It was all insane, of course. You did not cross a galaxy to find a man-and find him. You did not find a man who should have years ago been dead. You did not trace a legend to its end. But there it was, the sign that said Lawrence Arlen Knight.
And then, as I stood there, the thought crossed my mind-not the home of, but the grave of, not a villa, but a tomb.
“Sara,” I said, but already she was scrambling up the path, sobbing in excitement and relief, all the tension of the long search resolved at last.
And coming out on the porch of that white-shining structure was a man-an old man, but a man still hale, snow-white hair and beard, but with shoulders still unstooped, with his stride still steady. He was dressed in a white toga, and that was no surprise at all. With a setup such as this he could have worn nothing but a toga.
“Sara!” I cried, scrambling after her, with Hoot close upon my heels.
She didn’t hear. She paid me no attention.
And now the old man was speaking. “Visitors!” he said, holding out his hand. “My own people! I never thought I’d lay eyes on such again.”
The sound of that voice swept all my doubts away. Here was no illusion, no apparition, no magic. Here was a man, a human, the voice deep and somber, filled with human gladness at the sight of fellowmen.
Sara held out her hands and the old man grasped them and the two of them stood there, looking into one another’s eyes.
“It’s been long,” the old man said. “Too long. The trail is far, the way is hard and no one knew. You-how did you know?”
“Sir,” said Sara, still gasping from her climb, “you are- you must be Lawrence Arlen Knight.”
“Why, yes,” he said, “of course I am. Who did you expect?”
“Expect?” said Sara. “You, of course. But we could only hope.”
“And these good people with you?”
“Captain Michael Ross,” said Sara, “and Hoot, a good friend met along the way.”
Knight bowed to Hoot. “You servant, sir,” he said. Then he reached out a hand to me, grasping my hand in a warm, hard grip. In that moment, when there were other more important things to note, I could only see that his hand, despite the firmness of the grip, was an old and wrinkled hand, blotched with liver spots.
“Captain Ross,” he said, “you are welcome. There are places here for you, for all of you. And this young lady-I do not have your name.”
“Sara Foster,” Sara said.
“To think,” he said, “that no longer need I be alone. Wonderful as it all has been, I have missed the sound of human voices and the sight of human faces. There are many others here, creatures of great character and fine sensitivity, but one never quite outgrows the need of his own species.”
“How long have you been here?” I asked, trying to figure in my mind how far back the legend of this man might run.
“When a man lives each day to the full,” he told me, “and with the close of one day looks forward to the next, there is no counting of one’s times each day, each minute becomes a part of all eternity. I have thought about it and I am not sure there is such a thing as time. It is an abstract concept, a crude measuring device, a perspective structure built up by certain intelligences, and by no means all of them, because they feel a need to place themselves into what they call a spacetime framework. Time as such is lost in foreverness and there is no need to search for beginning or for end because they never did exist and under a situation such as here exists the meticulous measuring of ridiculously small slices of eternity becomes a task that has no meaning in it. Not, I must make haste to say, that one can slice eternity. . .”
He went on and on and I wondered, looking off across the valley from where I stood on the marble-columned porch, if he were unbalanced by his loneliness, or he might know some part of what he said. For this place, this valley that sprang out of nowhere, did have a look of eternity about it. Although as I thought this, I wondered how any man might know how eternity would look-but be that as it may, there was a feel of the unchanging in this place of bright white sunlight.
“But I ramble on,” the old man was saying. “The trouble is I have too much to say, too much stored up to say. Although there is no reason why I should try to say it all at once. I apologize for keeping you out here, standing. Won’t you please come in.”
We stepped through the open doorway into quiet and classic elegance. There were no windows, but from somewhere in the roof the sunlight came slanting in, to highlight with a classic brilliance the chairs and sofa, the writing desk with a small wooden chest and scattered sheets of paper on its top, the polished tea service on the smaller table in one corner.
“Please,” he said, “have chairs. I hope that you can spend some time with me.” (And there, I thought, he talked of time when he had said there might be no such thing as time.) “And that is foolish of me, of course, for you have the time. You hold in the hollow of your hand all the time there is. Having gotten here, there is no place else to go, no place else that you would care to go. Once one gets here, he never wants to leave, never needs to leave.”
It was all too sleek and smooth, too much like a play, well-written, and yet there was nothing wrong with it-just an old and lonely man with the gates of suppressed talk unlatched by the unexpected appearance of people of his race. Yet, underneath it all, underneath my own acceptance of this place and of this man (for here were both of them), I felt a prickling uneasiness.
“There are places here for you, of course,” he said. “There are always places waiting. Very few even win their way here and there is always room. In another day or two I’ll take you around and we’ll call upon the others. Very formal calls, for we are formal here. But the thing about it, the best thing, is that once protocol has been observed, you need not call again, although you may find some of them you’ll want to visit now and then. Here dwells a select company called from all the stars and some may be amusing and others you will find instructive and there will be much that they do, I must warn you, you will not understand. And some of it you may find disturbing and disgusting. Which need not perturb you in the slightest, for each one keeps his counsel and his place and. . .”
“What is this place?” asked Sara. “How did you hear of it? How did you. . .”
“What is this place?” he asked, with a muffled gasp.
“Yes, what is this place? What do you call it?”
“Why,” he said, “I’ve never even wondered. I’ve never thought of it. I have never asked.”
“You mean,” I said, “that you have been here all this time and you’ve never wondered where you were?”
He looked at me aghast, as if I had committed some unwitting heresy.
“What would be the need to ask?” he said. “What the need to wonder? Would it make any difference if it had a name or did not have a name?”
“We are sorry,” Sara said. “We are new here. We did not mean to upset you.”
And that was all right for her to say, but I had meant to upset him and in the process perhaps jar some sense from him. If this were a nameless place I wanted, illogically perhaps, to know why it had no name and, even more, how it had come about he had never asked the name.
“You said the days were full,” I said. “Exactly how do you fill them? How do you pass the time?”
“Mike!” said Sara sharply.
“I want to know,” I said. “Does he sit and contemplate his navel. Does he. . .”
“I write,” said Lawrence Arlen Knight.
“Sir,” said Sara, “I, apologize. This cross-examination is bad manners.”
“Not for me,” I told her. “I am the roughneck type who wants to get some answers. He says no one who gets here ever wants to leave. He said the days are full. If we are to be stuck here, I want to know. . .”
“Each one,” Knight said softly, “does what he wants to do. He does it for the sheer joy that he finds in the doing of it. He has no motive other than the satisfaction of doing very well either t
he thing he wants to do or the thing he does the best. There is no economic pressure and no social pressure. He does not work for praise or money or for fame. Here one realizes how empty all those motives are. He remains true only to himself.”
“And you write?”
“I write,” said Knight.
“What do you write?”
“The things I want to write. The thoughts inside myself. I try to express them as best I can. I write and rewrite them. I polish them. I seek the exact word and phrase. I try to put down the total experience of my life. I try to see what kind of creature I am and why I am the way I am and try to extend. . .”
“And how are you getting along?” I asked.
He gestured at the wooden box upon the table. “It is all there,” he said. “The bare beginning of it. It has taken long, but it is a task I never tire of. It will take much longer to finish it, if I ever finish it. Although that is silly of me to say, for I have all the time there is. Others may paint, still others compose music, others play it. Or many other things, of which I had never heard before. One of my near neighbors, a most peculiar creature if I may say so, is making up a most complicated game, played with many sets of pieces and many different counters on a board that is three dimensional and, at times, I suspect it may be four, and. . .”
“Stop it!” Sara cried. “Stop it! You need not explain yourself to us.”
She shriveled me with a look.
“I do not mind,” said Lawrence Arlen Knight. “In fact, I think I may enjoy it. There is so much to tell, so much that is so wondrous. I can quite understand how someone coming here might be puzzled and might have many questions ,he would want to ask. It is a difficult thing to absorb.”
“Mike,” said Hoot.
“Hush,” said Sara.
“Difficult,” said Knight. “Yes, very difficult. Hard to understand that here time stands still and that except for the going and the coming of the light, which fools us into measuring time into artificial days, there is no such thing as time. To realize that yesterday is one with today and that tomorrow is, as well, one with yesterday, that one walks in an unchanging lake of foreverness and that there is no change, that here one can escape the tyranny of time and. . .”
Hoot honked loudly at me: “Mike!”
Sara came to her feet and so did I and as I rose, the place changed-the place and man.
I stood in a hovel with a broken roof and dirt floor. The chairs were rickety and the table, lacking one leg, was propped against the wall. On it stood the wooden box and the litter of papers.
“It is beyond human experience,” said Knight. “It is, indeed, beyond human imagination. I sometimes wonder if someone in some distant age, by some process which I cannot even begin to understand, caught a glimpse and the meaning of this place and called it Heaven. . .”
He was old. He was incredibly old and filthy, a walking corpse. The skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones and pulled back from his lips, revealing yellowed, rotting teeth. Through a great rent in his robe, caked with filth, his ribs stood out like those of a winter-starved horse. His hands were claws. His beard was matted with dirt and drool and his hooded eyes gleamed with a vacant light, eyes half-dead and yet somehow sharp, too sharp to be housed in such an ancient, tottering body.
“Sara,” I shouted.
For she was standing in complete and polite absorption, listening ecstatically to the words mouthed by the filthy old wreck who sat huddled in his chair.
She whirled on me. “For the last time, Mike. . .”
By the look of cold fury on her face, I knew that she still saw him as he had appeared before, that the change was not apparent to her, that she still was trapped in whatever enchantment had ensnared us.
I moved fast, scarcely thinking. I clipped her on the chin, hard and accurately and without pity, and I caught her as she fell. I slung her over my shoulder and as I did I saw that Knight was struggling to push himself out of the chair and even as he continued his efforts, his mouth kept moving and he never stopped his talk.
“What is the trouble, my friends?” he asked. “Have I done some unwitting thing to offend you? It is so hard at times to know and appreciate the mores of the people that one meets. It is easy to perform one misguided act or say one unguarded word...”
I turned to go and as I did I saw that wooden box on the table top and reached out to grab it.
Hoot was pleading with me. “Mike, delay do not. Stand not on ceremony. Flee, please, with all alacrity.”
We fled with all alacrity.
TWENTY
We made good time, not looking back. I did look back, for an instant only, before we plunged into the canyonlike cleft between the soaring rocks that led back to the gateway.
Sara came to and screamed at me, kicking and beating at my back with clenched fists, but I hung tightly to her with one arm, holding her against my shoulder. In the other arm, I clutched the wooden box I had lifted from the table.
Still running, we reached the end of the canyon. Roscoe and Paint stood exactly as we had left them. Sara’s rifle leaned against the rocky wail and my sword and shield lay beside them.
I dumped Sara on the ground with no ceremony. I had taken quite a beating from her flailing feet and fists, and was not feeling exactly kindly toward her and was glad to be rid of her.
She landed on her rump and stayed sitting there, looking up at me, her face white with fury, her jaws working, but so sore at me that she could form no word but one, “You- you-you,” she kept saying. It was probably the first time in her money-buttressed life that anyone had laid violent and disrespectful hands upon her.
I stood there, looking down at her, blown with my mad, frantic running up the valley and through the canyon, gulping air, weak in the knees, sore in the back and belly, where she had hammered me-and thinking of that one backward look I’d taken before I’d plunged into the canyon.
“You hit me!” she finally said screaming in her outrage.
She said it and waited for my answer. But I had no answer. I had no answer in my mind and no breath to speak an answer. I don’t know what she expected as an answer. Maybe she was hoping I’d deny it, so that she could berate me not only as a bully, but a liar, too.
“You hit me!” she screamed again.
“You’re damned right I did,” I said. “You didn’t see a thing. You would have argued with me. There was nothing else to do.”
She leaped to her feet and confronted me. “We found Lawrence Arlen Knight,” she yelled. “We found a wonderful, shining place. After all our traveling, we found what we set out to find and then. . .”
Hoot said, “Gracious lady, the fault belongs on me. I sensed it with the edges of my third self and I made Mike to see. Strength I did not have to make more than one of you to see. Not the second one. And I made Mike to see. . .”
She whirled on him. “You filthy beast!” she cried. She lashed out with her foot. The kick caught him in the side and bowled him over. He lay there, his tiny feet working like little pistons, trying frantically to right himself.
Then, swiftly, she was on her knees beside him. “Hoot,” she cried, “I’m sorry. Can you believe me, I am sorry. I am sorry and ashamed.” She set him on his feet.
She looked up at me. “Mike! Oh, Mike! What has happened to us?”
“Enchantment,” I said. “It’s the only thing I can think of that would cover it. Enchantment happened to us.”
“Kindly one,” Hoot said to her, “resentment I do not bear. Reaction of the foot was a natural one. I quite understand.”
“Stand,” said Roscoe, “band, grand, sand.”
“Shut up,” said Old Paint, gruffly. “You’ll drive us nuts with that gibberish.”
“It was all illusion,” I told her. “There were no marble villas. There were only filthy huts. The stream did not run free and shining; it was clogged with garbage from those huts. There was a terrible smell to it that caught you in the throat. And Lawrence Arlen Knight, if that is wh
o he was, was a walking corpse kept alive by God knows what alchemy.”
“Wanted here we’re not,” said Hoot.
“We are trespassers,” I said. “Once here we can’t go back to space because no one must know about this planet. We’re caught in a big fly trap. Once we came near we were tolled in to a landing by the signal. And finally we chased a myth and that myth was another fly trap-a trap within a trap.”
“But Lawrence Arlen Knight chased the myth back in the galaxy.”
“And so did we,” I said. “So did the humanoids who left their bones back in the gully. In some insect traps certain scents and odors are used to attract the insects, even from far off. And in many cases the scents and odors drift on the winds to very distant places. Read, instead of scent and odor, myth and legend. . .”
“But that man back there,” she said, “was happy and contented and so full of life and plans. His days were busy days and full. Knight or not, he was sure he’d reached the place that he had hunted.”
“What simpler way,” I asked, “to keep a life form where you want it than to make it happy where you put it?”
“You are sure?” she asked. “Sure of what you saw? Hoot could not have fooled you?”
“Fool him I did not,” said Hoot. “I make him see it straight.”
“But what difference would it make?” she asked. “If he is happy there. If he has purpose there. If life is meaningful and there is no such thing as time to rob it of its meaning. . .”
“You mean we could have stayed?”
She nodded. “He said there was a place for us. That there are always places. We could have settled down. We could have...”
“Sara,” I asked, “is that what you really want? To settle down in imagined happiness? Never to go back to Earth?”
She started to speak, then hesitated.
“You know damn well,” I said, “it isn’t. Back on Earth you have this house filled with hides and heads, with trophies of the hunt. The great huntress. The killer of the vicious life forms of the galaxy. They gave you social status, they made you a glamor figure. But there were too many of them. People began to yawn at them. They were getting bored with your adventures. So to keep on being glamorous, you had to hunt a different game. . .”
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