“It’s all right with me,” he said. “We’ll have to cross the mountains to reach the river. I hope we can lose the wolves somewhere in the mountains. But if I may inquire . . .”
“It’s a long story,” I told him, curtly. “We can tell you later.”
“Have you ever heard,” asked Cynthia, “of an immortal man who lives a hermit’s life?”
She never let go of anything once she got her claws in it.
“I think I have,” said the census taker. “Very long ago. I suspect it was a myth. Earth had so many myths.”
“But not any longer,” I said.
He shook his head, rather sadly. “No longer. All Earth’s myths are dead.”
XIV
The sky had clouded over and the wind had shifted to the north, growing cold and sharp. Despite the chill, there was a stranger, wet smell in the air. The pine trees that grew along the slope threshed and moaned.
The census taker clumped on ahead, with Cynthia behind him and myself bringing up the rear. We had covered a lot of ground since dawn, although how long we had been walking I had no way of knowing. The sun was covered by the clouds and my watch had stopped and there was no way to know the time of day.
There was no sign of the ghosts, although I had the queasy feeling they were not far away. And the census taker troubled me as much as the invisible ghosts, for seen in the daylight he was a most disturbing thing. Seen face to face, he was not human unless one should regard a rag doll as being human. For his face was a rag-doll face, with a pinched mouth that was slightly askew, eyes that gave the impression of a cross-stitch and no nose or chin at all. His face ran straight down into his neck without an intervening jaw and the cowl and robe that I had taken for clothing, when one had a close look at him, seemed a part of his grotesque body. If it had not seemed so improbable, one would have been convinced that they were his body. Whether he had feet I didn’t know, for the robe (or body) came down so close to the ground that his feet were covered. He moved as if he had feet, but there was no sign of them and I found myself wondering, if he had no feet, how he managed to move along so well. Move he did. He set a brisk pace, bobbling along ahead of us. It was all that we could do to keep up with him.
He had not spoken since we had started, but had simply led the way, with the two of us following and neither of us speaking, either, for at the pace that we were going we didn’t have the breath to speak.
The way was wild, an unbroken wilderness with no sign that it ever had been occupied by man, as it surely must have been at one time. We followed the ridgetops for miles, at times descending from them to cross a small valley, then climb a series of hills again to follow other ridgetops. From the ridges we could see vast stretches of the countryside, but nowhere was there a clearing. We found no ruins, saw no crumbling chimneys, ran across no ancient fence rows. Down in the valleys the woods stood thick and heavy; on the ridgetops the trees thinned out to some extent. It was a rocky land; huge boulders lay strewn all about and great gray outcroppings of rock jutted from the hillsides. There was a little life. A few birds flew chirping among the trees and occasionally there were small life forms I recognized as rabbits and squirrels, but they were not plentiful.
We had stopped briefly to drink from shallow streams that ran through the valleys we had crossed, but the stops had been only momentary, long enough to lie flat upon our bellies and gulp a few mouthfuls of water, while the census taker (who did not seem to need to drink) waited impatiently, and then we hurried on.
Now, for the first time since we had set out, we halted. The ridge we had been traveling rose to a high point and then sloped down for a distance and on this high point lay a scattered jumble of barn-size rocks, grouped together in a rather haphazard fashion, as if some ancient giant had held a fistful of them and had been playing with them, as a boy will play with marbles, but having gotten tired of them, had dropped them here, where they had remained. Stunted pine trees grew among them, clutching for desperate footholds with twisted, groping roots.
The census taker, who was a few yards ahead of us, scrambled up a path when he reached the jumble of rocks, disappearing into them. We followed where he’d gone and found him crouched in a pocket formed by the massive stones. It was a place protected from the bitter wind, but open in the direction we had come so that we could see back along our trail.
He motioned for us to join him.
“We shall rest for a little time,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to eat. But no fire. Perhaps a fire tonight. We’ll see.”
I didn’t want to eat. I simply wanted to sit down and never move again.
“Maybe we should keep on,” said Cynthia. “They may be after us.”
She didn’t look as if she wanted to keep on. She looked worn down to a nubbin.
The prissy little mouth in the rag-doll face said, “They have not returned to the cave as yet.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“The shades,” he said. “They would let me know. I haven’t heard from them.”
“Maybe they’ve run out on us,” I said.
He shook his head. “They would not do that,” he said. “Where is there to run to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine where a ghost might run to.
Cynthia sat down wearily and leaned back against the side of a massive boulder that towered far above her. “In that case,” she said, “we can afford a rest.”
She had slid her pack off her shoulder before sitting down. Now she pulled it over to her, unstrapped it and rummaged around inside of it. She took something out of it and handed it to me. There were three or four strips of hard and brittle stuff, red shading into black.
“What is this junk?” I asked.
“That junk,” she said, “is jerky. Desiccated meat. You break off a chunk of it and put it in your mouth and chew it. You’ll find it is very nourishing.”
She offered a few sticks to the census taker, but he pushed it away. “I ingest food very sparingly,” he said.
I unshipped my pack and sat down beside her. I broke off a chunk of jerky and put it in my mouth. It felt like a piece of cardboard, only harder and perhaps not quite as tasty.
I sat there and chewed very gingerly and stared back along the way we’d come and thought what a far cry Earth was from our gentle world of Alden. I don’t think that in that moment I quite regretted leaving Alden, but I was not too far from it. I recalled that I had read of Earth and dreamed of it and yearned for it, and so help me, here it was. I admitted to myself that I was no woodsman and that while I could appreciate a piece of woodland beauty as well as any man, that I was not equipped, either physically or temperamentally, to lake on the sort of primitive world Earth had turned out to be. This was not the sort of thing I’d bargained for and I didn’t like it, but under the circumstances there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Cynthia was busy chewing too, but now she stopped to ask a question. “Are we heading toward the Ohio?”
“Oh, yes, indeed,” said the census taker, “but we’re still some distance from it.”
“And the immortal hermit?”
“I know naught,” said the census taker, “of an immortal hermit. Except some stories of him. And there are many stories.”
“Monster stories?” I asked.
“I do not understand.”
“You said that once there were monsters and implied the wolves were used against them. I have wondered ever since.”
“It was a very long time ago.”
“But they once were here.”
“Yes, once.”
“Genetic monsters?”
“This word you use . . .”
“Look,” I said, “ten thousand years ago this planet was a radioactive hell. Many life forms died. Many of those that lived had genetic damage.”
“I do not know,” he said.
The hell you don’t, I told myself. And the suspicion swiftly crossed my mind that the reason
he did not want to know was that he, himself, was one of those genetic monsters and was well aware of it. I wondered dully why I had not thought of it before.
I kept at him. “Why should Cemetery care about the monsters? Why was it necessary to fabricate the wolves to hunt them down? I suppose that is what the wolves were used for.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thousands of them. Great packs of them. They were programmed to hunt down monsters.”
“Not humans,” I said. “Only monsters.”
“That is right. Only the monsters.”
“I suppose there might have been times they made mistakes, when they hunted humans as well as monsters. It would be hard to program robots that hunted only monsters.”
“There were mistakes,” the census taker said.
“And I don’t suppose,” said Cynthia, bitterly, “that Cemetery cared too much. When something of the sort did occur, they didn’t really mind.”
“I would not know,” said the census taker.
“What I don’t understand,” said Cynthia, “is why they should have done it. What difference did a few monsters make?”
“There were not a few of them.”
“Well, then, a lot of them.”
“I think,” said the census taker, “that it might have been the pilgrim business. Once Cemetery had gotten off to a solid start, the pilgrim business grew until it represented a fair piece of revenue. And you could not have a pack of howling monsters come tearing down the land when pilgrims were around. It would have scared them off. The word would have spread and there would have been fewer pilgrims.”
“Oh, lovely,” Cynthia said. “A program of genocide. I suppose the monsters have been fairly well wiped out.”
“Yes,” said the census taker, “fairly well disposed of.”
“With a few showing up,” I said, “only now and then.”
His cross-stitch eyes crinkled at me and I wished I hadn’t said it. I don’t know what was wrong with me. Here we were, depending on this little jerk to help us and I was needling him.
I cut out the talking and went back to chewing jerky. It had softened up a bit and had a salty-smoky taste and even if it wasn’t supplying too much nourishment, it still gave me the impression that I was eating something.
We sat there chewing, the two of us, while the census taker just sat, not doing anything.
I looked around at Cynthia. “How are you getting on?” I asked.
“I’ll do all right,” she said, a little sharply.
“I’m sorry it turned out this way,” I said. “It is not what I had in mind.”
“Of course it’s not,” she said. “You thought of it as a polite little jaunt to a romantic planet, made romantic by what you’d read of it and imagined of it and . . .”
“I came here to make a composition,” I said,” considerably nettled at her, “not to play hide and seek with bomb throwers and grave robbers and a pack of robot wolves.”
“And you’re blaming me for it. If I hadn’t been along, if I hadn’t foisted myself off on you . . .”
“Hell, no,” I said. “I never thought of that.”
“But even if you did,” she said, “it would be all right, for you’d be doing it for good old Thorney . . .”
“Cut it out,” I shouted at her, really burned up now. “What’s got into you? What’s this all about?” Before she could answer the census taker got to his feet (that is, if he had feet); at any rate, he rose.
“It is time to go again,” he said. “You’ve had rest and nourishment and now we must push on.”
The wind had become sharper and colder. As we moved out of the shelter of the nest of boulders and faced the barren ridgetop, it struck us like a knife and the first few drops of driven rain spattered in our faces.
We pushed ahead—pushing against the rain, leaning into it. It was as if a great hand had been placed against us and tried to hold us back. It didn’t seem to bother the census taker much; he skipped on ahead without any trouble. The funny thing about it was that the wind seemed to have no effect at all upon his robe; it didn’t flutter, it never even stirred, it stayed just the way it was, hanging to the ground.
I would have liked to call this to Cynthia’s attention, but when I tried to yell at her, the buffeting wind blew the words back into my mouth.
From below us came the moaning of the forest trees, bending in the gale. Birds tried to fly and were whipped about the sky. The cloud cover seemed to become thicker by the minute, although so far as I could see, there were no moving clouds. The rain came in sudden gusts, icy cold, hard against the face.
We trudged on, miserably. I lost all track of everything. I kept my eyes on Cynthia’s plodding figure as she moved on ahead of me. Once she stumbled and without a word I helped her up. Without a word, she resumed the march.
Now the rain came down without a letup, driven by the wind. At intervals it turned to ice and rattled in the branches of the trees. Then it would turn to rain again and the rain, it seemed to me, was colder than the ice.
We walked forever and then I found that we were no longer on a ridge, but were slanting down a slope. We reached a creek and found a narrow place where we could jump across it and started clambering up the opposite slope. Suddenly the ground leveled off beneath my feet and I heard the census taker saying, “This is far enough.”
As soon as I heard those words I let my legs buckle under me and sat down on solid rock. For a moment I paid no attention to where we were. It was quite enough that there was no longer any need to move. But gradually I became aware of what was going on.
We had stopped, I saw, on a broad, flat shelf of rock that extended out in front of a huge rock shelter. The roof of the shelter, some thirty feet or more above the shelf, flared back to form a deep niche in the face of a jutting cliff. The slab of rock extending out from the cliff ran back into the shelter, forming a level floor of stone. A few feet downward from the shelf, the creek flowed down the valley, forming little pools and rapids, pinching down, then broadening out, a little mountain stream that was in a hurry, foaming in the rapids and then resting in the pools before it took another plunge. Beyond the stream the hill rose steeply to the ridgetop along which we’d come.
“Here we are,” said the census taker in a happy, chirpy voice. “Snug against the night and weather. We will build a fire and catch some trout out of the stream and wish the wolf ill luck in his trailing.”
“The wolf?” said Cynthia. “There were three wolves to start with. What happened to the other two?”
“I have intelligence,” said the census taker, “that but one remains. It seems the others met with awkward accidents.”
XV
Beyond the shelter’s mouth the storm raged in the night. The fire gave light and warmth and our clothes at last were dry and there had been, as the census taker had said, fish to be gotten in the brook, beautiful speckled trout that had made a welcome break from the gook we had been eating out of cans, and a vast improvement over jerky.
We were not the first to use the shelter. Our fire had been built on a blackened circle on the stone, where the fires of earlier years (although how long ago there was no way of knowing) had chipped and flaked the surface of the rock. Along the broad expanse of stone were several other similarly blackened areas, half camouflaged by a scattering of blown autumn leaves.
In a pile of leaves, wedged and caught far back in the rocky cleft, where the roof plunged down to meet the floor, Cynthia had found another evidence of human occupancy—a metal rod some four feet long, an inch in diameter, and touched only here and there with rust.
I sat beside the fire, staring at the flames, thinking back along the trail and trying to figure out how such well-laid plans as ours could have gone so utterly astray. The answer was, of course, that Cemetery had been responsible, although perhaps not responsible for our meeting with the band of grave robbers. We had simply stumbled onto them.
I tried to figure exactly where we stood and it seemed, as
I thought about it, we did not stand well at all. We had been harried from the settlement and we had been split up and Cynthia and I had fallen into the hands of an enigmatic being that might be little better than a madman.
Now there was the wolf—one wolf, if what the census taker said was right. There was no doubt in my mind what had happened to the other two. They had caught up with Elmer and the Bronco and that had been a great mistake for them. But while Elmer had been dismantling two of them, the third one had escaped and probably even now was upon our trail—if there were a trail to follow. We had gone along high, barren ridges, with a strong wind blowing to wipe away our scent. Now, with the breaking of the storm, there might be no trail at all to follow.
“Fletch,” said Cynthia, “what are you thinking of?”
“I am wondering,” I said, “where Elmer and Bronco might be at this moment.”
“They’re on their way back to the cave,” she said. “They will find the note.”
“Sure,” I said, “the note. A lot of good the note will do. We are traveling northwest, it said. If you don’t catch up with us before we reach there, you’ll find us on the Ohio River. Do you realize how much land may lie northwest before you reach the river and how big that river is?”
“It was the best that we could do,” she said, rather angrily.
“We shall, in the morning,” said the census taker, “build a fire, high upon a ridge, to make a signal. We will guide them to us.”
“Them,” I said, “and everyone else in sight, perhaps even including the wolf. Or is it still three wolves?”
“It is only one,” said the census taker, “and one wolf would not be so brave. Wolves are brave only when in packs.”
“I don’t think,” I said, “I would care to meet even one, lone, cowardly wolf.”
“There are few of them now,” said the census taker. “They have not been loosed to hunt for years. The long years of confinement may have taken a lot of the sharpness from them.”
“What I want to know,” I said, “is how it took Cemetery so long to send them out against us. They could have turned them loose the minute that we left.”
The Complete Serials Page 130