Highway of Eternity

by Clifford D. Simak

  He was no longer there, Boone told himself, because he had never been there. It was all illusion. There was no one but the wolf.

  When he looked, the wolf was gone as well.

  Boone got to his feet. He was stiff with cold. He fed the fire more wood and stood close against it, soaking up its heat as new, vigorous tongues of flame flared up and ran along the wood.

  He had slept for a long time. The moon had slanted far into the west. Moonlight reflected off the shattered skeleton of the monster. It had been a long time since the monster had bespoken him—if, in fact, it ever had bespoken him. Like The Hat, it could be fantasy.

  A change had come over him, he thought. Short hours ago he had been a hard-bitten newsman who dealt only with facts. But now he fantasized. He talked with a hat, squabbled with a dead monster, and saw in a wolf a friend. Loneliness, he supposed, could drive a man to strangeness, but this soon? Here, however, the loneliness might be different than ordinary loneliness, compounded by the consideration that in all probability he was the only human within the span of two great continents. In his time many scientists believed that the first human had not set foot upon the western hemisphere for at least 10,000 years after this period. Somewhere in the vastness of Asia, barbaric tribes ranged the land, and farther to the west were other men who, in another 20,000 years or so, would begin to paint the first crude drawings of the fauna of their day in the caves of eastern Europe. Here he was a misplaced human, alone among wild beasts.

  Warm now, he moved back and began to pace round and round the fire. He tried to think, but there was no beginning to his thoughts, nor was there any end. Like his walking around the fire, his thoughts went round and round.

  The wolves were quarreling over the bison, although the quarreling was low-key; they were not putting their hearts into it. Far off, some animal was bawling, a steady, monotonous complaint. Up the slope in the juniper thicket, a bird chirped sadly. The moon hovered just over the western horizon, the east began to brighten, and another day was dawning.

  When light came, he dug up the undershirt and took out some meat. Hunkered beside the fire, he chewed and chewed to break up the toughness of the fibers sufficiently to swallow safely. Finished, he went to the spring to get a saucepan of water, then up the hill to fetch wood for the fire.

  The realization dawned on him that the days could be difficult to fill. He tried to think of chores that he could invent to keep himself busy. He could think of none that made sense enough to do them. Later he could set out to spy the land, but there was little point in that. Later he might have to do it, but now he had to be here when Enid returned or someone else showed up.

  Going to the sandstone spur behind which the bull had been brought to bay, he lugged back to the camp slabs of stone fallen from the spur, as heavy as he could manage, and piled them on top the hole where the meat was buried. Quite possibly roving scavengers, sniffing out the meat, could move the stone to get it. But his wolves were too well fed to go to all that bother.

  He set out to climb the butte, toiling up its face. Finally he reached the crest and looked out across the country. There was not much to see. Some miles off, a herd of herbivores were grazing, most likely bison. Skittering bands of other animals fled across the land like shadows. Tentatively, he identified them as pronghorns. What looked to be a large bear waddled along a dry stream channel. Otherwise, what he saw was a lot of empty land, cut here and there by dry watercourses and with the everlasting buttes rearing up from it. Here and there along the watercourses were groves of cottonwoods and some of the buttes showed dark splotches that could be thickets of shrubs or clumps of trees.

  When he returned to camp, the wolves had left the bison carcass, now little more than bones and scraps of skin flapping in the breeze. A dozen or more vultures hopped about, pecking viciously at one another to guard the territory each had staked out, stripping off the last nourishment remaining on the skeleton.

  Boone settled down to wait as best he could. Four days passed and there was no traveler. Boone did his chores. Several times he inspected the wrecked monster, circling it, keeping at a safe distance. He tried to reconstruct it in his mind, to connect the broken parts to one another. He could have done a better job of that if he had allowed himself to get closer to it, picking up some of the broken parts and inspecting them. But he shied away from that. The monster did not speak to him, and finally he became convinced it had never spoken to him, that his memory of its talk was a mental aberration.

  By the end of the fourth day, several meals of the meat he had cooked still remained, but it was becoming tainted. He still remained too civilized for his system to tolerate tainted food.

  On the morning of the fifth day, he tore a page out of the notebook he carried in his breast pocket and, using the pencil stub, wrote a note:

  Gone hunting. Will be back directly.

  He placed the note on top of the pile of rock that protected the buried meat and weighed it down with another stone.

  Setting out with the rifle, he felt a lifting of his spirits. Finally there was something to be done, a chore that had to be done, that was not simply work made to fill the time.

  After a mile or so, the wolf showed up, trotting out from the butte to join him. It fell in to his right, a hundred yards distant and slightly behind him; it seemed friendly and glad to be with him once again. He spoke to it, but the wolf disregarded the speaking and kept on with him, pacing him.

  An hour or so out, he spotted a small band of pronghorns, grazing at some distance. To his left lay a dry stream bed. He slid into it, treading along as noiselessly as he could. The wash tended to the right, the direction that would bring him closer to his quarry. The wolf had descended into the dry wash with him and was trailing along behind. Twice Boone halted and crept carefully up the wall of the wash to check the pronghorns. They still remained where he had first spotted them, feeding on sagebrush and occasional patches of grass. They seemed undisturbed, but the range was too great; he had to move closer. He slid back into the wash and continued on his way, cautiously, being careful where he set his feet. The click of a pebble could trigger the pronghorns into flight. As if sensing the stalk, the wolf slunk along behind him. Ten minutes later Boone crawled up the incline of the wash again. The pronghorns were much closer than he had calculated they would be. He slid the rifle into position, selected the animal he wanted, lined up the sights, and fired. The pronghorn leaped high into the air and fell heavily. The rest of the band took off, bounding away, only to stop a few hundred yards off, switching about and looking back. When Boone climbed out of the wash, they took off again.

  With the wolf sitting to one side, Boone shouldered his kill and set out for camp. The wolf trotted along to one side of him, bearing the smug expression of a job well done.

  At camp Boone laboriously skinned the pronghorn, stretching out the hide on which to place the cuts of meat. Gutting the animal, he retained the liver, then dragged the rest of the entrails and internal organs out to the bison skeleton. The wolf got to work on the offering. Boone sliced the liver, impaled it on a stake and slanted it over a bed of coals. Then he set to work dismembering the kill. He saved the loin and one ham; what was left he carried beyond the camp and dumped. The wolf deserted the entrails and moved over to the more substantial feast.

  At the campfire, Boone feasted on fresh meat and began the cooking of what was left to store against the next few days. This could not go on, he told himself. He was living hand to mouth, and his ability to continue even this sort of existence was limited to the four cartridges that remained in the rifle’s magazine. Before they were gone, he had to acquire another capability to feed himself. He needed wood for a bow, tendons for strings, straight sticks for arrows, stone to make the arrowheads and from which he could chip a knife, for the cheap jackknife would not stand up for long under the use to which he had to put it.

  His knowledge about the making of a bow was almost nonexistent. Still he knew the basic theory and could
manage. He could make a poor bow and it would do until, by trial and error, he could make a better one.

  Tomorrow, he decided, he would set out in search of wood and stone. He considered briefly a search for wood for the bow in the juniper grove from which he had gotten firewood. Almost instantly, he gave up the idea. Juniper, at its best, was poor wood; and he doubted that in the entire grove he could find a piece that could be used to make a bow.

  Two more wolves had showed up. Watching them, Boone tried to pick out his wolf and was unable to decide which of the three it was. By the time the sun had set, all the meat he had left out for the wolves had disappeared, and the wolves were gone.

  But early in the evening, shortly after the fall of night, the wolf came back and sat across the fire from him.

  Boone talked to it. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I am going on a trip to find wood and stone. I’d be glad if you’d come along with me. It could be a hard trip. I have no way to carry water, but I’ll carry meat and will share it with you.”

  It was ridiculous, he thought. The wolf could not understand a word he said, and yet talking to it made him more secure. It was good to have anything to talk to; a wolf was better than nothing. It was something that could share the fire with him.

  He woke in the night and the wolf still was with him. It watched closely and companionably while he built up the fire. He went to sleep again with the wolf still watching him.

  In the morning he wrote another note, a longer one this time:

  I am leaving on a trip that may take several days, but I will be back. Please wait for me. A wolf may be traveling with me. If he is, do him no harm. He is a friend of mine.

  He weighted it down on the rock pile and he and the wolf started out. They traveled west, heading for the butte on which Boone had detected dark splotches that he had thought might be small trees. It seemed no more than a good day’s time away.

  It was much farther. Late in the afternoon, Boone realized they’d not reach it by dark. He was tired and thirsty. They had come across no water. Perhaps, he told himself, they’d find water on the butte. He could get through the night without it. Dropping into a dry wash, he walked along it until he came to a place where it curved sharply, forming a pocket with high walls.

  Collecting wood fallen from the cottonwoods, he built a fire. He selected three pieces of the meat and tossed them to the wolf. While the wolf gulped them down, he squatted by the fire and ate. The meat was tender and he had no trouble chewing it. The wolf finished and waited expectantly for more. He tossed over another chunk.

  “That’s all you get,” he stated. “Share and share alike, and you’ve had more than I had.”

  Bone tired, he fell asleep soon after dark, the wolf stretched out across the fire from him. Dawn was near when he woke. The fire was out and he did not bother to start it again. He gave the wolf some meat and ate some himself. The sun was not yet up when they started out.

  They reached the butte well before noon and began the climb. This butte was much larger than the one where he and Enid had camped; the climb was long and hard. The wolf found water halfway up. He came back with his muzzle wet and dripping.

  “Water,” said Boone. “Show me.”

  The wolf stood puzzled.

  “Water!” said Boone. Sticking out his tongue, he tried to make lapping motions.

  The wolf trotted off to the right, stopping now and then to look back. Was it possible, Boone asked himself, that it had understood? It was insane to think so, and yet he had shared the meat—would the wolf share water?

  He had been thirsty for hours, it seemed; he had tried to wipe it from his mind, but now that he knew there must be water near, the thirst came raging back. His mouth and throat were dry and it was hard to swallow.

  Ahead of him, a great outcropping of stone humped out of the slope. He tried to hurry, but the way was steep and the sun-dried grass was slippery. He went down on his hands and knees, scrabbling along, sobbing with his need of water.

  The stone, he saw, was limestone, not sandstone. The limestone, he thought, must lie atop the sandstone strata that protruded from the other butte. Limestone would not serve as tool material, but in between its layers might lie veins of chert or quartz.

  The wall of rock reared above him. Stunted cedar trees clung here and there upon its face. He crawled along the steep incline that came up to the base of the wall. Loose rock shifted under him. He had lost all track of the wolf, but he imagined that he heard the sound of running water.

  He slipped, rolled, slid again, and suddenly stopped. Something gripped his right leg and an agonizing pain shot through it, a pain so terrible that it left him sick and gasping, gone in the gut, his dry throat retching, and nothing to come up.

  He lay for a long moment while the pain slowly ebbed away, then tried to sit up. He couldn’t; whatever pinned his leg held him tight against the ground, angled down along the slope. He tried to squirm around to see what was wrong with the leg and, as he moved, the leg screamed at him. Faint with the pain, he fell back upon the ground. When some of his strength came back, he tried once more, very cautiously. He was able to angle his head around so he could see back along his body. The leg was caught in a narrow crevice. The underlying limestone was close to the surface, barely covered by the rock fragments that had fallen from the face of the cliff. His right leg had plunged into a narrow crevice and he was trapped, held in the crevice almost to the knee.

  What a silly thing to happen, he thought. He felt panic creeping up on him and pushed it back. All he had to do, he told himself, was to work his leg as gently as possible out of the rocky fissure that held it.

  He tried to work the leg free. The muscles responded. He could move it, although it protested. Maybe a sprain; it didn’t feel like a break. Probably gashed up quite a bit.

  The wolf came inching down the steepness of the slope and stood with feet braced, looking at him and whining.

  “It’s all right,” Boone croaked at him. “I’ll get out of here in a while. Might take some figuring.”

  But he didn’t get free in a while. No matter what he did, the leg stayed clamped in the fissure. The way he was sprawled out on the steep slope made the job hard. When he tried to maneuver his body into a more advantageous position, the agony of the leg left him weak and sweating. Finally he gave up, too weak, too pain-ridden, to go on. I’ll rest a while, he told himself.

  Rested, he tried again. But now it was nearly dark. The wolf had wandered off somewhere and he was alone. Once again he tried gingerly to work the leg free; when that didn’t work, he lunged in a desperate effort to pull loose. The fire of pain slashed through him. He gritted his teeth and lunged again. The leg still held. He did not try a third time. He lay exhausted. He heard, distinctly now, the sound of running water. The pain of the leg screamed at him; the deep dryness of his thirst choked him.

  He tried to reason with himself. He laid out a plan, but the plan did not progress far. He reached for the bundle of meat that he carried slung on his shoulder. The bundle was not there. Neither was the rifle.

  Boone set his jaw grimly. He’d been in bad places before and he’d lived through them all. Among other things, he could step around a corner and be free. He tried to step around the corner. He squeezed his eyes shut, he tensed himself, and he drove his brain.

  “The corner!” he screamed. “The corner! Where is that goddamned corner!”

  There was no corner. He continued where he was. He let the tenseness ebb away and collapsed upon the ground.

  He awoke much later. The stars were shining in the sky. A cold wind blew up the slope and he was half frozen. For a moment he did not know where he was, then it all seeped back. He was trapped upon this butte. He would never get away. He’d die here. He lay there, cold and hurt, his throat constricted by a raging thirst. Perhaps a little later he would do something about himself, but not now.

  A gray shadow moved in the starlight. It was the wolf. It looked at him and whined.

  �
�Promise me one thing,” Boone said to it. “One thing is all I ask. Be sure I’m dead before you start to eat me.”

  7

  Enid

  It all had gone wrong, Enid thought. She never should have tried to operate a traveler. She should have known that she was not competent. And yet what could she have done? Back at Hopkins Acre, she had been left alone to wait for Boone, and there had been no chance to lay a course. She had simply told the traveler go—that was the one thing left to do. Then, later, the same sort of situation had arisen. Boone had yelled for her to save the traveler and she had fled. Now here she was, almost a million years into the future beyond the era where Boone was stranded—and she had not the least idea how to go back and pick him up.

  It was Horace’s fault, she told herself. Horace, who was so big on planning and who had planned so poorly. Each traveler should have had one person who was a skilled pilot—although, come to think of it, there had not been three of them who were skilled sufficiently. David was quite proficient. And Horace, although at his best he would be sloppy. Emma and Timothy would know nothing about it. When it came right down to it, there had been only two who could have run a traveler.

  If the monster had not interfered and they had been given a chance to go about the planning decently, it all might have gone quite well. They would have decided where they would go when they left, and David, more than likely, would have programmed each of the travelers to go to the selfsame place and time. They would have known where and when they were going and they all would have gone together. If her traveler had been programmed, she would have had no trouble. It had been this repeated running in the dark that had been her undoing.

  She looked again at the panel and the time designation was clear enough. But the spatial designation was all Greek to her. She knew when she was, but certainly not where. That first time, it had been Boone who had figured out where they were, although only the general area. The spatial designation had been on the panel, of course, but she could not read it. What she should have done, she realized now that it was too late, would have been to jot down the readings.