“I’m beginning to believe,” said Cynthia, “that nothing on the Earth really makes much sense.”
We sat by the fire, enclosed in the magic circle. The firelight flickered and flickered yet again and there seemed to be a strange sense of motion all around.
“We have visitors,” Cynthia said quietly.
“It’s O’Gillicuddy,” I said. “O’Gillicuddy, are you there?”
“We are here,” said O’Gillicuddy. “There are many of us. We come to bear you company in this wilderness.”
“And to bear us word, perhaps.”
“Yes, indeed. Word we have to bear.”
Wolf flicked an ear, as if there were a fly, but there wasn’t any fly. Even if there had been, it would not have bothered Wolf.
Ghosts, I thought. The place was full of ghosts. Ghosts were here, I thought, and we were accepting them, as if they were people or had been people, and that was madness. Under normal circumstances, a ghost was unacceptable, but here, under these conditions, they became not only acceptable, but normal.
I remembered what the census taker had said when he had attempted an explanation of the ghosts, and thinking back on it, I realized that while I could not accept his explanation, he had made a valid point. We were too often prone to reject anything that seemed abnormal.
And thinking of it, I became aghast at the abnormality of our condition, how different it was from the quiet beauty of Alden, how distorted even from the mock majesty of Cemetery. For in fact, those two places seemed abnormal now. We had become so firmly set in the reality of this mad adventure that the ordinary places we had known now seemed strange and far.
“You are not, I fear,” O’Gillicuddy was saying, “safely beyond the clutches of the ghouls. They still trail you with much bloodthirstiness.”
“You mean,” I said, “they want our scalps for Cemetery.”
“You have plucked forth the naked truth,” said O’Gillicuddy.
“But why?” asked Cynthia. “Surely they are not friends of Cemetery.”
“No,” said O’Gillicuddy, “they’re not, indeed. Upon this planet, Cemetery has no friends. And yet there is no one here who would not most willingly do a favor for them, hoping a favor in return. Thus great power corrupts.”
“But there is nothing they would want from Cemetery,” Cynthia pointed out.
“Not at the moment, perhaps. But a favor deferred is still a favor and one that can be collected later. One can pile up points.”
“You said no one would refuse a favor,” I said. “How about yourself?”
“In our case,” said O’Gillicuddy, “there is a difference. Cemetery can do nothing for us, but what is perhaps of more importance, it can do nothing to us. We hope no favor and we have no fear.”
“And you say we aren’t safe?”
“They are hunting for you,” said O’Gillicuddy. “They will keep on hunting. You handed them defeat this morning and it lies bitter in their mouths. One the steel wolf killed, and another died . . .”
“But they shot him themselves,” said Cynthia. “A bullet meant for us. It was no fault of ours.”
“They still count it against you. There are two dead and there must be accountability. They do not accept the blame. They lay it all on you.”
“They’ll have a hard time finding us.”
“Hard, perhaps,” said O’Gillicuddy. “but find you they will. They are woodsmen of the finest. They range like hunting dogs. They read the wilderness like a book. A turned stone, a disturbed leaf, a bruised blade of grass—it says volumes to them.”
“Our only hope,” said Cynthia, “is to find Elmer and Bronco. “If we were together . . .”
“We can tell you where they are,” said O’Gillicuddy, “but it’s a long, hard way and you would be turning back into the very arms of the raging ghouls. We tried most desperately to reveal ourselves to your two companions so that we could lead them back to you, but for all that we could do they remained unaware of us. It takes a sharper-tuned sensibility than a robot can possess to discover us.”
“It all seems pretty hopeless to me,” said Cynthia, sounding considerably discouraged. “You can’t guide Elmer and Bronco to us and you say the ghouls are sure to find us.”
“And that isn’t all,” said O’Gillicuddy, seeming ghoulishly happy at what he had to tell us. “The Raveners are on the prowl.”
“The Raveners?” I asked. “Are there more than one of them?”
“There are two of them.”
“You mean war machines?”
“Is that what you call them?”
“That’s what Elmer thinks they are.”
“But that can’t mean anything to us.” protested Cynthia. “Surely the war machines are not tied in with Cemetery.”
“But they are,” said O’Gillicuddy. “Why?” I asked. “What has Cemetery got that they possibly could want?”
“Lubricating oil,” said O’Gillicuddy.
I’m afraid I groaned at that. It was such a simple thing and yet so logical. It was something that anyone should have thought of. The machines would have built-in power, more than likely nuclear, although I’d never really known, and they would be self-repairing, but the one thing they would need, perhaps the only thing they would need and would not have, would be lubricants.
This would be something that Cemetery wouldn’t miss. Cemetery missed no bets at all. They passed up nothing that would make any other factor on the Earth in some way beholden to them.
“And the census taker,” I said. “I suppose he is some way tied into it as well. And, by the way, where is the census taker?”
“He disappeared,” said O’Gillicuddy. “He flitters here and there. He is not really part of us. He is not always with us. We don’t know where he is.”
“Nor what he is?”
“What he is? Why, he’s the census taker.”
“That’s not what I mean. Is he a human being? Perhaps a mutated human being. There would have been a lot of human mutation. Some good, mostly bad. Although I imagine that over the years a great part of the bad died out. The ghouls have telepathy and God knows what else, and the settlers probably have something, too, although we don’t know what it is. Even you, for ghosts are not . . .”
“Shades,” said O’Gillicuddy.
“All right, then, shades. Shades are not a normal human condition. Maybe there aren’t any shades anyplace except here on Earth. No one knows what happened during those years after the people fled into space. Earth is a different place today than it was then.”
“You got off the track,” said Cynthia. “You were asking if the census taker was a Cemetery creature.”
“I am sure that he is not,” said O’Gillicuddy. “I don’t know what he is. I have always thought he was a sort of human being. He is a lot like humans. Not made the way they are, of course, and there is only one of him and . . .”
“Look,” I said, “you didn’t come here just to bear us company. You came here for a purpose. You wouldn’t have come just to bring us bad news. What is it all about?”
“There are many of us here,” said the shade. “We foregathered in some strength of numbers. We sent out a call for a gathering of the clan, for we feel great compassion and a strange comradeship with you. Not in all the history of the Earth has anyone before you tweaked the tail of Cemetery in such a hearty fashion.”
“And you like that?”
“We like it very much.”
“And you’ve come to cheer us on.”
“Not cheer,” said O’Gillicuddy, “although that we would also do and most willingly. But we feel that it is in our capacity to be of the slightest help.”
“We’re in the market,” said Cynthia, “for any help there is.”
“It becomes a complicated matter to explain,” said O’Gillicuddy, “and in lack of adequate information, you must fill in with faith. Being the sort of things we are, we have no real contact with the corporeal universe. But it seems we do have some
marginal powers to interact with time and space, which are neither in the corporeal universe nor quite out of it.”
“Now, wait a second there,” I said. “What you are talking of . . .”
“Believe me,” said O’Gillicuddy, “we have wracked our mental powers and can come up with nothing else. It is little that we have to offer, but . . .”
“What you propose to do,” said Cynthia, “is to move us in time.”
“But by only the tiniest fraction,” said O’Gillicuddy. “A minute part of a second. Barely out of the present, but that would be quite enough.”
“It’s never been done,” Cynthia objected. “For hundreds of years it has been studied and investigated and absolutely nothing has ever come of it.”
“Have you ever done it?” I demanded.
“No, not actually,” said O’Gillicuddy. “But we have thought about it and speculated on it and we are rather sure . . .”
“But not entirely sure?”
“You are right,” said O’Gillicuddy. “Not entirely sure.”
“And once you’ve done it,” I asked, “how about our getting back? I would not want to live out my life a fractional part of a second behind all the universe.”
“We have worked that out, too,” the shade said blithely. “We would set a time trap at the entrance of this cleft and by stepping into it . . .”
“But you’re not sure of that one, either.”
“Well, fairly certain,” said O’Gillicuddy.
It wasn’t very promising and, on top of that, I asked myself, how could we be sure that any of the rest of all he’d told was the truth? Maybe O’Gillicuddy and his gang of shades were doing no more than trying to push us into a situation where we’d serve willingly as subjects for an experiment they had cooked up. And come to think of it, how could we be sure there were any shades at all? We had seen them, or seemed to see them, as they danced around the fire back at the settlement. But actually all we had to go on was what the census taker had told us and this voice that said it was O’Gillicuddy.
And what about the voice of O’Gillicuddy? Was that imagination, too, as seeing them back at the settlement may have been, or imagining again that we had seen strange shapes back at the cave when they first had come to us? The trouble was that I was not the only one who was hearing it. Cynthia was hearing it as well as I, or she acted as if she did. Either that, or I imagined that she did. It was a hell of a thing, I told myself—to question not only the reality of your environment, but the reality of yourself as well.
“Cynthia,” I asked her, “are you really hearing all of this . . .”
The fire exploded in front of us. Ash and fire and burning brands sprayed across the cave and onto us. From outside came a hollow boom and then another and something traveling very fast smacked into the rock behind us.
We leaped to our feet, all three of us. A few sticks of the fire still burned and here and there were smoking brands that had been thrown outward from the fire by the impact of the heavy bullet.
“Fletch!” a well-remembered voice bawled from the outer darkness. “Fletch!” and the rapid thud of running feet.
“Elmer!” Cynthia screamed.
Wolf was raging from the cave, a vengeful, savage metal projectile heading out into the darkness, and Elmer was storming in, the feeble firelight flickering on his metal bulk, but he never reached us. Three more strides and he would have been with us, but he never made them—or at least we didn’t see him make them, or were not there when he made them.
Something—I don’t know what it was—but something like a tidal wave of water, although it certainly was not water, and did not have the force of water, came flooding into the cave, swirling and rolling with a mighty churning motion that blotted out our sight and hearing and made us aware of nothing but the swirling of it.
Then it was gone and we hadn’t stirred. It hadn’t knocked us from our feet or whirled us about. The two of us still stood where we had been standing, but there was no sign of Elmer or of Wolf, no evidence of O’Gillicuddy and his gang. The fire was gone and so were the smoking embers thrown by the bullet. The cave floor was bare and clean. And instead of it being night, brilliant sunlight lay on the valley just beyond the cleft.
We stood there for a moment, stupefied and not quite comprehending, then Cynthia said, in a small, weak voice, “They did it. They did it without even asking us. And when there was no need to do it.”
I stood there, wondering dimly if this could be a fantasy that was a piece with the fantasy of O’Gillicuddy and hoping that it was, for if one of them was a fantasy the other surely was, and in such a case in another instant we’d be back in the nighttime cave again, with the fire still burning, with Wolf rushing from the cave and Elmer storming in. But it didn’t happen that way. The floor stayed smooth and clean, there was no Elmer and no Wolf and the outside sunlight went on being sunlight.
“Why did O’Gillicuddy do it?” I asked, “There was no need to do it,” repeating what Cynthia had just said. “It would have taken all of three seconds for Wolf to have scattered the ghouls and Elmer was with us and everything was all right.”
“It was their first chance,” said Cynthia. “They did not know when they’d have a chance again. It was their first experiment and they couldn’t give it up.”
“You mean the shades,” I said.
“Yes. Don’t you see. They had to find out if it would really work. They weren’t sure it would.”
I shook my head. “There’s more to it than that. There must be something going on we don’t know about. They wanted us moved back in time, if that’s what really happened.”
XVIII
When we went outside it seemed quite apparent that something had happened that could only be explained by a shift in time. The valley was different, but at first it was hard to pick out what actually was different. It was daylight instead of dark, of course, and it was no longer autumn, for the trees were green. But these were surface indications only; there were other, more fundamental changes, but it took a while to get around to seeing them.
There were fewer trees, for one thing, and all of them were smaller and while I couldn’t really swear to it, it seemed to me their distribution had been shifted. There were trees in places where there’d been no trees before, and there were little areas where there had been trees and now the trees were gone. The grass seemed different, too, not as lush, not as green, but with a yellow cast to it. Looking up at the cliff walls, I saw there were no cedars there, and when we’d picked up wood for the fire we’d built, clinging cedars had crawled across the walls, masking off the rock.
And that, quite suddenly, put a different face on it. Here was evidence that we’d not been thrown back in time the fraction of a second that O’Gillicuddy had talked about. Cedars were slow-growing. It had taken centuries, undoubtedly, for them to have rooted in the crevices of the rock and to have grown to the size we’d seen. Here, in this time in which we stood, they had not even rooted, would not root, perhaps, for many centuries to come.
“Cynthia,” I said, speaking as gently as I could.
“We are a long ways back, aren’t we?” she asked. She had seen the barrenness of the rocky cliffs and had known as well as I.
“God knows how far back,” I said. “And I don’t suppose our clever ghosts do, either. Not that they would care.”
“Wolfs not with us,” said Cynthia. “Poor Wolf. They couldn’t send him back. Nor Elmer, either.”
“They lied to us about Elmer,” I pointed out to her. “They said he was far away. They couldn’t tell us where he was.”
“Maybe they didn’t know.”
“The hell they didn’t know,” I said. “Cynthia, we were sent back in time for some purpose by the ghosts.”
“Perhaps they only blundered. Perhaps they didn’t know.”
That might be right, I admitted to myself. But purposely or by blunder, we’d really had it now. Before, up in our present time, we had been lost in space, bu
t now lost in time as well. There was, now, no way we could be sure of getting back. A time trap, O’Gillicuddy had said, but if he’d blundered as Cynthia had suggested, if he knew no more of time traps than he did of moving people into time, we had no assurance left.
“Fletch,” said Cynthia, “how will we manage without Wolf? He was our rabbit catcher.”
“We’ll catch them for ourselves,” I said. “As for Wolf, they couldn’t, have sent him back even if they’d wanted to. Wolf was a robot . . .”
“A mutant robot,” she said.
“There are no mutant robots.”
“I think there are,” she said. “Or could be. Wolf changed. What was if that made him change?”
“Elmer threw the fear of God in him when he busted up his pals. Wolf got converted quick and switched to the winning side.”
“No, it couldn’t have been that. Sure, it would have scared him, but it would not have changed him the way that he was changed. You know what I think, Fletch?”
“I have no idea.”
“He evolved,” she said. “A robot could evolve.”
“Perhaps,” I said, not at all convinced, but I had to say something to stop her chattering. “Let’s look around a bit to find out where we are.”
“And when we are?”
“That, too,” I said. “If we can manage it.”
We went down the valley, moving slowly and somewhat uncertainly. There was, of course, no need to hurry now; there was no one at our heels. But it was not only that. There was, I think, in our slowness and uncertainty, a kind of reluctance to travel out into this world, a fear of what it might contain, not knowing what one might expect, and a consciousness, as well, that we were in the past, in an unknown alien time and that we had no right to be there. Somehow this world had a different texture to it—not only the lack of lush greenness in the grass or the smaller trees—but a sense of some strange difference that probably had no physical basis, but was entirely psychological.
We went on down the valley, not really going anywhere, going without purpose. The hills fell back a little and the valley widened and ahead of us other hills ranged blue into the sky. We could see that the valley we were traveling joined another valley, and in a mile or so we reached the river into which the stream we had been following poured its waters. It was a wide river, running very fast, its waters dark and oily with their speed, and as it ran it talked in a growling undertone. It was somehow a little frightening to look upon that river.
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