"You don't think that he is present?" I asked, thinking that it was a strange way of saying he was not around.
She shook her head. "He found what he was looking for. Just the way George found what he was looking for."
"That doll of his," I said.
"A symbol," Sara said. "A point of concentration. Like a crystal ball in which one can lose himself. A madonna or some ancient and effective religious belief. A talisman . . ."
"A madonna," I said. "You mentioned that before."
"Tuck was sensitive," said Sara, "down to his fingertips. In tune, somehow, with something outside our space-time reference. An offensive sort of man—yes, I'll admit that now—an offensive, sort of man, and different in a very special way. Not entirely of this world."
"You told me once he wouldn't make it," I said, "that somewhere along the way he would break up."
"I know I did. I thought that he was weak, but he wasn't. He was strong."
Standing there, I wondered where he had gone. Or was he gone at all? Had his grayness progressed to a point where he simply disappeared? Was he still with us, unseen and unsuspected, stumbling along at the edge of a twilight world into which we could not see? Was he out there even now, calling to us or plucking at our sleeves to let us know that he still was with us, and we unable to hear him or to feel the plucking? But that, I told myself, could not be the case. Tuck would not pluck or call. He wouldn't care; he wouldn't give a damn. He would not care if we knew he was there or did not know. All he needed was the doll to clutch against his chest and the lonely thought that jangled in his skull. Perhaps his disappearance had not been so much a disappearance as a growing grayness, as his utter and absolute rejection of us.
"You now be only two," said Hoot, "but strong allies travel with you. The other three of us still stand fast with you."
I had forgotten Hoot and the other two and for a moment it had seemed, in truth, there were only two of us, two of the four who had come storming up out of the galaxy to seek in its outland fringes a thing we could not know—and even now did not know.
"Hoot," I said, "you sensed George leaving us. You knew when he left. This time . . ."
"I did not hear him go," said Hoot. "He gone long back, days back. He fade away so easily there be no sense of leaving. He just grow less and less."
And that was the answer, of course. He'd just got less and less. I wondered if there had ever been a time when he'd been wholly with us.
Sara was standing close behind me, with her head held high, as if she might somehow be defiant of something out there in the gathering dark—the thing, perhaps, or the condition, or the interlocking of circumstances which had taken Tuck from us. Although it was hard to believe that there was any single thing or any specific set of circumstances involved. The answer must lie inside of Tuck and the kind of mind he had.
In the light of the campfire I saw that tears were running down her cheeks, weeping silently, with her head held high against whatever might be out there in the dark. I reached out a tentative hand and put it on her shoulder and at the touch she turned toward me and I had her in, my arms—without planning to, surprised that it should happen—with her head buried in my shoulder and now sobs were shaking her while I held her close and fast against myself.
Out by the campfire stood Roscoe, stolid, unmoving, and in the silences punctuated by Sara's sobbing, I heard his whispered mumbling: "Thing, bring, cling, sting, wing, fling . . ."
EIGHTEEN
We arrived the second morning after Tuck bad disappeared-arrived and knew that we were there, that we had reached the place we had struggled to reach all the endless days that stretched behind us. There was no great elation in us when we topped a little rise of ground and saw against a swale the gateway where the trail plunged downward between two great cliffs and recognized that here was the gateway to the place we had set out to reach.
Beyond us the mountains climbed up into the sky—those mountains which back at the city had first appeared as a purple smudge which could be seen fleetingly on the northern horizon. And the purple still remained, reflecting a dusk upon the blue land through which we had been traveling. It all felt so exactly right—the mountains, the gate, the feeling of having arrived—that I seemed to sense a wrongness in it, but try as I might I could not tell why there was a wrongness.
"Hoot," I said, but he did not answer. He was standing there beside us, as motionless and quiet as we were. To him it must have seemed entirely right as well.
"Shall we go?" asked Sara, and we went, stepping down the trail toward the great stone portals which opened on the mountains.
When we reached the gate formed by the towering cliffs between which the trail went on, we found the sign. It was made of metal, affixed to one of the cliff walls, and there were a dozen or more paneled legends that apparently carried identical information in different languages. One was in the bastard script that went with space patois and it said:
All Biological Creatures Welcome, Mechanicals, Synthetic Forms, Elementals of Any Persuasions Whatsoever Cannot Be Allowed to Enter. Nor May Any Tools or Weapons, of Even the Simplest Sort, Be Allowed Beyond This Point.
"I care not," said Paint. "I keep goodly company of great lumbering mumbler of rhyming words. And I watch most assiduously over rifle, sword, and shield. I pray you not be long, for following extended sojourn upon my back I shiver from apprehension at absence of biologic persons. There be strange comfort in the actual protoplasm."
"I don't like it," I said. "We'll be walking naked down that path."
"This," Sara reminded me, "is what we started out to find. We can't quibble at a simple regulation. And it'll be safe in there. I can feel it. Can't you feel the safety, Mike?'
"Sure I can feel it," I told her, "but I still don't like it. The way you feel is no sure thing to go on. We don't know what we'll find. We don't know what is waiting for us. What say we pay no attention to the sign and . . ."
"BEEP," said the sign, or the cliff, or whatever.
I swung around and there, on the panel where the regulations had been posted, was another message:
The Management Will Not Be Responsible for the Consequences of Willful Disregarding of Regulations.
"All right, Buster," I asked, "what kind of consequences do you have in mind?"
The panel didn't deign to answer; the message just stayed put.
"I don't care what you do," said Sara. "I am going on. And I'm doing what they say. I didn't come all this way to turn back now."
"Who said anything about turning back?" I asked.
BEEP, said the panel and there was another message:
Don't Try It, Buster!
Sara leaned the rifle against the wall of the cliff underneath the, sign, unfastened the cartridge belt and dropped it at the rifle's butt.
"Come on, Hoot," she said.
BEEP, and the panel said:
The Many-Legged One? Is It a True Biologic?
Hoot honked with anger. "Know it you do, Buster. I be honest hatched!" .
BEEP!
But You Are More Than One.
"I be three," said Hoot, with dignity. "I be now a second self. Much preferable to first self and unready yet for third."
The sign flashed off and there was a sense of someone or something pondering. You could feel the pondering.
BEEP! and the panel said:
Proceed, Sir, With Our Apology.
Sara turned around and looked at me. "Well?" she asked.
I threw the shield down beside the rifle and unbuckled the sword belt and let it fall. Sara led the way and I let her lead it. It was, after all, her show; this was what she'd paid for. Hoot ambled along at her heels and brought up the rear.
We went down the trail in a deepening dusk as the towering walls of stone shut out the light. We moved at the bottom of a trench that was less than three feet wide. Then the trench and trail took a sudden turn and ahead was light.
We left the towering walls and the narrow trail and
came into the Promised Land.
NINETEEN
It was a place out of the ancient Greece I had read about in school, the instructor trying to inspire in us some feeling for the history and the culture of the planet of mankind's first beginning. And while I had not cared at all about that distant planet nor the factors concerned with the rise of Man, I had been struck by the classical beauty of the Grecian concept. It had struck me at the time as a heritage in which any race could take a certain pride and then I'd forgotten it and not thought of it for years. But now here, at last, it was, just as I had imagined it when I had read that textbook many years ago.
The trail continued through a rugged, rock-bound valley with a small and rapid mountain stream running through it, flashing in the sun where its waters tumbled down the sharp inclines of its boulder-strewn bed. The landscape itself was harsh and barren, mostly rocky surfaces, but here and there a patch of green with twisted, weather-beaten trees thrusting from the crevasses in the rocky slopes. The trail led down the valley, sometimes close beside the stream, sometimes twisting sharply to negotiate a spur of rocky headland that came close down against the stream. And perched here and there along the rugged, rock-bound slopes that hung above the valley were tiny villas built of gleaming marble—or at least it looked from where we stood like marble—all designed in the clean, clear-cut lines of Grecian architecture.
Even the sun seemed to be the sun of Greece, or the sun of Greece as I had imagined it to be. Gone was the blueness of the great plateau we had climbed to reach the mountains, gone the purple of the mountains; in their place was the pure hard sunlight, white sunlight, beating down upon an arid land that was all angular and harsh.
This was it—the place we'd hunted for, not knowing what we hunted for, thinking, perhaps, it might be a man or a thing or simply an idea. Hunting blind. Although it might be, after all, a man, for here in this valley we might find, if not the man himself, perhaps the grave or at least some indication of what had happened to that legended man of space.
For looking at this rugged valley, I had no doubt at all that the trail we had followed had had no other purpose than to lead us here—not us alone, of course, but any who might follow it.
None of us had spoken when we'd come out of the notch into the Grecian sunlight. There was actually nothing one might say. And now Sara started down the path and Hoot and I followed on behind her.
We came to a path that lunged upward toward the first of the villas perched on the rocky hillside that rose above the stream and beside the path was a post with a sign affixed to it, bearing a line of script that we could not read.
Sara stopped.
"A nameplate?" she asked, looking at me.
I nodded. It could be a nameplate, the name of some creature that lived in the villa perched there on the hillside.
But if it were a nameplate, there was no sign of the one who lived up there in the villa. There was, in fact, no sign of any life at all. Nothing stirred to mar the smooth placidity of the valley. No one peeked out at us. No creature of the air flew overhead. There was no shrilling sound of insects or the equivalent of insects. For all the signs we saw, for all we heard, we might be the only life there was.
"It makes sense," said Sara, "that it should be a nameplate."
"Let's pretend it is," I said. "Let's proceed and look for one that says Lawrence Arlen Knight."
"Even now," she said, "can't you be serious about it? You said we'd never find him. You said he was just a story. You said he would be dead . . .
"Don't look at me," I told her. "I could be wrong. I don't think I am, but there is nothing that makes sense anymore."
"This was your idea . . ."
"And you were against it from the start."
"Not against it," I said. "Just not a true believer."
"We've come all this way," she said, almost plaintively.
"Sara," I said, "so help me, I don't know. Let's just go ahead and keep an eye on the signs."
We went ahead, plunging down the inclines, toiling up the slopes. There were other villas and other signs, each of them in different alphabets, if some of them in fact could be called alphabets, and none that we could read.
The sun beat down, a liquid flood that shattered off the stones and sparkled off the water. Except for the bubble and the chuckle of the water, the silence held. There was nothing stirring.
And then another sign in solid block letters that we could read:
LAWRENCE ARLEN KNIGHT
It was all insane, of course. You did not cross a galaxy to find a man—and find him. You did not find a man who should have years ago been dead. You did not trace a legend to its end. But there it was, the sign that said Lawrence Arlen Knight.
And then, as I stood there, the thought crossed my mind—not the home of, but the grave of, not a villa, but a tomb.
"Sara," I said, but already she was scrambling up the path, sobbing in excitement and relief, all the tension of the long search resolved at last.
And coming out on the porch of that white-shining structure was a man—an old man, but a man still hale, snow-white hair and beard, but with shoulders still unstooped, with his stride still steady. He was dressed in a white toga, and that was no surprise at all. With a setup such as this he could have worn nothing but a toga.
"Sara!" I cried, scrambling after her, with Hoot close upon my heels.
She didn't hear. She paid me no attention.
And now the old man was speaking. "Visitors!" he said, holding out his hand. "My own people! I never thought I'd lay eyes on such again."
The sound of that voice swept all my doubts away. Here was no illusion, no apparition, no magic. Here was a man, a human, the voice deep and somber, filled with human gladness at the sight of fellowmen.
Sara held out her hands and the old man grasped them and the two of them stood there, looking into one another's eyes.
"It's been long," the old man said. "Too long. The trail is far, the way is hard and no one knew. You—how did you know?"
"Sir," said Sara, still gasping from her climb, "you are— you must be Lawrence Arlen Knight."
"Why, yes," he said, "of course I am. Who did you expect?"
"Expect?" said Sara. "You, of course. But we could only hope."
"And these good people with you?"
"Captain Michael Ross," said Sara, "and Hoot, a good friend met along the way."
Knight bowed to Hoot. "You servant, sir," he said. Then he reached out a hand to me, grasping my hand in a warm, hard grip. In that moment, when there were other more important things to note, I could only see that his hand, despite the firmness of the grip, was an old and wrinkled hand, blotched with liver spots.
"Captain Ross," he said, "you are welcome. There are places here for you, for all of you. And this young lady—I do not have your name."
"Sara Foster," Sara said.
"To think," he said, "that no longer need I be alone. Wonderful as it all has been, I have missed the sound of human voices and the sight of human faces. There are many others here, creatures of great character and fine sensitivity, but one never quite outgrows the need of his own species."
"How long have you been here?" I asked, trying to figure in my mind how far back the legend of this man might run.
"When a man lives each day to the full," he told me, "and with the close of one day looks forward to the next, there is no counting of one's times each day, each minute becomes a part of all eternity. I have thought about it and I am not sure there is such a thing as time. It is an abstract concept, a crude measuring device, a perspective structure built up by certain intelligences, and by no means all of them, because they feel a need to place themselves into what they call a spacetime framework. Time as such is lost in foreverness and there is no need to search for beginning or for end because they never did exist and under a situation such as here exists the meticulous measuring of ridiculously small slices of eternity becomes a task that has no meaning in it. Not, I must make haste
to say, that one can slice eternity . . ."
He went on and on and I wondered, looking off across the valley from where I stood on the marble-columned porch, if he were unbalanced by his loneliness, or he might know some part of what he said. For this place, this valley that sprang out of nowhere, did have a look of eternity about it. Although as I thought this, I wondered how any man might know how eternity would look—but be that as it may, there was a feel of the unchanging in this place of bright white sunlight.
"But I ramble on," the old man was saying. "The trouble is I have too much to say, too much stored up to say. Although there is no reason why I should try to say it all at once. I apologize for keeping you out here, standing. Won't you please come in."
We stepped through the open doorway into quiet and classic elegance. There were no windows, but from somewhere in the roof the sunlight came slanting in, to highlight with a classic brilliance the chairs and sofa, the writing desk with a small wooden chest and scattered sheets of paper on its top, the polished tea service on the smaller table in one corner.
"Please," he said, "have chairs. I hope that you can spend some time with me." (And there, I thought, he talked of time when he had said there might be no such thing as time.) "And that is foolish of me, of course, for you have the time. You hold in the hollow of your hand all the time there is. Having gotten here, there is no place else to go, no place else that you would care to go. Once one gets here, he never wants to leave, never needs to leave."
It was all too sleek and smooth, too much like a play, well-written, and yet there was nothing wrong with it—just an old and lonely man with the gates of suppressed talk unlatched by the unexpected appearance of people of his race. Yet, underneath it all, underneath my own acceptance of this place and of this man (for here were both of them), I felt a prickling uneasiness.
"There are places here for you, of course," he said. "There are always places waiting. Very few even win their way here and there is always room. In another day or two I'll take you around and we'll call upon the others. Very formal calls, for we are formal here. But the thing about it, the best thing, is that once protocol has been observed, you need not call again, although you may find some of them you'll want to visit now and then. Here dwells a select company called from all the stars and some may be amusing and others you will find instructive and there will be much that they do, I must warn you, you will not understand. And some of it you may find disturbing and disgusting. Which need not perturb you in the slightest, for each one keeps his counsel and his place and . . ."
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