kill a hundred people. Especially when the death of those hundred would have no possible tactical advantage. All I found were ruined cities in which still might live tiny, pitiful huddles of humanity. I found a blasted countryside, great craters, miles across, blasted to the bedrock, drifting clouds of poison, miles of once-rich land reduced to nothing—occasional clumps of dead or dying trees and not a blade of grass. There is no way to tell you how it was, no way for you to imagine how it might have been.
“So I turned homeward, going slowly, for there was no hurry now and I had much to think about. I shall not burden you with the thoughts, the sorrow and the guilt. I was a patriot no longer. I had been cured of patriotism.”
“There is one thing that puzzles me,” I said. “I know there is more than one of you—human beings, that is. Perhaps several of you. Yet you speak of yourself as I.”
“There were at one time,” Joe said, “five of us, five men who were willing to sacrifice their bodies and their positions as human beings to man a war machine. There was a professor of mathematics, a most distinguished scholar; a military man, a general of the armies; an astronomer of considerable repute; a former stock broker; and the last a most unlikely choice, one might think—a poet.”
“And you are the poet?”
“No,” said Joe. “I don’t know what I am. I think I am all five of us together. We are separate minds no longer. We have become, in some strange way we cannot understand, a single mind. I am amazed at times that I, as this mind, can still recognize myself as one or another of the five of us, but each time I have this sense of recognition it is not actually the recognition of another, but rather of myself. As if interchangeably and at different times I can be any one of us. But mostly I am not any one of us, but all of us together.
“It is the same with Ivan, although there were only four of him. But now there is likewise only one of him.”
“We are leavi
ng Ivan out of the conversation,” said Cynthia.
“Not at all,” said Joe. “He is a most active listener. He could speak either for himself or through me if he had the wish. Do you wish to, Ivan?”
A deeper, thicker voice said, “You tell it so well, Joe. Why don’t you go ahead?”
“Well, as I was telling you,” said Joe, “I was heading home, I had come to a stretch of prairie that seemed to go on forever. Steppeland, I suppose. It was bleak and lonely and there seemed no end to it. It was there that I spotted old Ivan, here. He was far away and not much more than a speck, but when I used a telescopic optic, I knew what he was—an enemy of mine. Although, to tell the truth, by that time it was rather difficult to think in terms of enmity. Rather, I felt a thrill at just knowing that out there on the plain was something like myself. Strange identity, perhaps, but identity. Ivan told me later that he had much the same reaction, but the point was that neither one of us could know what the other thought. So we both began maneuvering and we were both rather tricky. There were a couple of times when I had Ivan in my sights and could have unloaded on him, but something held me back and I couldn’t do it. Ivan, for some screwy Russian reason, has never been willing to admit that the same thing happened with regard to me, but I am sure it did. Ivan was too good a war machine for it not to happen. But anyway, there were the two of us, sashaying back and forth, and after a day or two of this, it got ridiculous. So I said something to this effect: ‘O.K., let’s break it off. We know damn well neither of us wants to fight. We’re probably the only two surviving war machines and the war is over and there is no longer any need of fighting, so why can’t we be friends?’ Old Ivan, he didn’t protest none, although it took a little time for him to agree to it, but finally he did. We rumbled straight toward one another, moving slow and easy, until we bumped noses. And we just sat there, nose to nose, and we stayed there, for I don’t know how long—maybe days or months or years. There wasn’t really anything that we could do. The jobs we’d had had disappeared. There was in the entire world no longer any need of war machines. So we stayed out on that Godforsaken plain, the only living things there were for miles around, with our noses bumped together. We talked and we got to know one another so well that finally for long periods there was no need to talk. It was good just to sit there, doing nothing, thinking nothing, saying nothing, nose to nose with Ivan. It was enough that we were together, that we were not alone. It may seem strange to say that two ungainly, ugly machines got to be friends, but you must remember that while we might be machines, we were still human beings. At that time we were not single minds. We were five minds and four minds, nine minds all together, and all of us were intelligent and well-educated men and there was a lot to talk about.
The Complete Serials Page 135
