“Undoubtedly,” said the census taker, “they had to send for them. I don’t know where they are kept, but doubtless at some distance.”
The wind went whooping down the valley that lay in front of us and a sheet of rain came hissing into the mouth of the cave to spatter on the rock just beyond the fire.
“Where are all your pals?” I asked. “Where are all the shades?”
“On a night like this,” said the census taker, “they have far-ranging business.”
I didn’t ask what kind of business. I didn’t want to know.
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Cynthia, “but I’m going to roll up in my blanket and try to get some sleep.”
“The both of you might as well,” said the census taker. “It has been a long, hard day. I will keep the watch. I almost never sleep.”
“You never sleep,” I said, “and you almost never eat. The wind doesn’t blow that robe of yours. Just what the hell are you?”
He didn’t answer. I knew he wouldn’t answer.
The last thing that I saw before I went to sleep was the census taker sitting a short distance from the fire, a rigid upright figure that had a strange resemblance to a cone resting on its base.
I woke cold. The fire had gone out and beyond the mouth of the cave dawn was breaking. The storm had stopped and what I could see of the sky was clear.
And there, on the rock shelf that extended out in front of the cave, sat a metal wolf. He was hunkered on his haunches and he was looking straight at me and from his steel jaws dangled the limp form of a rabbit.
I sat up rapidly, the blanket falling from me, putting out my hand to find a stick of firewood, although what good a stick of wood would have been against such a monster I had no idea. But in grasping for the stick, I found something else. I wasn’t looking where I was reaching out because I didn’t dare take my eyes off the wolf. But when my fingers touched it, I knew what I had—the four-foot metal rod that Cynthia had unearthed from beneath the pile of leaves. I wrapped my fingers around it with something like a prayer of thankfulness and got carefully to my feet, gripping the rod so hard that the grip was painful.
The wolf made no move toward me; it just stayed sitting there, with that silly rabbit hanging from its jaws. I had forgotten that it had a tail, but now its tail began to beat, very gently, very slowly upon the slab of rock, for all the world like the tail-beating of a dog that was glad to see someone.
I looked around quickly. The census taker was nowhere to be seen, but Cynthia was sitting upright in her blanket and her eyes were the size of saucers. She didn’t notice that I was looking at her; she had her eyes fastened on the wolf.
I took a step sidewise to get around the fire and as I did I lifted the metal rod to a ready position. If I could get in just one lucky lick, I thought, upon the ugly head when it came at me, I stood at least some chance.
But the wolf didn’t come at me. It just stayed sitting there and when I took another step it keeled over on its back and stayed there, with all four feet sticking in the air, and now its tail beat a wild tattoo upon the stone, the sound of the metal beating on the stone ringing in the morning silence.
“It wants to be friendly,” Cynthia said. “I think it is asking you not to hit it.”
I took another step.
“And look,” said that silly Cynthia, “it has brought a rabbit for us.”
I lowered the rod and kept it low and now the wolf turned over on its belly and began creeping toward me. I stood and waited for it. When it got close enough, it dropped the rabbit at my feet.
“Pick it up,” said Cynthia.
“Pick it up,” I said, “and it will take off my arm.”
“Pick it up,” she said. “It has brought the rabbit to you. It has given it to you.”
So I stooped and picked up that crazy rabbit and the moment that I did the wolf leaped up with a wriggling joy and rubbed against my legs so hard it almost tipped me over.
TO BE CONTINUED
Conclusion. Threads of man’s distant past and far future had to be pulled together before Carson could finish the work that he had come to the Cemetery World to accomplish.
Synopsis
Ten thousand years before the story opens, the final war has been fought on Earth, the last stages of it being carried on by great war machines, with the brains of men fused into the machines and directing them. With the Earth poisoned and ruined, many of the survivors flee into space, seeking new homes among the stars. In time a corporation, Mother Earth, Inc., sets up a cemetery on Earth, operating high-powered public relations programs to convince people of the sentimental prestige of being interred on the planet where mankind first arose. A few people, descendants of the ne’er-do-wells who were left behind when the rest of the population went to the stars, still live on Earth, but Mother Earth seeks to create the impression there is nothing there but the Cemetery.
On the gentle world of Alden, Fletcher Carson is attempting to build a compositor, a machine-instrument which can take a theme and translate it into every known art form. He plans to take the compositor to Earth, but he runs out of money before he can finish it. He is approached by Elmer, an incredibly ancient robot, who had worked on the last of Earth’s war machines and who, because he was a skilled technician, was taken to the stars by the humans. He has been a free robot for centuries and now wants to return to Earth. He becomes Carson’s partner, investing his life savings in the compositor, named Bronco.
Because they have no money left for a regular passage, Carson rides a funeral ship to Earth, taking Elmer and Bronco along as freight. Once on Earth, Carson quarrels with Maxwell Peter Bell, manager of Mother Earth, Inc., with Carson resisting being taken over by Mother Earth, which would like to use the composition he plans as publicity for the Cemetery. Carson meets Cynthia Lansing, a woman from Alden who carries with her a letter from Carson’s old friend, Dr. William Thorndyke (Thorney), an archaeologist at Alden University. Thorndyke is a leading authority on the Anachrons, a mysterious galactic people who have long since disappeared, but have left traces of their culture among the artifacts of many other races. The Anachrons are popularly thought of as galactic traders, but Thorndyke believes they were cultural observers seeking new cultural approaches to graft onto their own civilization.
In his letter, Thorndyke says that Cynthia will be taking regular passage to Earth and will arrive there ahead of Carson. He asks Carson to help her in her quest for a treasure which he believes an Anachron observer had collected on Earth. This belief is based on a letter she has found among old family papers, detailing a meeting of an ancestor of hers with a strange being who could have been an Anachron, bringing the choice part of his collection from Greece to hide in a location near the Ohio River. Carson is reluctant to become involved in treasure hunting, but takes Cynthia along with his expedition.
Once out of the Cemetery the party camps. When night has fallen, some great creature comes charging through the forest, smashing trees and making a great swath through the woods, barely missing the camp. Carson suspects it may be a war machine, although it seems unlikely such a machine would have survived for ten thousand years.
They are joined by a party of coon hunters from a backwoods settlement, who tell them the thing that smashed down the trees is the Ravener, a mythical being almost never seen. The coon hunters invite them to a hoedown in the settlement the following night.
At the hoedown there is a good deal of liquor in evidence, including a case of good whiskey which apparently has been provided by the Cemetery. An outlandish creature, the census taker, shows up, accompanied by a band of shadowy ghosts who insist they should be called shades. At the height of festivities someone throws a bomb in an attempt to blow up Bronco. In the excitement that follows, Carson and his party escape. Bronco is badly damaged, but with Elmer’s help, gets away. Elmer then leaves Bronco in charge of Carson and Cynthia, telling them to continue on their way while he goes back to the settlement to steal tools he
will need to repair Bronco.
The three of them, just before dawn, wander into a camp of ruffians they later label “the ghouls,” and are captured. Elmer rescues them and drives off the ghouls. Left behind are a number of horses and a great clutter of boxes and bales. They open one of the boxes and find sheets of metal. The metal could only have come from caskets and they deduce that the ghouls have been robbing graves in the Cemetery to get metal. Another box yields a hoard of alien artifacts and Carson recalls that Thorndyke has many times bewailed the stripping of potential archaeological sites of artifacts that later turn up for sale. The supposition now appears to be that Mother Earth is trafficking in artifacts, hiding them in graves. There also is almost the certainty that the bombing of Bronco was done at the behest of Mother Earth, with the case of whiskey as payment.
Carson’s party proceeds, driving the horses with them to slow up pursuit by the ghouls. Carson and Cynthia, who have gone hours without sleep, are hidden, at Elmer’s insistence, in a cave where they can get some sleep while Elmer and Bronco drive the horses deeper into the mountains. The two sleepers are wakened by the census taker, who tells them they are being hunted by robotic wolves which Mother Earth used in the ancient days to rid the planet of genetic monsters. From the mouth of the cave, they see three wolves, which pass them by. A group of shades are with the census taker and they talk with one whose name is Ramsay O’Gillicuddy.
The census taker warns Carson and Cynthia that the wolves will be back and that they must leave. He volunteers to guide them. They travel all day through a storm and finally camp in another cave. The census taker says that of the three, only one wolf is left, the other two apparently having been killed by Elmer and Bronco, but that the one wolf is trailing them. When Carson and Cynthia wake in the morning, the census taker is gone, but the wolf is there, waiting for them. However, he comes in peace, bringing them a rabbit for breakfast.
Part 3
XVI
We sat beside the fire and gnawed the last shreds of meat off the rabbit’s bones, while the wolf lay off to one side, its tail beating occasionally on the stony floor, watching us.
“What do you suppose happened to him?” Cynthia asked.
“He maybe went insane,” I said, “or turned chicken after what happened to the other two. Or he may be just laying for us, lulling us to sleep. When he has the chance, he’ll finish off the two of us.”
I reached out and pulled the metal rod just a little closer.
“I don’t think that at all,” said Cynthia. “You know what I think. He doesn’t want to go back.”
“Back to where?”
“Back to wherever it is that Cemetery keeps him. Think of it. He and the other wolves, however many there may be, may have been kept penned up for years and—”
“They wouldn’t keep them penned,” I said. “More likely they would turn them off until they needed them.”
“Then maybe that is it,” she said. “Maybe he doesn’t want to go back because he knows they’ll turn him off.”
I grunted at her. It was all damn foolishness. Maybe the best thing to do, I thought, was to pick up the metal rod and beat the wolf to death. The only thing, I guess, that stopped me was a suspicion that the wolf might take a lot of killing and that in the process I’d come out second best.
“I wonder what happened to the census taker,” I said.
“The wolf scared him off,” said Cynthia. “He won’t be back.”
“He could at least have wakened us. Given us a chance.”
“It turned out all right.”
“But he couldn’t know it would.”
“What do we do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. And that was exactly right. I really didn’t know. Never in my life had I felt so unsure of what my next step should be. I had no real idea of where we were; we were lost, so far as I was concerned, in a howling wilderness. We were separated from the two stronger members of our party and our guide had deserted us. A metal wolf had made friends with us and I was far from sure of the sincerity of its friendship.
I caught the motion out of the corner of my eye and leaped to my feet, but there was nothing I could do about it except stand there and stare into the muzzles of the guns. Holding the guns were two men, and one of them I recognized as the big brute who had stood in the forefront of the mob that Cynthia and I had faced, futile clubs in hand, back at the camp site of the ghouls just before Elmer had come bursting in to break up the confrontation. I was a bit surprised that I recognized him, for at the time I had been too busy watching all the others that made up the mob who had left off their attack on Bronco to zero in on us. But now I found that I did know him—the leering half-smile pasted on his face, the droopy eye, that ragged scar that ran across one cheek. The other one I did not recognize.
They had crept up to one corner of the cave and now they stood there, with their rifles pointed at us.
I heard Cynthia gasp in surprise and I said, sharply, to her, “Stay down. Don’t move.”
With a scratch of metal claws on rock, something came up to me and stood beside me, pressing hard against my leg. I didn’t look to see what it might be. I knew. It was Wolf, lining up with me against the guns.
The two with the guns apparently had not seen him, lying off to one side of us. And now that he moved into their view, the leering smile came off Big Brute’s face and his jaw sagged just a little. A nervous tic ran across the face of the other man. But they stood their ground.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “it appears to be a stand-off. You could kill us easily, but you wouldn’t live to get a hundred feet.”
They kept their guns pointed at us, but finally Big Brute lifted his gun and let the butt slide to the ground.
“Jed,” he said, “put up your shooting iron. These folks have outsmarted us.”
Jed lowered his gun.
“It seems to me,” said Big Brute, “that we have to cipher out a way for all of us to get out of this scrape without losing any hide.”
“Come on in,” I said, “but be careful of the guns.”
They came up to the fire, walking slowly and somewhat sheepishly.
I took a quick glance at Cynthia. She was still crouched on the floor, but she wasn’t scared. She was hard as nails.
“Fletch,” she said, “the gentlemen must be hungry, coming all this way. Why don’t you ask them to sit down while I open up a can or two. We haven’t too much, traveling light, but I put in some stew.”
The two of them looked at me and I nodded rather curtly.
“Please do,” I said.
They sat down and laid their guns beside them.
Wolf didn’t stir; he stood and looked at them.
Big Brute made a questioning thumb at him.
“He’s all right,” I said. “Just don’t make any sudden moves.” I hoped that I was right. I couldn’t quite be sure.
Cynthia, digging into one of the packs, had a stewpan out. I poked the fire together and it blazed up brightly.
“Now,” I said, “suppose you tell me what this is all about?”
“You stole our horses,” Big Brute said.
Jed said, “We were, hunting them.”
I shook my head. “You could have followed the trail blindfolded. You should have had no trouble. There were a lot of horses.”
“Well,” said Big Brute, “we found the place where you hid out and we found the note. Jed here, he was able to get it puzzled out. And we knew about this cave.”
“It’s a camping place,” said Jed. “We camp here ourselves, every now and then.”
It still didn’t make too much sense, but I didn’t press it. Big Brute, however, went on to explain. “We figured you weren’t alone. Someone must have been with you. Someone who knew the country. People like you wouldn’t strike out on your own. And this here place is a hard day’s march.”
Jed said, “What I can’t figure is the wolf. We never counted on no wolf. We thought by this time he’d be halfway
home.”
“You knew about the wolves?”
“We saw the tracks. Three of them. And we found what was left of the other two.”
“Not you,” I said. “You came straight from the place where we slept. You had to. You wouldn’t have had the time . . .”
“Not us,” said Jed. “We didn’t see it. Some of the rest of us. They let us know.”
“They let you know?”
“Sure,” said Big Brute. “We keep one another posted.”
“Telepathy,” said Cynthia, softly. “It has to be telepathy.”
“But telepathy . . .”
“A survival factor,” she said. “The people who were left on Earth after the war would have needed survival factors. And with mutations, there might have been a lot of factors. Fine things to have if they didn’t kill you first. Telepathy would have been good to have and it would not have killed you.”
“Tell me,” I said to Big Brute, “what happened to Elmer—to the other two who were with us.”
“The metal things,” said Jed. “That’s right. The metal things.” Big Brute shook his head.
“You mean that you don’t know?”
“We can find out.”
“Well, then, you find out.”
“Look, Mister,” said Jed, “we need a bargaining point. This is our bargaining point.”
“The wolf is ours,” I said. “And the wolfs right here.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be sitting here dickering,” said Big Brute. “Maybe we should throw in together.”
“That’s why you came sneaking up on us, to throw in with us?”
“Well, no,” said Jed. “Not exactly. We had blood in our eye, for sure. You busted up our camp and run us off and then you took our horses. There ain’t nothing more low-down than running off a man’s horses. We weren’t, to tell the truth, feeling very friendly.”
“But things have changed now. You are willing to be friendly?”
The Complete Serials Page 131