I didn’t have too much strength left, but I had enough to grab him by an arm and fling him out, sprawling, into the dusty trail. He dropped the doll and groveled, on his hands and knees, picking it up.
I hung onto the saddle to keep from falling down. “Now lead out,” I told him. “And, so help me Christ, you do one more stupid thing and I’ll get down and beat you to a pulp.”
TEN
The trail wound across the arid land, crossing flats of sand and little pools of cracked, dried mud where weeks or months, or maybe even years before, rainwater had collected. It climbed broken, shattered ridges, angling around grotesque land formations. It wended its way around dome-shaped buttes. The land stayed red and yellow and sometimes black where ledges of glassy volcanic stone cropped out. Far ahead, sometimes seen, sometimes fading in the horizon blueness, lay a smudge of purple that I thought were mountains, but could not be sure.
The vegetation continued sparse-little bushes that crouched close against the ground, the sprawling thorn that ran along the surface. The sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky, but it was not hot, just pleasantly warm. The sun, I was sure, was smaller and fainter than the sun of Earth-either that, or the planet lay a greater distance from it.
On some of the higher ridges were little, cone-shaped houses of stone, or at least structures that looked like houses. As if someone or something had needed temporary shelter or protection and had gathered up flat slabs of stone, which lay about the ridges, and had constructed a flimsy barrier. The stones were laid up dry, with no mortar, piled one atop another. Some of the structures still stood much as their builders must have left them, in many of the others stones had fallen out of place, and in still others the entire structure had collapsed and lay in fallen heaps.
And there were the trees. They loomed in all directions, each one standing alone and lordly in its loneliness and each of them several miles from any other. We came close to none of them.
There was no life, or none that showed itself. The land ran on and on, motionless and set. There was no wind.
I used both hands to hang onto the saddle and continually I fought against falling down into the darkness that stole upon me every time I forgot to fight it back.
“You all right?” asked Sara.
I don’t remember answering her. I was busy hanging on to the saddle and fighting back the darkness.
We stopped at noon. I don’t remember eating, although I suppose I did. I do remember one thing. We had stopped in a rugged badlands area below one of the ridges and I was propped up against a wall of earth, so that I was looking at another wall of earth and the wall, I saw, was distinctly stratified with various strata of different thicknesses, some of them no more than a few inches deep while others would have been four or five feet, and each of them a distinctive color. As I looked at the strata I began to sense the time which each one represented. I tried to turn it off, for with this recognition was associated a most unrestful feeling, as if I were stretching all my faculties to a straining point, as if I were using all my energy and strength to drive deeper into this sense of time which the wall of earth invoked. But there was no way to turn it off; for some reason I was committed and must keep on and could only hope that at some point along the way I would reach a stopping point-either a point where I could go no further or a point where I had learned or sensed all there was to learn or sense.
Time became real to me in a way I can’t express in words. Instead of a concept, it became a material thing that I could distinguish (although it was not seeing and it was not feeling) and could understand. The years and eons did not roll back for me. Rather, they stood revealed. It was as if a chronological chart had become alive and solid. Through the wavering lines of the time structure as if the structure might have been a pane of glass made inexpertly, I could faintly glimpse the planet as it had been in those ages past-ages which were no longer in the past but now stood in the present, as if I were outside of time and independent of time and could see and evaluate it exactly as I could have seen and evaluated some material structure that coexisted with me on my own time level.
The next thing I remember was waking up and for a moment it seemed to me that I was waking from that interval when I saw time spread out before me, but in a little while I realized that could not be so, for the badlands now were gone and it was night and I was stretched out on my back with blankets under me and another covering me. I looked straight up at the sky and it was a different sky than I had ever seen. For a moment I was puzzled and lay quietly, trying to work out the puzzle. Then, as if someone had told me (although no one did), I knew that I was looking at the galaxy, all spread out before me. Almost directly overhead was the brilliant glow of the central area and spread out all around it, like a gauzy whirlpool, were the arms and outlying sectors.
I turned my head to one side and here and there, just above the horizon, were brilliant stars and I realized that I was seeing a few of the globular clusters, or more unlikely, other nearby stars, fellows with the star about which the planet I was on revolved-those outlaw members of the galactic system which in ages past had fled the system and now lay in the outer dark at the edge of galactic space.
A fire was burning-almost burned down-just a few feet from me and a hunched and blanketed figure lay close beside the fire. Just beyond the fire were the hunched-up hobbies, gently rocking back and forth, with the dim firelight reflecting from their polished hides.
A hand touched my shoulder and I twisted around to face in that direction. Sara knelt beside me.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“I feel fine,” I said, and that was the truth. Somehow I felt new and whole and my head and thoughts were clear with an echoing, frightening clarity-as if I were the first human waking to the first day of a brand-new world, as if time had been turned back to the first hour that ever was.
I sat up and the covering blanket fell off me.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“A day’s journey from the city,” she told me. “Tuck wanted to stop. He said you were in no condition to be traveling, but I insisted we keep on. I thought you’d want it that way.”
I shook my head, bewildered. “I remember none of it. You are sure Tuck said that we should stop?”
She nodded. “You hung onto the saddle and were terribly sick, but you answered when we spoke to you. And there was no place to stop, no good camping spot.”
“Where’s Hoot?”
“Out on guard. Prowling. He says he doesn’t need to sleep.”
I got up and stretched, like a dog will stretch after a good night’s sleep. I felt fine. God, how fine I felt!
“Is there any food?” I asked.
She got to her feet and laughed.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked.
“You,” she said.
“Me?”
“Because you are all right. I was worried. All of us were worried.”
“It was that damn Hoot,” I said. “He drained my blood.”
“I know,” she said. “He explained it to me. He had to. There was nothing else to do.”
I shivered, thinking of it. “It’s unbelievable,” I said.
“Hoot himself,” she said, “is unbelievable.”
“We’re lucky that we have him,” I told her. “And to think that I almost left him back there in the dunes. I wanted to leave him. We had trouble enough without reaching out for more.”
She led the way to the fire.
“Build it up,” she said. “I’ll fix some food for you.”
Beside the fire was a little pile of brush, twisted branches broken from some of the desert trees. I squatted down and fed some of them to the fire and the flame blazed up, licking at the wood.
“I’m sorry about the laser gun,” I said. “Without it, we stand sort of naked.”
“I still have my rifle,” she pointed out. “It has a lot of power. In good hands . . .
“Like yours,” I said.
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��Like mine,” she said.
Beyond the fire the heap of blankets lay unmoving. I gestured toward them. “How is Tuck?” I asked. “Any sign of him snapping out of it?”
“You’re too hard on him,” she said. “You have no patience with him. He’s different. He’s not like the two of us. We are very much alike. Have you thought of that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have.”
She brought a pan and set it on the coals, squatting down beside me.
“The two of us will get through,” she said. “Tuck won’t. He’ll break up, somewhere along the way.”
And strangely I found myself thinking that perhaps Tuck now had less to live for-that since Smith had disappeared he had lost at least a part of his reason for continuing to live.
Had that been why, I wondered, he had appropriated the doll? Did he need to have something he could cling to, and make cling to him by offering it protection? Although, I recalled, he had grabbed hold of the doll before George had disappeared. But that might not apply at all, for he may have known, or at least suspected, that George would disappear. Certainly he had not been surprised when it had happened.
“There’s another thing,” said Sara, “you should know. It’s about the trees. You can see for yourself as soon as it is light. We’re camped just under the brow of a hill and from the hilltop you can see a lot of country and a lot of trees, twenty or thirty of them, perhaps. And they’re not just haphazard. They are planted. I am sure of that.”
“You mean like an orchard?”
“That is right,” she said. “Just like an orchard. Each tree so far from every other tree. Planted in a checkerboard sort of pattern. Someone, at some time, had an orchard here.”
ELEVEN
We went on-and on and on.
Day followed day and we traveled from dawn until the failing of the light. The weather held. There was no rain and very little wind. From the appearance of the country, rain came seldom here. The country changed at times. There were days when we struggled uphill and down in twisted badland terrain; there were other days on end when we traveled land so flat that we seemed to be in the center of a concave bowl-a shallow dish-with the horizons climbing upward on every hand. Ahead of us what at first had been a purple cloud lying low against the horizon became unmistakably a far-off mountain range, still purpled by the distance.
Now there was life, although not a great deal of it. There were honking things that ran along the hilltops when we crossed the badlands area and went streaking down the painted gulleys, gobbling their excitement. There were the ones we called the striders, seldom seen and always at a distance, so far off that even with our glasses we never got a good look at them, but from what we saw incredibly twisted life forms that seemed to be walking on stilts, lurching and striding along at a rapid rate, not seeming to move swiftly but covering a lot of ground. And out on the desiccated plains the whizzers-animals (if they were animals) the size of wolves that moved so fast we were unable to see what they really were or how they traveled. They were a blur coming toward us and a whish going past and another blur as they went away. But although they came close, they never bothered us. Nor did the honkers or the striders.
The vegetation changed, too, from one type of landscape to another. Out on some of the plains strange curly grasses grew and in some of the badlands areas distorted trees clung to the hillsides and huddled in the gullies. They looked more like palms than pines, although they were not palms. Their wood was incredibly tough and oily and when we passed through regions where they grew we collected as many of their fallen branches as the hobbies could carry to serve as wood for campfires.
And always there were the trees, the great monsters that towered miles into the sky. Now we knew, without any question, that they had been planted, that the land had been surveyed and they had been laid out in orchards, forming a geometric gridwork over the face of the land. We did not come closer than a mile or so to any one of them. The trail seemed to be engineered to avoid them. And while at times we saw them shooting out their seed pods, they never shot at us.
“It’s almost,” Sara said, “as if they’d learned a lesson. As if they knew what might happen to them if they fired at us.”
“Except it wouldn’t happen now,” I reminded her, blaming myself once again for having left the ship without going back to the control room to get the extra laser gun and the repair kit for it.
“They don’t know that, of course,” she said.
But I wasn’t quite as sure as she was.
At times, watching through glasses, we saw swarms of the little ratlike creatures scurry out of burrows some distance from the trees to collect the seeds from the thrown pods, carrying them to what undoubtedly were hidden pits to deposit them. We never tried to investigate the pits; they were too close to the trees. If the trees were willing to leave us alone, we were quite glad to reciprocate.
The trail kept on, at times growing faint, at other times broader and better marked, as if at some time in the past parts of it had been more heavily traveled than were other sections of it. But the travel in any event could not have been heavy. We did not meet a soul.
One day the trail was crossed by what at one time had been a paved road, with only a few of the paving blocks remaining. The few that did remain were either shattered or canted out of place, but standing at the point where it crossed the trail, almost at right angles, one could look for a long distance either way along the slash marked out by the road, running straight without a single curve.
We held a conference. The road somehow was attractive, in some ways seemed more important than the trail we had been following. In times past it would have linked points of some importance, while the trail went dawdling across the land in a most haphazard way. But the trail did bear some signs of ancient travel. The road bore none at all. It still existed only because enough time had not passed to erase it from the landscape. And the trail trended in a northerly direction and it was to the north that we understood we might find the centaurs. The road ran east and west. Another point. The trail undoubtedly was older than the road; it had an ancient look about it. In certain places where it was constricted by geographic features and thus not allowed to wander, it had been cut to a depth of three or four feet into the soil. The evidence was that it had been used for millennia, that it had been a route of travel in times beyond all telling.
With some reluctance, we made our decision, composed half of logic, half of hunch. We continued on the trail.
Someone had been here-how long ago? Someone who had built the city and laid out the road and planted the trees. But now the city stood silent and empty and the road had fallen into ruin. What did it mean, I wondered. A great deal of time and energy had been spent upon this planet. And then the spenders of this time and energy had left, taking steps before they left to insure that anyone who landed on the planet would have no chance to leave. Landing otherwhere than in the city, a ship undoubtedly would be safe and could take off again. But any ship approaching the planet would almost certainly land nowhere but in the city, lured in by the signals that reached far out in space.
Along the trail at intervals the beehive houses of stone still were encountered, squatting on their hilltops. An examination of them showed nothing. There was no debris, nothing left behind. They had not, apparently, been used at any time as permanent abodes; they were simply stopping places, to be used as shelter for a night or two. We camped out in the open; we never used them. For all their simplicity, they had a musty feel about them.
As we traveled, we shook down into shape. Tuck rode most of the time. He was too awkward, too gangling, to walk. Sara and I took turns at riding. Hoot continued to be file closer, bringing up the rear, hustling the hobbies along. There was no spoken agreement to this arrangement; we simply fell into a travel pattern. The hobbies remained sulky and after a time we did not try to talk with them. Tuck and I got along. We did not grow to like one another better; we just got along. He still carried his ridiculou
s doll, clutched against his chest. Day after day he drew away from us, retreating more deeply inside himself. After the evening meal he sat alone, not talking, not noticing.
We were covering a lot of ground, but we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. We were marching deeper and deeper into an unknown land which wasn’t hostile at the moment, but perhaps could turn so at a moment.
Late one afternoon we came to a badlands area and when we’d gone into it a ways realized that it was one of the really bad ones and somewhat more extensive than we’d first imagined. So when we reached a fairly level place we stopped despite there being another hour or two of light.
We got the packs off the hobbies and stacked the supplies in a pile and the hobbies went wandering off, as they often did, as if they took this chance to be shut away from us for at least a little time. But it was all right. Hoot always went off with them and he always brought them back. Through the days that we had marched he had served as a sheepdog for the pack of hobbies and they were safe with him.
We got a fire started and Sara began putting a meal together while Tuck and I went up a draw to bring in some firewood.
We were coming back, each of us with an armload of wood, when we heard the frightened screaming of the hobbies and the clangor of their rockers as they ran. We dropped the wood and set off swiftly for the camp and as we came in sight of it, the hobbies came boiling up out of a narrow gully. They were running fast and without pausing for an instant they overran the camp, scattering the blazing fire and the pots and pans Sara had set out, with Sara herself running for her life to get out of the way.
They didn’t even hesitate when they reached the camp, but turned to the right to head back down the trail. Behind them, came Hoot. He was running close against the ground, the only way he could run, and he was making speed as well. He was little more than a dark streak at the hobbies’ heels, but when he reached the camp he skidded to a halt and swung around broadside. Standing there, braced on his tiny feet, he blazed-as he had done back in the city when the hobbies had launched a sudden charge. Blue haze enveloped him and the world did a funny sort of jig and up on the trail the hobbies went flying, spinning in the air. But they got to their rockers once again and went plunging on and Hoot blazed once again, just as they reached the top of the hill that rose above the camp. This time they disappeared, flipped and hurled and blown over the hill by whatever Hoot was doing to them.
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