The Star Road

by Gordon R. Dickson

His own last words sent him off into a humorous cackle, which he stopped abruptly when he realized it was hurting his dry throat to laugh. He plodded along, trying to remember whether it was time for him to allow himself a drink. Finally, he worked out that it was time—in fact, it was past time. He allowed himself three sips of the recycled water. If he was correct, his shoulder tanks should still be about half full.

  But as he went on through the day and as his shadow shortened before him until the most glaring cloud light was directly overhead, he began to feel the effort of his labors, after all. He took advantage of the sunlight being overhead to rest for a little longer than usual, until XN-4010’s star should once more have moved ahead of him.

  It was still too high in the cloud-filled sky for him to use it as a directional guide, when he forced himself to his feet once more. But he walked with his faceplate looking ahead and down, noting the short shadows thrown backward by the rocks he passed and making sure that he walked parallel to those shadows.

  Meanwhile, the hobgoblin voices got louder. By midafternoon they were very nearly deafening. He was tempted to take a tranquilizer, which he knew would tune them down. But he was afraid that a tranquilizer would have just enough of a sedative effect to make the now almost intolerable job of carrying Plotch over the uneven ground too much for him.

  By the time the sun was far enough down the western sky to be visible as a bright spot behind the clouds ahead of him, he was staggering with fatigue. He stopped for one of his breaks and fell instantly asleep—waking over an hour later. It took two stim pills this time, washed down with several extra swallows of the precious water to get him on his feet and moving. But once he was upright he cackled at the hobgoblin voices which had once more thronged around him.

  “Just call me Iron Man Clancy!” he jeered at them hoarsely, through a raw throat and staggered on toward the horizon.

  At the end of the day, his pedometer showed that he had covered nearly sixteen miles. He exulted over this; and, exulting, fell into sleep the way a man might fall into a thousand-foot-deep mine shaft. When he woke, the next day was well started. The sun was a full quarter of the way up the eastern horizon.

  Cursing himself and Plotch both, he stimulated himself and struggled to his feet and set out once more. That day he began to walk into nightmares. The hobgoblin voices became quite clear—even if they still gibbered without sense—in his earphones. Moreover, now as he staggered along, it seemed to him that from time to time he caught glimpses of turnip heads and skinny limbs peering at him from time to time, or flickering out of sight when he glanced quickly in the direction of some boulder larger than the others.

  Also, this third day of walking, he found he had lost all logical track of the time and the periods of his rest halts. Several times he fell asleep during a halt in spite of himself; and, by the time the red furnace-glow of the sun was low behind the clouds on the horizon before him, he was simply walking until he could walk no more, then resting until he could walk again . . . and so on . . .

  At the end of the day the pedometer showed that, to the nearly sixteen miles covered the previous two days, he had added only seven. There was a good eight miles to go yet before he would be—theoretically at least—in the neighborhood of the spaceship.

  Eight miles seemed little after covering more than twenty. But also, it seemed to him, as he sank down for the night and unloaded Plotch from his shoulders, that the eight miles might as well be eight hundred. Literally, he felt as if he could not take another step. Without bothering to find a comfortable position, he stretched out on the bare rock beneath him; and sleep took him with the suddenness of a rabbit taken by the silent swoop of a great horned owl.

  —When he woke on the fourth day, he had Plotch on his

  shoulders and was already walking. It seemed to him that he had been walking for some time, and the moving shadow of himself projected before him, which he followed, was already short.

  Around him, the desert of bare rock had altered. Its loose boulders, its little rises and hollows, its fissures—all of these had somehow melted together and changed so that they made up the walls and rooftops of a strange weird city of low buildings, straggling in every direction to the horizon. The flat rock he walked on flowed upward off to his left to become a wall, tilted away to his right to become a roof; and among all these buildings, the city was aswarm with the hobgoblins.

  V

  Gray-bodied, turnip-headed and skinny-limbed, they swarmed the streets of their city; and all those within view of Clancy were concerned with him and Plotch. They were concerned for him, they implied, in their leering, jeering way. Their gibber still would not resolve itself into words; but somehow he understood that they were trying to tell him that the way he was going he would never make the spaceship. For one thing, he had gotten turned around and was headed in the wrong direction. His only hope of making it to the ship was to sit down and rest.—Or, at least, to leave Plotch behind, turn around and head back the way he had come. They were trying to help him, they suggested, even as they sniggered, and postured and danced about him. But somehow, a certain sort of animal cunning would not let him believe them.

  “No!” he stumbled on through their insubstantial mass of gesticulating bodies. “Got to get Plotch to the ship. If I leave him, he’ll get away from me.” Clancy giggled suddenly, and was shocked for a second at hearing the high-pitched sound within the close confines of his own helmet. “I want him back Earthside.”

  No! No! The hobgoblins gibbered and made faces and jostled about him. Plotch is through living. Clancy will be through unless he leaves Plotch behind.

  “You don’t fool me,” Clancy muttered, reeling and stumbling ahead with the dead weight of Plotch on his shoulders. “You don’t fool me!”

  After a while, he fell.

  He twisted as he went down, so that the stiff body of Plotch landed on top of him. Lying flat on his back on the ground with the hobgoblin’s bodies and faces forming a dome over them, Clancy giggled once again at Plotch.

  “Hope I didn’t chip you any, old boy.” He grinned at Plotch.

  He lay there for a while, thinking about everything and nothing. The labor of getting back to his feet and getting Plotch once more up on his head and shoulders loomed before him like the labor of climbing up the vertical side of a mile-high mountain. It was just not to be done. It was humanly impossible. But, after a while, he found himself trying it.

  He got to his knees, and after a great deal of slow effort, managed to get Plotch balanced once more stiffly on his helmet and his shoulders. But when he came to rise from his knees to his feet, bearing Plotch’s weight, he found his legs would not respond.

  You see, said a large hobgoblin smirking and pulling his rubbery face into different grotesque shapes directly in front of Clancy’s faceplate, Clancy has to leave Plotch if Clancy is going to get to the spaceship.

  “To hell with you!”

  Somehow, with some terrific effort and a strength that he did not know was still in him, Clancy found himself back on his feet once more, carrying Plotch. He tottered forward, wading through the hobgoblins that clustered around him. There was nothing substantial about their bodies to clog and hold back the movement of his legs, but their attempts to stop him wearied his mind. After forty or fifty steps he stumbled and fell again, this time losing his grip on Plotch, who tumbled to the rock, but lay there, apparently unbroken. Clancy crawled to the unmoving figure through the clutching mist of gray hobgoblin bodies.

  “You all right, Plotch?” Clancy muttered.

  He patted Plotch’s stiff, suited body from helmet to boots. As far as touch could tell, there was no damage done. Then he saw that above the frost the faceplate was starred with cracks. Gently he probed it with the gloved fingers of his right hand. But, while cracked, the faceplate seemed to be still holding together.

  “All right, Plotch,” he muttered. He made one more effort to get Plotch on his shoulders, and himself on his feet; but his body would no
longer obey him. Still kneeling, half-crouching over the figure of Plotch, he fell asleep. At first the sleep was like all the other sleeps, then gradually a difference began to creep in.

  He found himself dreaming.

  He was dreaming of his appointment ceremony as a Lineman back in the main tower of Line Service Headquarters, back on Earth. He and all the other cadets were dressed in the stiff, old-fashioned green dress uniforms, which, in his case, he had not put on again since. The uniforms had a high stand-up collar; and the collar edge of the cadet in front of him had already worn a red line on the back of the cadet’s neck. The man kept tilting his head forward a little to get the tender, abraded skin away from the collar edge, while the voice of the Commandant droned on:

  “. . . You are dedicating yourself today ” the Commandant was saying, harshly, “to the Line, to that whole project of effort by which our human race is reaching out to occupy and inhabit the further stars. Therefore you are dedicating your-selves to the service of your race; and that service is found within the Line from everyone in our headquarters staff out

  to the most far-flung, two-man teams on new Terminal or Relay Worlds. All of us together make up the Team which extends and maintains the Line; and we are bound together by the fact that we are teammates. ...”

  The Commandant, Lief Janssen, was still senior officer of the Line Service. He was a tall, stiff military-looking man with gray hair and gray mustache, trim and almost grimly neat in his green uniform with its rows of Station Clusters. He made an imposing figure up on the rostrum; and at the time of the appointment ceremony Clancy had admired the Commandant greatly. It was the past five years that had changed Clancy’s mind. Janssen was plainly pretty much a man of straw—at least where R. and E. was concerned. It was strange that such an effective-looking man should prove so weak; and that a small bookkeeperish-looking character like Charles Li, the Head of R. and E., should turn out to be such a successful battler. Theoretically, the two Services were independent and equal, but lately R. and E. had been doing anything it wanted to the Line Team.

  Up on the platform, in Clancy’s dream, the Commandant continued to drone on. . . .

  “. . . For, just as the human race is the Line, so the Line is the Line Team, in its single ship sent out to hook up a new Relay or Terminal Station. And the Team in essence is its two and three-man units, sent out to work on planetary surfaces heretofore untrodden by human foot. The race is the Line Service. The Service is the Line Team, and the Line Team is each and every one of your fellow Linemen. . . .”

  The speech was interminable. Clancy searched for something in his mind to occupy himself with; and for no particular reason he remembered an old film made of the hunting of elephants in Africa, before such hunting was outlawed completely. The hunters rode in a wheeled car after the elephant herd, which, after some show of defiance had turned to run away. Standing up in the back of the wheeled car, one of the hunters shot—and one of the large bull elephants staggered and broke his stride.

  Clearly the animal had been hit. Soon he slowed. A couple of the other bulls, evidently concerned, slowed also. The hit elephant was staggering; and they closed in on either side of him, pushing against him with their great gray flanks to hold him upright.

  For a while this seemed to work. But the effects of the shot were telling—or perhaps the hunter had fired again, Clancy could not remember. The wounded elephant slowed at last to a walk, then to a standstill. He went down on his front knees.

  The other two bulls would not abandon him. They tried to lift him with their trunks and tusks; but he was too heavy for them. Up close, the hunter in the wheeled cart fired another shot in close. There was a puff of dust from behind the elephant’s ear where the bullet hit. The wounded bull shivered and rolled over on its side and lay there very still.

  It was plain he was finally dead. Only then did the other two bulls abandon him. Screaming with upcurled trunks at the wheeled cart, they faced the hunter for a moment, stamping, then turned and ran with the rest of the herd. The hunter and the others in the wheeled cart let them go . . .

  In his dream, it seemed to Clancy that the elephant was suddenly buried. He lay in a cemetery with a headstone above his grave. Going close, Clancy saw that the name on the headstone was Art. There was something else written there; but when he tried to go closer to see—for it was just twilight in the graveyard and not easy to read the headstones —a dog lying on the grave, whom he had not noticed, growled and bared its fangs at him, so that he was forced to back off. . . .

  Slowly, from his dreams of graduating ceremonies, elephants and graveyards, Clancy drifted back up into consciousness. It seemed that he must have been sleeping for some time; and his mouth was wet, which meant that some-

  how he must have been drinking water—whether from his suit reserves, or from some other source. But he did not feel now as if he had his suit around him.

  VI

  He opened his eyes and saw, at first, nothing but white, the white walls and ceiling of a small room aboard a spaceship. Then he became conscious of a girl standing beside the bed.

  She was dressed in white, also, so at first he thought that she was a nurse—and then he noticed that she wore no nurse’s cap, only a small, strange-looking gold button in the lapel of her white jacket.

  “Who’re you?” asked Clancy, wonderingly. “Where is this?”

  “It’s all right, you can get up now,” the girl answered. “You’re on our ship. We’re Research and Experimentation Service, and we just happened to land less than half a mile from where you were. So we picked you up and brought you in. Luckily for you. You were headed exactly in the wrong direction.”

  “And Plotch?” Clancy demanded.

  “We brought in your teammate, too,” she answered.

  Clancy sat up on what he now saw was a bunk, and sat on the edge of it for a moment. He was wearing the working coveralls he normally wore underneath the suit; but they seemed to have been freshly cleaned and pressed—which was good. He would not have liked to face this very good-looking girl in his coveralls, as they must have been after six days of his wearing the suit.

  “R. and E.?” he echoed. For a second her words seemed to make sense. Then the great impossibility of what she was saying, struck him.

  “But you can’t have landed a ship on XN-4010!” he said to the girl, getting to his feet. “We’re still just putting out the

  Star-Point terminals. The only way another ship could get here would be to home in on the drone that our Line ship homed in on; and that’s been inactive since our second day here, when we started cannibalizing it for Station parts!”

  “Oh, no. This ship,” she answered, “uses a new experimental process, designed to bypass the wasteful process of sending out a thousand drones in hopes that one may home in on a planet that may be used as a Terminal or Relay point for a ship shifted from Earth. But here comes someone who can explain it much better than I can.”

  A short, round-faced man with black hair and a short, black mustache had come briskly into the room. After a second, Clancy recognized him from seeing him on news broadcasts, back on Earth. He was Charles Li, Head of the Research and Experimentation Service; and he wore a long white coat, or smock, buttoned in front, with a small gold button like the girl’s in his lapel.

  It was strange, thought Clancy woozily, how an impressive figure like Janssen could turn out to be so incapable of protecting his own Service, while someone like this fuzzy-looking little man could prove to be so effective. You certainly could not judge by appearances. . . .

  “I heard what you said, young man,” snapped Li, now, “and I’d warn you against judging by appearances. The method that brought this special ship here is a gadget of my own invention. Of course, it’s a million-to-one chance that we should land right beside you, out here; but that’s what scientific research and experimentation deal with today, isn’t it? Million-to-one chances?”

  Clancy had to admit silently that it was. Certainly m
ost of the R. and E. gadgets in their survival suits seemed to represent million-to-one shots at coming up with something useful. But Li was already taking Clancy by the arm and leading him out into and down a white-painted corridor of the ship.

  “But there’s something you need to do for us,” he said in steely, commanding tones, his grip hard on Clancy’s arm. “It’s imperative your transmit ship be told of our arrival, as soon as possible. But the very nature of the device which brought us here—top secret, I’m afraid, so I can’t explain it to you now—places us under certain restrictions. None of us aboard here can be spared to make the trip to your ship; and the nature of our equipment makes it impossible for us to send a message over ordinary inter-ship channels.”

  He led Clancy into a room which Clancy recognized as an airlock. His suit was waiting for him there.

  “We’re sorry to put you to this trouble, particularly just after recovering from a good deal of exhaustion and exposure,” said the black-mustached man briskly. “But we have to ask you to put your suit on once again and finish your walk to your spaceship, to tell them that we’re here.”

  “Why not?” said Clancy. He began to get into his space-suit, while the other two watched; the girl, he thought, with a certain amount of admiration in her eyes.

  “Yes, it’s too bad one of us can’t be spared to go with you,” said the mustached man. “But we have no outside suits aboard the ship, and then if nothing else one would be needed for protection from the hobgoblins.”

  “Protection—?” echoed Clancy. He paused, in the midst of sealing the trunk of his suit. For the first time it struck him that he could not hear the voiceless gibber of the hobgoblins here.

  The mustached man must have divined his thought, for he answered it.

  “Yes,” he said. “The special hull materials of this ship shield us from hobgoblin attempts to control us. A refinement of the shielding material in your suits. That same sort of protection we now have will be necessary for future Line Teams and whoever chooses this planet. I will have to recommend it once we get back to Earth.”