“You must be wrong,” I told him, trying to keep my temper. “All you did was unship the crates and haul them in here, and, as for storage, they’ve been here only an hour or so.”
Reilly shook his head, sadly. “I can’t help that. Them’s the charges. You either pay them or we hold the cargo. Them’s the rules.”
The other two men had moved up silently, one to either side of him.
“It’s all ridiculous,” I protested. “This must be a joke.”
“Mister,” said the foreman, “it isn’t any joke.”
I didn’t have four hundred credits and I wouldn’t have paid it if I had, but neither was I going to tackle the foreman and the husky stevedores standing with him.
“I’ll look into this,” I said, trying to save face, having no idea what I could do next. They had me cold, I knew. Although it wasn’t them; it was Maxwell Peter Bell. He was the one who had me cold.
“You do that, Mister,” said Reilly. “You just go ahead and do it.”
I could go storming back to Bell and that was exactly what he wanted. He expected that I would and it would be all right, of course, and all would be forgiven, if I accepted a Cemetery grant and did Cemetery work. But I wasn’t going to do that, either.
Cynthia said, behind me, “Fletcher, they’re ganging up on us.” I turned my head and there were more men, coming in the door.
“Not ganging up on you,” said Reilly. “Just making sure that you understand. There can’t be no outlander come in here and tell us what to do.”
From behind Reilly came a faint, thin screeching sound and the instant that I heard it, I pegged it for what it was, a nail being forced out of the wood that held it.
Reilly and his henchmen swung around and I let out a yell. “All right, Elmer! Out and at them!”
At my yell the big crate seemed to explode, the planks nailed across its top wrenched and tom away, and out of the crate rose Elmer, all eight feet of him.
He stepped out of the crate, almost fastidiously.
“What’s the matter, Fletch?”
“Go easy on them, Elmer,” I said. “Don’t kill them. If necessary, just rough them up a bit.”
He took a step forward and Reilly and the two men backed away.
“I will not harm them,” Elmer said. “I’ll just brush them to one side Who is it you have with you, Fletch?”
“This is Cynthia,” I said. “She’ll be going with us.”
“Will I?” asked Cynthia.
“Look here, Carson,” Reilly roared, “don’t you try no rough stuff. . .”
“If I were you,” said Elmer, “I would not linger here.” He took a rapid step toward them. They turned and ran, piling out the door.
Elmer went past us rapidly. They were closing the door and just before it closed, he thrust a hand into the crack, clutched the door and wrenched it open, then butted it with his shoulder. It crumpled and hung.
“That will take care of it,” said Elmer. “Now the door won’t close. They were about to lock us in, can you imagine that? Now if you’ll tell me, Fletch, what is going on.”
“Maxwell Peter Bell,” I said, “doesn’t like us. Let’s get going on the Bronco. The quicker we are out of here . . .”
“I have to get the car,” said Cynthia. “I have all the supplies and my clothes in it.”
“Supplies?” I asked.
“Certainly. Food and the other stuff we’ll need. I don’t suppose you brought anything along. That’s one reason I’m so broke. I spent the last of my money . . .”
“You go and get the car,” said Elmer. “I’ll keep watch. No one will lay a hand on you.”
“You thought of everything,” I said. “You were pretty sure . . .”
But she was running out the door. There was no sign of Reilly or his men. She got into the car and drove it through the door.
Elmer went to the other crates and rapped on the smaller one. “That you, Bronco?” he asked. “You inside of there?”
“It is I,” said a muffled voice. “Elmer, is that you? Have we reached the Earth?”
“I didn’t know,” said Cynthia, “that Bronco was a sentient or that he could talk. Professor Thorndyke didn’t tell me that.”
“He is sentient,” said Elmer, “but of low intellect. He is no mental giant.”
He said to Bronco, “You all right?”
“I am fine,” said Bronco.
“We’ll have to get a pinch bar,” I said.
“There is no need,” said Elmer. He balled a fist and smashed it down on one comer of the crate. The wood crumpled and splintered and he reached his fingers into the hole and tore loose a board.
“This is easy,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I could break out of my crate. The mechanics of the situation were not too favorable. There was little room and not much leverage. But when I heard what was going on out here . . .”
“Is Fletch here?” asked Bronco.
“Fletch is here,” said Elmer, “and now there is another member of the expedition. There are four of us.”
He went on ripping boards off the crate.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.
We got to work, the two of us.
Bronco was a complicated thing and not easy to assemble. There were a lot of parts and all of them had to be phased together with little tolerance. But the two of us had worked with Bronco for almost two years and we knew him inside out. At first we’d used a manual, but now there was no need of one. We’d thrown away the manual when it had become so tattered it was of little use, and when Bronco, himself, refined and redesigned and tinkered here and there, had become a contraption that bore but small resemblance to the model of the manual. The two of us, working together, knew every piece by heart. We could have field-stripped Bronco and put him back together in the dark. There was no waste motion and no need of conference or direction. Elmer and I worked together like two machines. Inside of an hour we had Bronco put together.
Assembled, he was a crazy thing to look at. He had eight jointed legs that had an insect look about them. Each of them could be positioned at almost any angle. There were claws he could unsheathe to get a better grip. He could go anywhere, on any kind of ground. He could damn near climb a wall. His barrel-like body, equipped with a saddle, afforded good protection to the delicate instruments that it contained. It carried a series of rings that allowed the strapping of loads upon his back. He had a retractable tail that was made up of a hundred different sensors and his head was crowned with another weird sensor assembly.
“I feel good,” he said. “Are we leaving now?”
Cynthia had unloaded the supplies from the car.
“Camping stuff,” she said. “Concentrated food, blankets, rain gear, stuff like that. Nothing fancy. I didn’t have the money to buy fancy stuff.”
Elmer began heaving the boxes and crates on Bronco’s back, cinching them in place.
“You think you can ride him?” I asked Cynthia.
“Sure I can. But what about yourself?”
“He’s riding me,” said Elmer.
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“Be sensible,” said Elmer. “We may have to run for it to get out of here. They may be laying for us.”
Cynthia went to the door and looked out. “There’s no one in sight,” she said.
“How do we get out of here?” asked Elmer. “The quickest way out of the Cemetery.”
“You take the road west,” she told him, “past the administration building. Twenty-five miles or so and the Cemetery ends.”
Elmer finished packing the supplies on Bronco. He took a final look around. “I guess that’s all,” he said. “Now, Miss, up on Bronco.”
He helped her up. “Hang on tight,” he cautioned her. “Bronco’s not the smoothest thing to ride.”
“I’ll hang on,” she said. She looked scared.
“Now you,” Elmer said to me. I started to protest, but didn’t because I knew it would do no good. And, besides, ridi
ng Elmer made a lot of sense. If we should have to run for it, he could go ten times faster than I could. Those long metal legs of his could really eat up ground.
He lifted me and put me on his shoulders, astride his neck. “You hang onto my head to balance yourself,” he said. “I’ll hold onto your legs. I’ll see you don’t fall off.”
I nodded, not too happy. It was damned undignified.
We didn’t have to run for it. There was no one around except one plodding figure far to the north walking down an aisle between the stones. There must have been people watching us; I could almost feel their eyes. We must have made a strange sight—Cynthia riding that grasshopper of a Bronco, with bales and boxes tied all over him, and myself up there, jiggling and swaying atop the eight-foot Elmer.
We didn’t run or even hurry, but we made good time. Bronco and Elmer were good travelers. Even at their normal walking pace, a man would have had to run to keep up with them.
We went clattering and lurching up the road, past the administration building and out into the main part of the Cemetery. The road was empty and the land was peaceful. Occasionally, far off, I would sight a little village, nestled in a cove—a slender finger of a steeple pointing at the sky and a blur of color that was the rooftops of the houses. I imagined those little villages were the homes of workers employed by the Cemetery.
As I rode along, bouncing and swaying to Elmer’s swinging strides, I saw that the Cemetery, for all its vaunted beauty, was in reality a dismal, brooding place. There was a sameness to it and an endless order that was monotonous and over all of it hung a sense of death and a great finality.
I hadn’t had time to worry before, but now I began to worry. What worried me the most, strangely enough, was that Cemetery, after a fairly feeble effort, had made no real attempt to stop us. Although, I told myself, if Elmer had not been able to burst out of his crate, Reilly and his men would have stopped me cold. But as it was, it almost seemed that Bell figured he could let us go, knowing that any time he wished he could reach out and grab us. I didn’t try to fool myself about Maxwell Peter Bell.
I wondered, too, if any further attempts would be made upon us. Perhaps there didn’t have to be; more than likely Bell and Cemetery might be no longer too much concerned with us. We could go wherever we wished and it would make no difference. For no matter where we went or what we did, there was no chance of leaving Earth without Cemetery’s help.
I had made a mess of it, I told myself. I had gone in and played smart aleck to Bell’s pompousness and had thrown away any chance I had of any sort of working relationship with Bell or Cemetery. Although, I realized, it might have made no difference no matter what I’d done. I should have realized that on Earth you played along with Cemetery or you did not play at all. The whole damn venture had been doomed from the very start.
It hadn’t seemed so long to me, although it may have been quite a while—I had been so sunk in worry I’d lost all track of time—but finally the road climbed up a hill and there came to an end, and the end of the Cemetery as well.
I stared at the valley below us and the hills that climbed in serried ranks above it, sucking in my breath in astonishment at the sight of it. It was a strangely wooded land dressed in flaming color that shone like glowing fires in the sun of afternoon.
“Autumn,” Elmer said. “I had forgotten that Earth had autumn. Back there you couldn’t tell. All the trees were green.”
“Autumn?” I asked.
“A season,” Elmer told me. “A certain time of year when all the trees are colored. I had forgotten it.”
He twisted his head around so he could look up at me. If he could have wept, he would have.
“One forgets so many things,” he said.
V
It was a world of beauty, but of lusty, two-fisted, brooding beauty unlike the delicate, almost fragile, beauty of my world of Alden. It was solemn and impressive and there was a dash of wonder and a streak of fear intertwined into the structure and the color of it.
I sat on a moss-grown boulder beside a brawling, dark-brown stream that carried on its surface the faery boats of red and gold and yellow that were the fallen leaves. If one listened sharply he could pick out, at the edge of the throaty gurgle of the dark-brown water, the faint, far-off pattering of other leaves falling to the earth. And for all the color and the beauty, there was an ancient sadness there. I sat and listened to the liquid sliding of the water and the faint patter of the leaves, and looking at the trees, I saw that they were massive growths, exuding a sense of age, and that there was something secure and homelike and comfortable about them. There was color here and mood and sound, quality and structure, and a texture that could be felt with the fingers of the mind.
The sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to camp. But I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place, once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back it would not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic moment.
A stone rattled behind me and I turned to see that it was Elmer, moving through the dusk. I said nothing to him and he did not speak to me, but came and squatted down beside me and there was nothing to be said, nothing that needed to be said. I sat there, remembering all the other times like this—when there had been no need of words between Elmer and myself. We sat as the twilight deepened and from far away came the sound of something hooting and a little later the faint sound of something that was baying. The water went on talking as the darkness deepened.
“I built a fire,” said Elmer, finally. “We’ll need it for cooking, but even if we had no need of it, I still would have built a fire. The Earth calls for a fire. The two of them go together. Man came up from savagery with fire. In all of man’s long history he never let the fire go out.”
“Is it,” I asked, “the way you remember it?”
He shook his head. “Not the way I remember it, but somehow it is the way that I knew it would be. There weren’t trees like these, or a stream like this. But you see one tree flaming in the autumn sun and you can imagine what it might be like with a forest of such trees. You see a stream run red and choked with filth and you know how it might be if the land were clean.”
The baying sound came again and walked with chilly feet along my spine.
“Dogs,” said Elmer, “trailing something. Either dogs or wolves.”
“You were here,” I said, “in the Final War. It was different then.”
“Different,” said Elmer. “Most everything was dead or dying. But there were places here and there where the old Earth still remained. Little pockets where the poison and the radiation had not settled in, places that had been struck no more than a glancing blow. Enough to let you know what it had been like at one time. The people were living mostly underground. I worked on the surface, on one of the war machines—perhaps the last such machine that was ever built. Barring the purpose of it, it was a wondrous piece of mechanism and well it might have been, for it was not machine alone. It had the body of a machine, but the brain of it was something else—a melding of machine and man, a robotic brain linked with the brains of men. I don’t know who they were. Someone must have known, but I never did. I have often wondered. It was the only way, you see, that a war could still be fought. No human could go to fight that kind of war. So man’s servants and companions, the machines, carried on the war. I don’t know why they kept on fighting. I have often asked myself. They’d destroyed all there’d ever been to fight for and there was no use of keeping on.”
He quit talking and rose to his feet.
“Let’s go back,” he said. “You must be hungry and so must the young lady. Fletch, I fear I am a bit
confused as to why she is along.”
“Something about a treasure.”
“What kind of treasure?”
“I don’t really know. There was no time for her to explain it to me.” From where we stood we could see the flare of the fire and we walked toward it.
Cynthia was on her knees before a bed of coals she had raked off to one side, holding a pot over the coals and stirring with a spoon.
“I hope it’s decent,” she said. “It’s some kind of stew.”
“There is no need for you to be doing that,” said Elmer, somewhat miffed. “I am, when called upon, a quite efficient cook.”
“So am I,” said Cynthia. “Tomorrow,” Elmer said, “I’ll get some meat for you. I saw a number of squirrels and a rabbit or two.”
“We have no hunting equipment,” I said. “We brought along no guns.”
“We can make a bow,” said Cynthia.
“No need of guns or bows,” said Elmer. “Stones are good enough. I’ll pick up some pebbles . . .”
“No one can hunt with pebbles,” Cynthia said. “You can’t throw straight enough.”
“I can,” Elmer told her. “I am a machine. I do not rely on muscles or a human eye, which marvelous as it may be . . .”
“Where’s Bronco?” I asked.
Elmer motioned with his thumb. “He’s in a trance,” he said.
I moved around the fire so I could get a better look at him. What Elmer had said was right. Bronco was standing to one side with all his sensor apparatus out, soaking up the place.
“The best compositor there ever was,” said Elmer, proudly. “He took to it like a shot. He’s a sensitive.” Cynthia picked up a couple of bowls and dished up the stew. She handed one of them to me.
“Watch out; it’s hot,” she said.
I sat down beside her and began, cautiously, to eat. The stew was not too bad, but it was hot. I had to blow upon each spoonful of it to cool it off before I put it in my mouth.
The baying came again, and it was close now, just a hill or two away.
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