“But finally both of us began to see how footless and how pointless it was just to stay sitting there. We began to wonder if there might be people in the world that we could help. If man was going to recover from what the war had left, he would need all the help that he could get. Among the nine of us we had a lot of savvy, of a kind that man might need and each of us was a source of power and energy if ways could be found for man to make use of that power and energy.
“Ivan said there was no use going west. Asia was finished, he said, and he’d roamed through enough of Europe to know it was finished, too. No social organization of any kind was left there. There might be scattered bands of men already sunk in savagery, but not enough of them to form any sort of economic base. So we headed east, for America, and there, in places, we found little scattered settlements—not too many, but a few—where man was slowly getting on his feet, at a point where he could use the kind of help we had to offer. But so far we have been of no help at all. The little settlements will not listen to us. They run screaming for the woods whenever we show up and no matter how we try to tell them we’re only there to help they will not respond in any way at all. You two are the first humans who would talk with us.”
“The trouble with that,” I told him, “is that talking to us will do little good. We aren’t of this time. We are from the future.”
“I remember now,” said Joe. “You said that you knew Elmer from the future. Where is Elmer now?”
“As of right now, he is somewhere among the stars.”
“The stars? How could old Elmer . . .”
“Listen to me,” I said. “Let me try to tell you. Once it became apparent what was about to happen to the Earth, a lot of people went out to the stars. One shipload of them would colonize one planet and another shipload another. After some ten thousand years of this, there are an awful lot of humans living on an awful lot of planets. The people who were recruited for the star trips were the educated, the skilled, the technological people, the kind of people who would be needed to establish a colony in space. What were left were the uneducated, the untrained, the unskilled. That is why, even in this time, the settlements you have been trying to help need the help so badly. That probably is why they refuse your help. What is left is the equivalent of the peasants, the ne’er-do-wells . . .”
“But old Elmer, he wasn’t really people . . .”
“He was a good mechanic. A new colony would need folks like him. So he went along.”
“This matter of Elmer in the future and of people fleeing into space,” said Joe, “is a most intriguing thing. But how come you are here? You said that you would tell us. Why don’t you just settle back and tell us now?”
It was just like old home week. It was all so good and friendly. Joe was a nice guy and Ivan wasn’t bad. For the first time since we had hit the planet, it was really nice.
So we settled back and between the two of us, first me, then Cynthia, and then me again, we told our story to them.
“This Cemetery business still must be in the future,” said Joe. “There is no sign of Cemetery yet.”
“It will come,” I said. “I wish I could recall the date when it was started. Perhaps I never knew.”
Cynthia shook her head. “I don’t know, either.”
“There’s one thing I am glad to know about,” said Joe. “This matter of a lubricant. It was something we were a bit concerned about. We know that in time we’ll need it and we had hoped we could contact some people who would be able to supply us with it. If they could get their hands on the crude and supply it to us, we could manage to refine it to a point where it could be used. There wouldn’t have to be a lot of it. But we haven’t been having too much luck with people.”
“You’ll get it, all refined and ready, according to your specifications, from Cemetery,” I told him. “But don’t pay the price they ask.”
“We’ll pay no price,” said Joe. “They sound like top-grade lice.”
“They are all of that,” I said. “And now we have to go.”
“To keep your appointment with the future.”
“That is right,” I said. “And if it happens as we hope it will, it would be nice to find you there and waiting for us. Do you think you could manage that?”
“Give us the date,” said Joe, so I gave him the date.
“We’ll be there,” he said.
As we started down the ladder, he said, “Look, if it doesn’t work. If there’s no time trap there. Well, if that should happen, there’s no need to go back to that shack. Horrible job, you know, cleaning it up, dead man and all of that. Why not come and live with us? It’s nothing very fancy, but we’ll be glad to have you.
We could go south for winter and . . .”
“Thanks, we will,” said Cynthia. “It would be very nice.”
We went on down the ladder and started walking up the hollow. The cleft in the cliff lay just ahead and before we reached it, we turned around to look back at our friends. They had switched around so that they were facing us and we raised our hands to them, then went toward the cleft.
We were almost in the cleft when the surging wave that wasn’t water hit us, and as it receded, we stood shaken and in dismay.
For we stood, not in the hollow as we remembered it, but in the Cemetery.
XX
The cliff was still there, with the twisted cedars growing on its face, and the hills were there and the valley that ran between them. But it was wilderness no longer. The stream had been confined between walls of lain rock, done most tastefully, and the greensward, clipped to carpet smoothness, ran from the foot of the cliff out to the rock-work channel. Monuments stood in staggered rows and there were clumps of evergreen and yew.
I felt Cynthia close against me, but I didn’t look at her. Right then I didn’t want to look at her. I tried to keep my voice steady. “The shades have messed it up again,” I said.
I tried to compute how long it might take for the Cemetery to stretch from its boundary as we’d found it to this place and the answer had to be many centuries—perhaps as far into the future as we had been sent into the past.
“They couldn’t be this bad at it,” said Cynthia. “They simply couldn’t be. Once maybe, but not twice.”
“They sold us out,” I said.
“But they could have sold us out,” she said, “when they sent us so far back into the past. Why should we be sold out twice? If they simply wanted to get rid of us, they could have left us where we were. In such a case, there would have been no time trap. Fletch, it makes no sense.”
She was right, of course. I hadn’t thought of that. It did simply make no sense.
“It must be,” I said, “just their slab-sidedness.”
I looked around the sweep of Cemetery.
“We might have been better off,” I said, “if we had stayed with Joe and Ivan. We’d have had a place where we could have lived and a way to travel. We could have gone with them everywhere they went. They would have been good company. I don’t know what we have here.”
“I won’t cry,” said Cynthia. “I’ll be damned if I will cry. But I feel like it.”
I wanted to take her in my arms, but I didn’t. If I had touched her, she would have busted out in tears.
“We could see if the census taker’s place is where it was,” I said. “I don’t think it will be, but we can have a look. If I know Cemetery they will have evicted him.”
We walked down the hollow and the walking was easy. It was like walking on a carpet. There was no uneven ground, no boulders that we had to dodge around. There were just the monuments and the clumps of evergreen and yew.
I glanced at some of the dates on the monuments and there was no way of telling, of course, how recent they might have been, but the dates I saw were evidence that we were at least thirty centuries beyond the time we’d hoped to reach. For some reason, Cynthia paid no attention to the dates, and Itlidn’t mention them. Although, come to think of it, perhaps she did and m
ade no mention of them, either.
We reached the river and it seemed much the same as it had before, except that the trees that had grown along its banks were gone to give way to the monuments and landscaping that marked the Cemetery.
I was looking at the river, thinking of how, in spite of all events, some things manage to endure. The river still flowed on, tumbling down the land between hills and there was no one who could stay its hurry or reduce its force.
Cynthia caught my arm.
She was excited. “Fletch, isn’t that where we found the census taker’s house?”
She was pointing toward the bluffs and when I looked where she was pointing, I gasped at what I saw. Not that there was anything about it that should have made me gasp. Except, perhaps, the utter beauty of it. What took my breath away, I am sure, was how the entire scene had changed. We had seen the place (in our own time bracket) only hours before. Then it had been a wilderness—thick woods running down to the river, with the roof of the house in which the dead man lay barely showing through the trees, and with the bare, knob-like blufftops shouldering the sky. Now it was all neat and green and very civilized, and atop the bluff where had stood the little weatherbeaten house where we had enjoyed lunch with a charming gentleman now stood a building that came out of a dream. It was all white stone, but with a fragile air about it that seemed to rule out the use of stone. It lay low against the blufftop and its front had three porches supported by faery pillars that, from this distance, seemed to be pencil-thin, and narrow, rainbow-flashing windows all along its length. A flight of long stairs ran down to the river.
“Do you think . . .” she asked, stopping in mid-sentence.
“Not the census taker,” I said. “He’d never build a place like that.”
For the census taker was a lurker, a hider, a scurrier. He scurried all about, trying very hard that no one saw him, and snatched from beneath their noses those little artifacts (not yet artifacts, but artifacts at some time in the future) that would tell the story of those he was hiding from. “But it is where his house was.”
“So it is,” I said, at a loss for anything else that I might say.
We walked along the river, not hurrying but looking at the place atop the bluff, finally coming to the place where the stairs came down to the river, ending on the riverbank with a plaza paved with great blocks of stone, with room made here and there, for plantings of—what else?—yew and evergreen.
We stood side by side, like a couple of frightened children confronted by a thing of special wonder, looking up the flight of stairs to the gleaming wonder that stood atop the bluff.
“Know what this reminds me of,” said Cynthia. “The stairway up to Heaven.”
“How could it? You’ve never seen the stairway up to Heaven.”
“Well, it looks the way the old ones wrote about it. Except there should be trumpets sounding.”
“Do you think that you can make it without the trumpets sounding?”
“I think,” she said, “it is likely that I can.”
I wondered what it was that was making her so light-hearted. Myself, I was too puzzled and upset to be the least light-hearted. The entire thing was pretty, if you cared for prettiness, but I didn’t like particularly the placement of the building where the census taker’s house had been. That there must be some connection between the two of them seemed a reasonable conclusion and I found myself hard put to arrive at that connection.
The stairs were long and rather steep and we took our time. We had the stairway to ourselves, for there was no one else about, although, a short time earlier there had been three or four people standing on one of the porches of the building.
The stairs at the blufftop ended in another plaza, much larger than the one at the river’s edge and we walked across this toward the central porch. Up close, the building was even more beautiful than it had been at a distance. The stone was snowy white, the architectural lines were refined and delicate and there was about the whole of it a sort of reverential aura. No lettering was sculptured anywhere to tell one what it was and I found myself wondering, in a dumb, benumbed sort of way, exactly what it was.
The porch opened into a foyer, frozen in that hushed dimness that one associates with museums or with picture galleries. A glassed-in case stood in the center of the room, with a light playing on the object standing in the case. Echoing from deep inside the building could be heard the sounds of footfalls and of voices.
We came up to the case and there, sitting in it, was that very jug that we had been shown at lunch. It had to be the same, I told myself. No other warrior could have leaned so dejectedly upon his shield, no other broken spear trail quite so defeated on the ground.
Cynthia had leaned down to peer into the case and now she rose. “The potter’s mark is the same,” she said. “I am sure of that.”
“How can you be sure? You can’t read Greek. You said you couldn’t.”
“That’s true, but you can make out the name. Nicosthenes. It must say ‘Nicosthenes made me.’ ”
“He might have made a lot of them,” I said. I don’t know why I argued. I don’t know why I fought against the almost certain knowledge that here was the very piece that had stood on the sideboard in the census taker’s house.
“I am sure he did,” she said. “He must have been a famous potter. This must have been a masterpiece for the census taker to have selected it. And no potter, once he’d made one, would duplicate a masterpiece. It probably was made for some great man of the time . . .”
“Perhaps for the census taker.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right. Perhaps for the census taker.”
I was interested in the jug and while I heard a door open, I paid no attention to it. I heard Cynthia gasp and turned around. And there, just outside a door that opened on the foyer, he stood, the great, almost unbelievable, lumbering bulk of him.
“Hello, Miss,” said Elmer. “It’s been a long time, Fletch.”
“Why, no . . . .” I began and then I stopped myself. It had been only a few hours for Cynthia and myself, but for Elmer it had been a long, long time, indeed.
“Elmer,” I said, and then I got all choked up and could say no more.
“I am glad,” said Elmer, “that you finally have arrived. We had feared so much you wouldn’t. There were so many things that could happen.”
“Those bumbling shades,” I said. “They made a mess of it.”
“By no means bumbling,” said Elmer. “They did exactly what they planned.”
“There’s something damn strange going on,” I said. “Elmer, tell me what it is.”
“In time,” said Elmer, “we will tell it all. There is so much to tell.”
“We?” I asked. “You keep saying we.”
“All your friends,” said Elmer. “All of them are here. We have been waiting for you.”
“You knew we would be coming here?”
“We hoped you would,” said Elmer. “Don’t you see, you had to come or it all would be for nothing.”
He was talking riddles and he had never, in all the time I’d known him, talked that way before.
“You mean they all are here?” asked Cynthia, excited. “Bronco and Wolf and . . .”
“If you’ll come with me,” said Elmer. “They are waiting for you.”
He turned about and we followed through the door, which opened into a huge room and they all were there, Bronco and Wolf standing side by side and the two war machines bulking in the rear.
Elmer made a thumb toward the two machines. “When we built this place,” he said, “we made a special door so they could get in and the floor they’re standing on is bedrock. Nothing else would hold them.”
“Welcome home,” said Joe, “and Ivan says hello.”
“There’s one other here,” said Elmer. “You may not recognize him, but he’s an old friend, too.”
The other one of them sat behind a desk that was positioned near the door and Elmer was quite
right. I did not recognize him; I had never seen him or anything quite like him. The mechanical equivalent of a human head attached to what might roughly be described as the mechanical equivalent of a human body—a robot, more than likely, but like no robot I’d ever seen before. Not like Elmer, not like any honest robot, but a frankly mechanical contraption that made no real concession to the human form.
“I suppose you may be pardoned,” said this freakish thing, “for not recognizing me, since I have changed considerably. You at one time knew me as Ramsay O’Gillicuddy.”
It seemed outrageous on the face of it, of course, but there was something in the timbre of the voice that almost made me think so.
“I vouch for him,” said Elmer. “He is O’Gillicuddy.”
“In which case,” said O’Gillicuddy, “you may as well sit down. We have some catching up to do.”
He motioned at chairs set before the desk and when Cynthia and I were seated, he said, “Well, this is very comfortable and cozy and . . .”
“Now, just a minute there, O’Gillicuddy,” I said. “I have a bone to pick with you. Back there in the cave, there was no need to send us back in time. Elmer was there and so was Wolf . . .”
“But it was a plan,” said O’Gillicuddy. “If we had not acted then, you’d not be here today . .
“Fletch,” said Elmer, “I would recommend that you hear him out. It may seem very strange to you, but in common courtesy you should hear him out.”
The Complete Serials Page 136