She leaped to her feet and her hand swung in a vicious arc and caught me in the face.
I grinned at her. “We’re even now,” I said.
TWENTY-ONE
We turned back, traveling down the trail that we had used in coming, back across that great blue land of high plateau, with the purple mountains looming up behind us.
I had expected Sara to raise a fuss about it. I was not sure that she believed what I had told her; how could she? All she had was my word for it and I was not certain how much reliance she would put upon my word. She had seen none of what I’d seen. So far as she was concerned, the valley still was a shining place, with a flashing stream and bright white sunlight, with the marble villas still perched among the crags. If she were to go back, I was sure, it would all be there for her, unchanged. The enchantment still was working for her.
We had no plans. We had no place to go. Certainly there was no incentive to reach the desert we had crossed. The great white city had no attraction for us. I don’t know what Hoot or Sara might have been thinking. I know that for myself the only thought was to build up some distance between ourselves and that gateway to the valley.
I had forgotten the blueness of the high plateau with its mossy hummocks, its thickets of sweet-smelling shrubs, the icy rills and, towering in every direction, the trees that reached miles into the sky. If one looked for a reason why this planet should be closed, or intended to be closed, I felt that one must look toward those towering trees. For they were clearly the handiwork of another intelligence. Trees, seeding naturally, do not grow in a grid arrangement, each one exactly so far from its nearest neighbor. One tended to become accustomed to them after a time, but this was only, I was well aware, because the mind, tired of fruitless speculation, turned them off, rejecting them as a way of preserving itself against the devastating question mark of wonder written by the trees.
That night, beside the campfire, we tried to put into perspective the situation which confronted us.
There seemed no hope we could get into the spaceship which stood on the field in the center of the city. At least two dozen other ships also stood upon the field. In all the years they’d stood there others must have tried to crack them, but there was no evidence they had.
And what had happened to those other people, those other creatures, that had ridden in the ships? We knew, of course, what had happened to the humanoids whose skeletons we’d found in the gully. We could speculate that the centaurs might be retrogressed out-planet creatures which, centuries ago had landed on the field. The planet was large, with more land surface than the Earth, and there was plenty of space in which other stranded travelers might have found a living niche and settled down. Some of them might be living in the city, although that seemed doubtful because of the killing vibrations which swept the city whenever a ship should land. And there was, as well, the consideration that many expeditions might have consisted only of male members of a species, which would mean there’d be no continuation. Marooned, they’d simply die and that would be the end of it.
“There’s one more possibility,” said Sara. “Some of them may be back there in the valley. We know that Knight made it. Some of the others, perhaps many of the others, might have made it, too.”
I nodded, agreeing with her. It was the final trap. If a visitor did not perish in reaching it, then there was the valley. Once in it, no one would get out. It was the perfect trap in that no one would ever want to leave it. Although there could be no seeking what Lawrence Arlen Knight had sought-and what we had sought. They might have come for reasons quite unknown to us.
“You are sure,” asked Sara, “that you really saw what you say you saw?”
“I don’t know what I can do,” I told her, “to make you believe me. Do you think I threw it all away? To spite you, maybe? Don’t you think I might have been a little happy, too? Maybe, being a suspicious sort of clown, not as happy as you were, but after all those miles. . .”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “You had no reason to. But why you alone? Why not me? I did not see these things.”
“Hoot explained all that,” I told her. “He could alert only one of us. And he alerted me. . .”
“A part of me is Mike,” said Hoot. “We owe one another life. A bond there is between us. His mind is always with me. We be almost one.”
“One,” said Roscoe solemnly, “done, fun, gun...”
“Cease your clack,” said Paint. “No sense at all you make.”
“Fake,” said Roscoe.
“The almost human one,” said Hoot, “tries, to talk with us.
“His brain is addled,” I said. “That’s what is wrong with him. The centaurs. . .”
“No,” said Hoot. “He attempts communication.”
I hunched around and stared up at Roscoe. He stood straight and rigid, the flare of firelight on his metal hide. And I remembered how, back there in the badlands, when we had asked a question, he had signaled that we should travel north. Did he, in fact, still understand? Was there something he could tell us if he could put it into words?
I said to Hoot, “Can you dig it out of him?”
“It beyond my power,” said Hoot.
“Don’t you understand,” Sara said to me, “that there is no use trying. We’re not going to get back to Earth; or anywhere. We are staying on this planet.”
“There is one thing we could try,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I thought of it, too... The other worlds. The worlds like the sand dune world. There must be hundreds of them.”
“Out of all those hundreds, there might be. . .”
She shook her head. “You underestimate the people who built the city and set out the trees. They knew what they were doing. Every one of those worlds would be as isolated as this world. Those worlds were chosen for a purpose. . .”
“Have you ever thought,” I argued, “that one of them might be the home planet of the folks who built the city?”
“No, I never have,” she said. “But what difference would it make? They’d squash you like a bug.”
“Then what do we do?” I asked.
“I could go back to the valley,” she said. “I didn’t see what you saw. I wouldn’t see what you saw.”
“That’s all right for you,” I said, “if that’s the kind of life you want to live.”
“What difference would it make?” she asked. “I wouldn’t know what kind of life it was. It would be real enough. How would it be any different than the life we’re living now? How do we know it isn’t the kind of life we’re living now? How do you judge reality?”
There was, of course, no answer to her questions. There was no way in which one could prove reality. Lawrence Arlen Knight had accepted the pseudo-life, the unreality of the valley, living in delusion, imagining an ideal life with as much force and clarity as if it had been real. But that was for Knight; easy, perhaps, for all the other residents of the valley, for they did not know what was going on. I found myself wondering what sort of fantasy had been invoked within his mind to explain our precipitate departure from his living place. Something, naturally, that would not upset him, that would not interrupt, for a single instant, the dream in which he lived.
“It’s all right for you,” I said, limply, beaten. “I couldn’t go back.”
We sat silently by the fire, all talked out, nothing more to say. There was no use in arguing with her. She didn’t really mean it. In the morning she would have forgotten it and good sense would prevail. We’d be on our way again. But on our way to where?
“Mike,” she finally said.
“Yes, what is it?”
“It could have been good between us if we had stayed on Earth. We are two of a kind. We could have gotten on.”
I glanced up sharply. Her face was lighted by the flicker of the fire and there was a strange softness in it.
“Forget it,” I said angrily. “I make it a rule never to make a pass at my employer.”
I expect
ed her to be furious, but she wasn’t. She didn’t even wince.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” she said. “You know what I mean. This trip spoiled it for us. We found out too much about one another. Too many things to hate. I am sorry, Mike.”
“So am I,” I said.
In the morning she was gone.
TWENTY-TWO
I stormed at Hoot. “You were awake. You saw her go. You could have wakened me.”
“For why?” he asked. “What the use of waking? You would not have stopped her.”
“I’d beaten some sense into that stubborn skull of hers.”
“Stop her you would not,” Hoot maintained. “She but follow destiny and no one’s destiny another’s destiny and no interference please. George, his destiny his own. Tuck, his destiny his own. Sara, her destiny her own. My destiny my own.”
“The hell with destiny!” I yelled. “Look at what it got them. George and Tuck both disappeared and now I got to go and yank Sara out of. . .”
“No yank,” honked Hoot, puffing with anger. “That you must not do. Understanding you miss. It is of yours no business.”
“But she sneaked out on us.”
“She did not sneak,” said Hoot. “She tell me where she go. She take Paint to ride, but pledge to send him back. She left the rifle and what you call the ammo. She say you have need of it. She say she cannot bear to make farewell of you. She crying when she left.”
“She ran out on us,” I said.
“So did George run out. So did Tuck.”
“Tuck and George don’t count,” I said.
“My friend,” said Hoot. “My friend, I crying for you, too.”
“Cut out the goddamn sentiment,” I yelled at him. “You’ll have me bawling with you.”
“And that so bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad,” I said.
“I have hope to wait,” said Hoot.
“Wait for what?” I asked. “Wait for Sara? Not that you can notice. I am going back and...”
“Not for Sara. For myself. I have hope to wait, but I can wait no longer.”
“Hoot, stop talking riddles. What is going on?”
“I leave you now,” said Hoot. “Stay I can no longer. I in my second self for long, must go third self now.”
“Look,” I said, “you’ve been blubbering around about the different numbers of yourself ever since we met.”
“Three phases,” Hoot declared. “Start with first self, then second self, then third.”
“Wait a minute, there,” I told him. “You mean like a butterfly, First a caterpillar, then a chrysalis, then a. . .”
“I know not this butterfly.”
“But in your lifetime you are three things?”
“Second self a little longer, perhaps,” said Hoot, sadly, “if not flip momentarily into third self to see in rightness this Lawrence Knight of yours.”
“Hoot,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“For sorrow is no need,” said Hoot. “Third self is joyousness. To be much desired. Look forward to third self with overwhelming happiness.”
‘Well, hell,” I said, “if that is all it is go ahead into your third self. I won’t mind at all.”
“Third self is awayness,” Hoot told me. “Is not here. Is elsewhere. How to explain I do not know. I am sorrow for you, Mike. I sorrow for myself. I sorrow at our parting. You give me life. I give you life. We have a very closeness. Hard trails we travel side by side. We speak with more than words. I’d share this third life with you, but is not possible.”
I took a step forward and stumbled on my knees. I held out my hands toward him and his tentacle reached out and engulfed my hands and gripped them hard and in that moment that hands and tentacles closed together and held, I was one with this friend of mine. For an instant I probed into the blackness and the glory of his being and caught a glimpse- or many glimpses-of what he knew, what he remembered, what he hoped, what he dreamed, what ho was, the purpose of him (although I am not sure I really caught a purpose), the unreal, shocking, almost incomprehensive structure of his society and the faint, blurred, rainbowed edges of its mores. It flooded in upon my mind and overwhelmed it in a roaring storm of information, sense, emotion, outrage, happiness, and wonder.
For an instant only, then it was gone, and the hand grip and Hoot himself. I was kneeling, with my two hands held out and there was nothing there. My brain ached with coldness and I could feel the fine bead of sweat that had started on my forehead and I was as close to nothingness as I bad ever been, as I could ever be and still remain a human. I knew that I existed, perhaps with a sharper and a finer sense of existing than had ever been the case before, but I don’t believe I remembered where I was, for in that linking contact I had been in too many places to sort out any single place and I did not think-I simply hung there, my mind in neutral, crammed with so much that was new that all mentality was clogged.
How long it lasted, I don’t know, probably only for a moment, although it seemed much longer than a moment-and then, with a sharp suddenness, with the sort of jolt one experiences when hitting a hard surface after a long fall, I came back to myself and the high blue world and that stupid-looking robot standing rigidly beside the burned-out campfire.
I staggered to my feet and looked about me and tried to remember what had, until that instant, been crowded in my brain and it all was gone, all the details of it, covered over by the present and my humanity as a flash flood will cover the pebbles lying in the dry bottom of an ancient creek bed. It all was there, or at least some of it was there, for I could sense it lying there beneath the flash flood of my humanity. And I wondered, vaguely, as I stood there, if this burial of the matters transmitted by my friend might not be for my own protection, if my mind, in a protective reflex action, had covered it and blanked it out in a fight for sanity. And I wondered what it was my inner self might know that I no longer knew-surely there was nothing I could remember now which seemed so dangerous that I could not be allowed to know it.
I stumbled over to the fire and hunkered down beside it. Picking up a stick of firewood, I stirred the ashes and at their heart, buried deeply, I came upon a still glowing lump of fire. Carefully I fed tiny slivers to it and a pale ribbon of smoke curled up and in a moment a tiny flame began to flicker.
I crouched there, in the silence, watching and nourishing the flame, bringing the fire of the night before back to careful life. I could bring back the fire, I thought, but nothing else. Of the night before nothing now remained except myself and the hulking robot. It had come to this, I thought. Of four humans and an alien, there was but one human left. I wavered close to self-pity, but brought myself sharply back from it. Hell, I’d been in tight jams before. I’d been alone before-in fact, I usually was alone. So this was nothing new. George and Tuck were gone and no tears shed over them. Hoot was gone and there might be tears for him-no, not for him, but rather for myself, for he had changed somehow, in some way I could not understand, into a better form of life, to exist on a higher plane of sentience. The one who mattered, I knew, the only one who really mattered, was Sara and she, as well as Hoot, had gone where she’d wished to go.
With a sense of shock I realized that George and Tuck also had gone where they’d wished to go. Everyone had had a place to go-all except myself.
But what, I asked of myself, of Sara? I could go down into the valley and drag her out, kicking and screaming. Or I could sit around a while and wait for her to come to her senses and come back by herself (which, I told myself, would be a waste of time, for she never would). Or I could simply say the hell with it and go stumping down the trail, heading for the city.
I could take the latter course, I argued with myself, with no particular sense of guilt. Certainly any responsibility had been amply discharged. I had fulfilled my part of the bargain. And it had, come to think of it, come out a whole lot better than I had ever thought it would. It had been a wild-goose chase after all; there really had been a Lawrence Arlen Knight an
d there was a place that he had been seeking. All the others had been right and I had been wrong and maybe that was why I was sitting out here all by myself, with no place in particular that I was hunting for.
There was a metallic clanging and when I looked up I saw that Roscoe had moved over and was squatting down beside me-as if, since there was no one else, he was willing to be a pal to me.
When he had gotten squatted comfortably, he reached out a hand and with his flattened palm smoothed out a dusty spot beside the fire, half dust, half ash. There was a sprig of some sort of grass still remaining, wilted by the heat of last night’s fire, and he reached out carefully with thumb and forefinger and uprooted it, then smoothed the area once again.
I watched in fascination. I wondered what he might be about, but there was no use to ask. He’d just spout some gibberish at me.
He stuck out a forefinger neatly and made a squiggly line in the dust and followed that with other marks that, if not entirely squiggly, certainly made no sense. As I watched, it seemed that he was writing a mathematical or chemical formula of some sort-not that I could make any reason of it, but some of the symbols he was writing I had seen before in leafing through a scientific journal in an idle moment.
I could hold in no longer and I yelled at him, “What the hell is that?”
“That,” he said, “cat, rat, vat, pat, mat, sat,” and then suddenly he was talking, not in rhyme, but still, so far as I was concerned, in gibberish: “Valence bond wave function equals product of antisymmetric spatial wave functions times symmetric wave functions times spin function of both antisymmetric and symmetric wave functions. . .”
“Wait just a goddamn minute,” I yelped at him. “What is going on? You talk like Mother Goose one minute and now you’re talking like a prof. . .”
“Prof,” he said, happily and solemnly, “scoff, doff, cough...”
But he went on writing that lingo in the dust. Writing steadily, with never any hesitation, as if he knew what he was doing and exactly what it meant. He filled the place he’d smoothed with symbols, then wiped it clean and smoothed it out again, and continued with his writing.
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