The fact that the men whose bones lay there in the gully’s end had been seeking someone did not necessarily mean they knew he’d come this way. Probably they had been as confused as we were. And there was no real evidence that Knight had been the one they had been looking for.
So we sat there by the campfire and planned it out.
We would load Paint with Roscoe’s useless carcass and all the water and food that he could carry. Tuck and I would carry heavy packs while Sara, the only one of us with a weapon, would carry a light load, so that in a moment of emergency she could drop her pack and be ready with the rifle. Hoot would carry nothing. He would be our scout, ranging out ahead of us and spying out the land.
That afternoon, much as we disliked the doing of it, we went down the gully and dug through the fort. We found three human skulls and half a dozen rusted weapons that were too far gone to determine what kind of guns they might have been. Paint recalled that there had been eight humans and the large number of scattered bones seemed to bear him out. But three skulls were all we found.
Back at camp we made up our packs and hauled the rest of the supplies off the trail, caching them in a narrow fissure than ran down into the gully. Using branches, we brushed out our tracks leading off the trail. Neither the caching job or the brushing out of tracks was done too expertly. But I had the feeling that it was all a waste of time, that the trail had been long abandoned and that we might have been the first to travel it for a century or more.
The day was far gone, but we loaded up and left. There was none of us who wanted to stay in that camp for a minute longer than was necessary. We fled from it, glad to get away, to be free of the depressing walls of barren earth and the sense of ancient doom one could feel hanging over it. And there was, as well, a sense of urgency, a never-expressed, perhaps never-admitted feeling that we were running out of time.
FIFTEEN
Hoot stumbled on the centaurs the second day out.
We still were in the badlands. Heretofore any of them we had come to had been crossed in a few hours or a day at most. But this badlands area seemed to stretch on forever and we all looked forward to the end of it, if the end should ever come. Loaded down with heavy packs as Tuck and I were, it was rugged going, mostly up and down, with only short respites when the trail ran for short distances across more level land.
Hoot kept out ahead of us. We saw him only now and then and then only glimpses of him when he stood on some high point to look back and see how we were doing.
Shortly before noon I saw him sidewheeling rapidly down the trail above us. Glad of an excuse to rest, I dropped my pack and waited for him. So did Sara, but Tuck merely stopped when we stopped and did not drop his pack. He stood there, hunched over under the weight of it, staring at the ground. Since we’d left the camp where we had lost the hobbies, he had been more withdrawn than ever, fumbling along without paying attention to anything at all.
Hoot came slithering down the trail and stopped in front of us.
“Hobbies ahead,” he hooted at me. “Ten times ten of them. But without their rockers and with faces such as you.”
“Centaurs,” Sara said.
“Playing,” panted Hoot. “In depression in the hills. Playing at game. Knocking sphere about with sticks.”
“Centaurs playing polo,” Sara said, enchanted. “What could be more appropriate!”
She reached up to brush the truant lock of hair out of her eyes and watching her, I caught a glimpse again of the girl who had met me in the hallway of that old house back on Earth-as she had looked before the dust and wear of travel on this planet had blunted the sharp edge of her beauty.
“Understand do I,” said Hoot, “that you seek for them. Glad I be to find them.”
“Thank you, Hoot,” said Sara.
I reached down and picked up my pack and shrugged into the harness.
“Lead on, Hoot,” I said.
“Do you think,” asked Sara, “that the centaurs still might have the brain case? They might have lost it or broken it or used it up some way.”
“We’ll know,” I said, “when we talk with them.”
“What about his memory?” she asked. “If we get the case and put it into him, will the memory still be there? Will he remember as well as when it was taken out of him?”
“The memory won’t be lost,” I assured her. “Everthing he ever knew will still be there. It’s the way a robotic brain is made. They don’t forget like people.”
There was a chance, of course, that there’d be more than one tribe of centaurs on the planet, that there might be many tribes of them, and that this one up ahead, engaged in their polo playing, would not be the tribe that had Roscoe’s brain case. But I didn’t mention this to her.
There was a chance as well they’d not be interested in parting with it. Although I couldn’t imagine what earthly good a robotic brain case would be to anyone unless they had a robot.
When we neared the top of the hill beyond the one down which Hoot had scrambled to bring us word, he whispered to us that the centaurs were just beyond the bill.
I’m not sure why we did it, for no one passed the word to do it, but we all scrooched down when we neared the top of the hill and peeked over it.
Below us lay a wide flat area of sand and scrawny vegetation and beyond that little area the red and yellow of the desert lay, with the badlands formations finally petering out.
Hoot had been wrong in his counting of them. There were many more than ten times ten. The bulk of them were ranged solidly around a rectangular playing field, which was a playing field only by the virtue of a game being played upon it. It was a level chunk of desert, with two rows of white stones serving as goals. Upon the field a dozen centaurs were involved in furious action, long clubs clutched in their hands, fighting for the possession of a ball, whacking it back and forth-a rude and very elemental version of the noble game of polo.
Even as we watched, however, the, game came to an end. The players trotted off the field and the crowd began breaking up.
Beyond the polo field a few tents were set up, although one should not have called them tents. They were simply large squares of some sort of dirty fabric supported by poles thrust into the ground, designed perhaps for nothing more than shelter from the sun. Here and there among the shelters were piles of packs, probably containing the few possessions of the tribe.
The centaurs were milling about, with no seeming purpose, exactly as a crowd of people on an aimless holiday would mill around.
“What do we do now?” asked Sara. “Just walk down to them?”
Tuck came out of his trance. “Not all of us,” he said. “Just one.”
“And I suppose that’s you,” I said, half-kidding.
“Of course it’s me,” said Tuck. “If anyone is going to get killed, I’m the candidate.”
“I don’t think,” said Sara, “that they’d just up and kill someone.”
“That’s what you think,” I said.
“Let’s look at it logically,” said Tuck, in that dirty supercilious way of his that made you want to belt him. “Of all of us, I am the least likely to get killed. I am a humble-looking person, very inoffensive and with no bluster in me and probably not appearing quite right in the head. And I have this brown robe and I don’t wear shoes, but sandals. . .”
“Those babies down there,” I told him, “don’t know a thing about brown robes or sandals. And they could care less if you were bright or stupid. If they feel like killing someone. . .”
“But you can’t know that,” said Sara. “They might be friendly people.”
“Do they look friendly to you?”
“No, I guess they don’t,” she said, “although you can’t tell just by looking at them. But Tuck may have something going for him. Maybe they don’t know about brown robes and sandals, but maybe they could sense a simple soul. They might see right off he isn’t dangerous but is filled with kindly thoughts.”
And I was thinking all th
e time she was saying this that she must have someone else in mind, for it couldn’t be our Tuck.
“I’m the one to go, by God,” I said. “So let’s just cut out this jabbering and I’ll go on down there. They’d mop up the place with Tuck.”
“I don’t suppose they would with you,” she said. “You’re damned right they wouldn’t. I know how to handle. . .”
“Captain,” said Tuck, “why don’t you ever listen to reason? You just go popping off. You got to be the big shot. Consider just two things. What I said I meant. They might not clobber me because I’m a different kind of man than you are. There wouldn’t be the satisfaction of taking off on me there’d be in taking off on you. There isn’t too much fun in killing or in beating up someone who is pitiful and weak and if I only put my mind to it, I can look awful pitiful and weak. And the other thing is this-you’re needed more than I am. If something happened to me it wouldn’t make much difference, but it would make a lot of difference to this expedition if you went down there and got yourself knocked off.”
I stared at him, aghast that he had had the guts to say what he’d just said. “You mean all this foolishness?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” ‘he said. “What did you think, that I was just grandstanding? Did you think I thought you wouldn’t let me go and no matter what I said, I wouldn’t have to go, that I would be safe?”
I didn’t answer him, but he was right. That was exactly what I’d thought.
“Whoever goes,” said Sara, “will have to ride Old Paint. The kind of things they are, they’d have more respect for you if you were riding Paint. And another thing, Paint could get you out of there if the situation started going bad.”
“Mike,” honked Hoot, “the holy one speaks vivid sort of sense.”
“It’s all damn foolishness,” I told them. “I’m the one who is supposed to take the risks. I’m being paid for it.”
“Mike,” said Sara, sharply, “stop being infantile. Someone has to go down there-I might even be the one. There are three of us, not counting Hoot, and we can’t send him down there. It must be one of us. So let’s just marshal all the angles. . .”
“But it’s not just going down to face them,” I protested. “We also have to bargain for the brain case. Tuck would get it all screwed up.”
We crouched, glaring at one another.
“Toss a coin,” I growled. “Would you settle for a toss?”
“A coin only has two sides,” said Sara.
“That’s enough,” I said. “You’re out of this. It’s either Tuck or I.”
“No coin,” said Tuck. “I’m the one who’s going.” Sara looked at me. “I think we should let him go,” she said. “He wants to. He is willing. He will do all right.”
“The bargaining?” I asked.
“We want the robot’s brain case,” said Tuck. “We’ll give almost anything for it if we have to give it and. . .”
“Up to and including the rifle,” said Sara.
I blew up at her. “Not the rifle! We may need that rifle badly. It’s the only thing we have.”
“We need the brain case, too,” said Sara. “Without it we are sunk. And we may not need the rifle. Since we’ve been here I have fired it once and even that once was a senseless piece of business.
“There were the men back in the gully.”
She shrugged. “They had weapons. How much good did the weapons do them?”
“All I can do,” said Tuck, “is to find if they have the case and if they’d be willing to let loose of it. The actual bargaining will come later. We can all take part in it.”
“All right,” I said.
Let him go ahead and make a mess of it. If he did maybe we could give up this silly hunt for Lawrence Arlen Knight and try to figure out how to get off this planet. Although I had only the most foggy of ideas how to go about it.
I walked over to Paint and unloaded him, piling the water tins to the side of the trail and draping Roscoe’s limp metal body over them.
“All right, sport,” I said to Tuck.
He walked over and got into the saddle. He looked down at me and held down his hand. I took it and there was more strength in those long, lean fingers than I had thought there’d be.
“Good luck,” I said to him, and then Paint went galloping over the hilltop, heading down the trail. We peeked over the hilltop, watching.
I had said good luck to him and meant it. God knows, the poor damn fool would need all the luck there was.
Somehow he looked small and pitiful, bouncing along on the hobby’s back, the hood pulled up around his face and his robe fluttering behind him.
The trail turned and dipped and we lost sight of him, but in a few minutes he reappeared, riding across the flat toward the milling centaurs. Someone in the milling crowd caught sight of him and a shout went up. All the centaurs spun around to look at him and the milling stopped.
This is it, I thought, and I was watching so hard that I held my breath. In another second they might rush him and that would be the end of it. But they didn’t rush him; they just stood and looked.
Paint went rocking forward, Tuck bouncing on him like a doll clothed in a scrap of brown cloth. And that doll of his, I thought...
“What about the doll?” I whispered to Sara. I don’t know why I whispered. It was foolish of me. I could have shouted and that herd of centaurs would not have paid attention. They were busy watching Tuck. “What about the doll? Did he leave it here?”
“No,” she said, “he took it with him. He tucked it underneath the belt and pulled the belt up tight to hold it.”
“For the love of Christ!” I said.
“You keep thinking,” he said, “that it is just a doll, that there’s something wrong with him to carry it around. But there isn’t. He sees something in it you and I can’t see. It’s not just a good luck charm, like a rabbit’s foot. It’s a good deal more than that. I’ve watched him with it. He handles it tenderly and reverently. As if it were religious. A Madonna, maybe.”
I scarcely heard the last of what she had to say, for Paint was getting close to the herd of centaurs and was slowing down. Finally, fifty feet or so from them, the hobby stopped and stood waiting. Tuck sat there like a lump. He hadn’t raised his hand in a peaceful gesture. He hadn’t done a thing; he’d just ridden up to them, sitting on Old Paint like a lumpy sack.
I looked around. Sara had the glasses trained on the flat.
“Is he talking to them,” I asked.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “He has the hood pulled up around his face.”
It was all to the good, I told myself. They hadn’t killed him out of hand. There might still be hope.
Two of the centaurs trotted out to meet him, maneuvering so there’d be one on each side of him.
“Here,” said Sara, handing me the glasses.
Through them I could see nothing of Tuck except the back of that pulled-up hood, but could plainly see the faces of the two centaurs. They were the faces of tough and strong-willed men, brutal faces. They were far more humanoid than I had expected them to be. They had the appearance of listening to Tuck and from time to time one or the other of them seemed to make short replies. Then, suddenly, they were laughing, great shouts of uproarious laughter, taunting, contemptuous laughter, and behind them the herd took up the laughter.
I put down the glasses and crouched there, listening to the distant booming of that mass laughter which echoed in the twisted hills and gullies.
Sara made a wry face at me. “I wonder what is happening,” she said.
“Old Tuck,” I told her, “has mulled it once again.”
The laughter quieted and died away and once again the two centaurs were talking with Tuck. I handed the glasses back to Sara. I could see as much as I wanted to see without the help of them.
One of the centaurs swung about and shouted to someone in the crowd. For a moment the three of them seemed to be waiting, then one of the centaurs in the crowd trotted out, c
arrying something that glittered in the sunlight.
“What is it?” I asked Sara, who had the glasses up.
“It’s a shield,” she said. “And there seems to be a belt of some sort. Now I can see. It’s a belt and sword. They’re giving them to Tuck.”
Paint was wheeling about and heading back, the sunlight glinting off the shield and sword that Tuck held in front of him in the saddle. And back on the flat, the centaurs again were hooting with mocking laughter. It rolled in upon us, wave after wave of sound and out on the flat Paint built up sudden speed. He was running like a startled rabbit. When he disappeared from view, the two of us sat back and looked at one another.
“We’ll soon know,” I said.
“I’m afraid,” said Sara, “that it won’t be good. Maybe we made a mistake. You were the one to go, of course. But he wanted to, so badly.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why did the poor fool want to go? Mock heroics? This is no time, I tell you. . .”
She shook her head. “Not mock heroics. Something more complicated than that. Tuck is a complex sort of person . . .”
“There’s something eating on him,” I said. “I’d like to know what it is.”
“He doesn’t think the way you and I do,” she said. “He sees things differently. There is something driving him. Not a physical something. Nothing physical like fear or ambition or envy. A mystical force of some sort. I know. You’ve always thought he was just another religico. Another faker. One of that wandering tribe that takes on pretended religious attributes to cover up their strangeness. But I tell you he isn’t. I’ve known him a lot longer than you have. . .”
Paint came plunging over the hilltop and, setting his rockers, skidded to a halt. Tuck, sagging in the saddle, let go of the shield and sword belt and they clattered to the ground.
Tuck sat there and stared at us, half-paralyzed.
“What about the brain case?” Sara asked. “Have they got it?”
Tuck nodded.
“Will they trade it?”
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