So we were back to that again, to this ridiculous assertion. This strange and stubborn pride. If I’d not been so sore at them, I would have bust out laughing. But as it stood, I’d had about as much of what was going on as I was able to take.
I reached down and grabbed the gnome by the slack of his robe that hung about his chest and lifted him. He dangled and his scrawny legs kicked and kept on kicking as if he were trying to run, but couldn’t, since his feet were in the air.
“I’ve had enough of this,” I told him. “I don’t know what it is all about and I don’t give a damn, but you’re giving us what we need and without any quibbling. If you don’t, I’ll snap your filthy neck.”
“Look out!” screamed Sara and as I jerked my head around, I saw the hobbies charging us, rocking forward on their rear rockers and their front rockers lifted menacingly.
I threw the gnome away. I didn’t look where I was throwing him. I just heaved him out of there and brought up my gun, remembering, with a sinking feeling, the lack of impression the laser beam had made upon that crystal landing field.. If the hobbies were fabricated of the same material, and it looked as if they were, I’d do just as well by standing off and pegging rocks at them.
But even as I brought the rifle up, Hoot scurried quickly forward and as he scurried forward, suddenly he blazed. That’s an awkward way of saying it, but I can’t think of any other way of describing it. There he was, scampering forward, his little feet clicking on the floor, then his body quivered with a bluish sort of haze, as if he were an electrical transformer that had gone haywire. The air seemed to shake and everything did a funny sort of jig, then it all was over and the way it was before. Except that all the hobbies were piled into a far corner of the room, all tangled up together, with their rockers waving in the air. I hadn’t seen them move-they just suddenly were there. It was as if they had been moved without actually traveling through space. One instant they had been charging us, with their rockers lifted, the next instant they were jammed into the corner.
“They be all right,” said Hoot, apologetically. “They damaged not at all. They be discommoded for the moment only. They be of use again. Sorry for surprise, but need of moving rapidly.”
The gnome was picking himself up slowly from the tangle of barrels and boxes and baskets where I had thrown him and I could see, just by looking at him, he had no fight left in him. Neither had the hobbies.
“Tuck,” I said, “get moving. Get the stuff together. As soon as we can get the hobbies loaded, we are moving out.”
FIVE
The city pressed close. It towered on every side. Its walls were straight up into the sky and where they stopped (if they did stop, for down at their base one had the feeling he could not be sure) there existed only a narrow strip of blue, sky so far and faint that it faded out almost to the whiteness of the walls. The narrow street did not run straight; it jogged and twisted, a trickle of a street that ran between the boulders that were buildings. The buildings all were the same. There was slight difference among them. There was no such a concept as architecture, unless one could call straight lines and massiveness a kind of architecture.
Everything was white, even the floor of the street we followed-and the floor could not be thought of as paving; it was, instead, a floor, a slab that extended between the buildings as if it were a part of them, and a slab that seemed to run on forever and forever, without a single joint or seam. There seemed no end to it, nor to the city either. One had the feeling that he would never leave the city, that he was caught and trapped and that there was no way out.
“Captain,” said Sara, walking along beside me, “I’m not entirely sure I approve of the manner in which you handle things.”
I didn’t bother to answer her. I knew that dissatisfaction with me had been nibbling at her for days-on board the ship and after we had landed. Sooner or later, it was certain that she would get around to chewing on me about it and there was nothing I could have said that would have made a difference.
I threw a glance over my shoulder and saw that the others were coming along behind us-Smith and Tuck riding two of the-hobbies and the rest of them loaded with our supplies and tins of water. Behind the hobbies came Hoot, like a dog hazing a flock of sheep, and at times sidewheeling along the way a dog will run. His body was built low to the ground and on each side of it he had a couple of dozen stubby legs, like a centipede, and I knew that so long as he was back there behind them, the hobbies would try no monkey business. They were scared pink of him.
“You are heavy handed,” Sara said when I didn’t answer her. “You simply bull ahead. You have absolutely no finesse and I think in time that can lead to trouble.”
“You are talking about the gnome,” I said.
“You could have reasoned with him.”
“Reasoned with him and he about to steal us blind?”
“He said he would have gotten us out of that other world,” she said, “and I’m inclined to have believed him. There have been other parties here and he must have pulled them back out of the worlds he put them in and let them go ahead.”
“In such a case,” I said, “please account for all that loot he had the storeroom jammed with.”
“He maybe stole some of it,” admitted Sara, “or he ran a bluff and got some of it before they started out or some of the expeditions failed and he went out and picked up the stuff after they had failed.”
It was possible, I knew, any one of the alternatives she suggested could be possible. But somehow I didn’t think so. The gnome had said that we had been the first to get out of one of the other worlds without any help from him, but that could have been a lie, perhaps calculated to make us feel good about being so smart we had gotten out of it. And we really hadn’t gotten out of it. We’d been thrown out of it, and there was a good chance that some of the other parties that had landed here had been thrown out as well. The residents of those other worlds must by now be tired of having someone keep on dumping aliens in on them.
But not all of the people dumped into those other worlds would have been thrown out and that would have meant that the gnome and his pals, the hobbies, would have had good pickings. Although what good all that stuff was doing them was hard to figure out. They couldn’t begin to use all of it and on a planet such as this, with a built-in trap for any who might land on it, there’d be little chance of trading with someone out in space. The gnome apparently did a little local trading, for he’d sold Roscoe’s braincase to a centaur tribe, but the local trading couldn’t amount to so very much.
“Speaking of the gnome,” said Sara. “At first you threatened you’d bring him along with us and then you didn’t bring him. Personally, since we’re running this kind of show, I’d feel better if we had him where we could keep an eye on him.”
“1 couldn’t stand his whining and his bawling,” I told her, shortly. “And, besides, once it became apparent we weren’t hauling him along, he got so happy about it that he let us take the other things we needed without any argument. Including what is left of Roscoe and all that water and the maps.”
We walked in silence for a moment, but she still wasn’t satisfied. She was sore at me. She didn’t like the way I operated and she meant to tell me so, very forcefully, and she wasn’t having much success.
“I don’t like this Hoot of yours,” she said. “He’s a crawly sort of creature.”
“He saved our necks when the hobbies went for us,” I said. “I suppose you’re all knotted up because you don’t understand what he used to hit the hobbies. Me, I don’t care what he used, just so he still has it and can use it again if we get into a jam. And I don’t care how crawly he may seem, just so he stays with us. We need a guy like him.”
She flared at me. “That’s a crack at the rest of us. You don’t like George and you don’t like Tuck and you’re barely civil to me. And you call everybody Buster, I don’t like people who call other people Buster.”
I took a long, deep breath and began to co
unt to ten, but I didn’t wait till ten.
“Miss Foster,” I told her, “you undoubtedly recall all that money you transferred to my account on Earth. All I’m trying to do now is to earn all that lovely money. And I’m going to earn it no matter what you do or say. You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to approve of anything I do. But you’re signed onto this harebrained scheme just like all the rest of us and I’m in charge of it because you put me in charge of it and I’m going to stay in charge of it and you haven’t a damned thing to say about it until we’re back on Earth again-if we are ever back.”
I didn’t know what she might do. I didn’t care too much.
This business had been building up for a long time now, since shortly after we had taken off from Earth and there had to be an end to it or we’d all go down the drain. Although, to tell the truth, I figured we were part-way down the drain already. There was something about the planet that made a man uneasy-something furtively vicious, a hard coldness like the coldness of a squinted eye, a thing a man couldn’t put a finger on and perhaps was afraid to put a finger on because of what he’d find. And how were we to get off the planet with our ship sealed shut?
I thought maybe she’d stop right there in the street and throw a tantrum at me. I thought maybe she might try to brain me with her rifle or maybe try to shoot me.
She did nothing of the sort. She just kept walking along beside me. She never broke her stride. Then quietly, almost conversationally, she said, “What a sleazy son-of-a-bitch you turned out to be.”
And it was all right. I probably deserved it. I’d been rough on her, but I’d had to be. She had to understand and, anyhow, I’d been called lot worse things than that.
We kept walking along and I wondered what time it was.
My watch said we’d been walking down the street for a bit better than six hours, but that didn’t mean a thing, for I hadn’t the least idea of how long this planet’s day might be.
I tried to keep a sharp lookout as we went along, but I had no idea what I was watching for. The city seemed deserted, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be something very nasty in it that might come popping out at us. It was all too quiet and innocent. A place like this begged for someone or something to be living in it.
The streets were narrow, the one that we were following and the others that ran off from it. The buildings rose straight up from them and went soaring upward. There were occasional breaks in the blank, white walls that probably were windows, but didn’t look like windows. Usually several small, unpretentious doors fronted the street from each building, but at times there were great ramps leading up through a recess sliced out of a building’s front up to massive doors that stood several stories high. Seldom were any of these doors closed; most of them stood open. Someone, sometime, had built this city and used it for a while and then had walked away from it, not even bothering to close the doors when they turned their backs on it.
The street jogged suddenly and as we came around the corner we were looking down a narrow lane where the street ran straight for a much greater distance than it had run straight all the time we had traveled on it. And far off, at the end of the street, stood a tree, one of those great trees that towered above the city. We had seen some of them when we’d been out on the landing field, but this was the first one we’d seen since. Traveling in the street, the buildings stood so high that they cut off the sight of everything that wasn’t directly overhead.
I stopped and Sara stopped beside me. Behind us the hobbies shuffled to a halt. Now that the clanking of the hobbies’ rockers was still I could hear the crooning sound. I had been hearing it for some time, I realized, but had paid no attention to It, for it had been blotted out by the noise made by the rockers.
But the hobbies were standing silent now and the crooning still kept on and when I swung around I saw it came from Smith. He was sitting in the saddle, rocking gently back and forth and he was making these cooing sounds like a happy baby.
I was standing there and saying nothing when Sara said, “Well, go ahead and say it.”
“I haven’t said a thing,” I told her, “and I won’t say anything. But if he doesn’t shut his trap, I’ll rig a muzzle for him.”
“It’s only happiness,” said Tuck. “Surely, captain, you can’t complain at a little happiness. We are getting very close, it seems, to the creature that has been talking with him all these years and he’s almost beside himself with an inner happiness.”
Smith paid no attention to what was going on. He just sat humped there on the hobby, crooning to himself like a half-wit baby.
“Let’s get on,” I said. I had been ready to call a halt so we could rest and have a bite to eat, but for some reason this didn’t seem to be the place for it. Although maybe that wasn’t it at all-maybe I wanted to get going so that the sound of the hobbies’ rockers would drown out that sound of crooning.
I expected Sara might protest that I was driving everyone too hard, that it was time to take a rest, but she fell into step beside me and we went on down the street without a word from her.
The tree that stood at the end of the street kept getting bigger all the time, or seemed to be getting bigger. It was only, of course, that as we drew closer to it, we began to get a better perspective of it. Finally we could see that it stood a little distance beyond where the street came to an end and that it seemed to be twice as tall, perhaps more than twice as tall, as the buildings that stood on either side of the street. And that meant twice as tall as any of the buildings in the city, for the buildings here were as tall as any we’d seen in the center of the city.
The sun was slanting toward the west when we finally reached the end of the street, and it really was the end. The city stopped, just like that, and open country lay beyond, a red and yellow land, not exactly desert, but very close to it, a land with buttes and the far-off blue of mountain ranges and here and there the trees. There was other vegetation, little scrubby stuff, but the only thing that reached any height were those monstrous trees. Only the one of them was close, perhaps three miles or so away, although it was hard, admittedly, to judge its distance.
The street ended and a trail went on as a continuation of it-not a road, but a trail that over many years had been worn down a couple of feet or so into the very soil. It went winding out, twisting and turning, into that red and yellow land. A mile or so beyond the city stood a single building, not as massive as the buildings that made up the city, but still good-sized. It was not like the buildings of the city, not just one huge rectangular mass. Rather, it was a frothy sort of thing, but solid and without any foolishness about its frothiness. It was built of some kind of red material and that alone was enough to set it out from the whiteness of the buildings in the city. It had spires and towers and what seemed to be windows, high up, and a huge ramp sprang up to three mighty doors that stood open on its front.
“Captain Ross,” said Sara, “perhaps we should call a halt. It’s been a long, hard day.”
Maybe she expected that I would argue with her, but I didn’t. It had been a long, hard day and it was time to call a halt. I should have done it sooner, perhaps, but I had felt an itch to get out of the city, if that were possible. We’d been marching steadily for eight hours or more and the sun still was only a little better than halfway down the western sky. There still would be several hours of light, but we’d done enough for one day. The days must run long here, I told myself.
“Over by the building,” I suggested. “After we set up camp, we can have a look at it.”
She nodded and we started out again. Smith still was crooning, but you could only hear the crooning in between the creaking sounds made by the rockers of the hobbies. If he kept it up once we set up camp, I’d be hard put to keep from belting him into at least a semblance of silence. To let him keep on with that silly sound was more than a man should have to stand.
Inside the city we had been shielded from the sun, but now the sun was warm-not hot, but warm,
with that welcome, heartening warmness one associates with spring. It felt good just to be walking in the sunlight. The air was clean and had a sharpness to it and it carried in it a redolent scent of vegetation, a resinous, spicy scent that tingled in the nostrils.
Ahead of us the red building stood stark against the cloudless sky, its towers and spires seeming to reach up to pierce that very sky. It was good to get out of the city, to be where we could see the sky again, and it gave me the feeling that we were finally on our way, wherever we were going.
I wondered once again just how crazy one could get. If we followed this snaking trail we just might find the centaur people who had bought Roscoe’s brain and if they still happened to have it they might sell it back to us, and if we could get it somehow we could pop it back into Roscoe’s body and just possibly he might be able to tell us what the whole thing was about.
In my time I’d been on wild-goose chases of my own, but to whomp up a honey, I told myself, it took a female big game hunter and a dreaming blind man and a sneaky little religico with dirty fingernails. There might be better combinations, but until a better one came along, those three would stand as tops.
We were about halfway to the building when behind me startled, frightened screams burst out and as I turned I saw the hobbies charging down upon us. Hardly thinking of what I was doing, I dived sidewise off the trail and as I dived caught Sara around the waist and carried her along with me. Together we rolled out to one side of the path and the hobbies went rushing past us, their rockers moving so fast they seemed to be a blur. Both Smith and Tuck where hanging on to the saddles desperately and Tuck’s brown robe was flowing out behind him, snapping in the wind. The hobbies were pounding as hard as they could go straight for the ramp that led into the building, screaming as they went-screams that sent cold shivers running up my spine.
I was halfway to my feet when something exploded just above my head, not a loud explosion, but rather a muffled thump, and dark red pellets went whizzing through the air and bouncing on the ground.
Destiny Doll Page 7
