Outside the door the dark balls still were plunging in and exploding with their muffled crumps, throwing out sprays of the whizzing pellets that struck and bounced in dancing frenzy all along the ramp.
I took a look at Sara and she was — somewhat mussed. Her natty explorer outfit was wrinkled and dusty and she had a dark smudge across one cheek.
I grinned at her. Through it all, I saw, she'd hung onto her rifle. I wondered if she had it glued to her.
Something small and running very fast went past me and then another one and as the tiny runners burst out onto the ramp I saw they were ratlike creatures. Each of them grabbed one of the bouncing pellets in their mouth, grabbing them even as they bounced, and then they were coming back, with their rodent teeth locked about the pellets.
From the darkness behind us came a rustling sound, interspersed with squeaks, and a second later hundreds of those ratlike creatures were pouring past us, running between our feet, bumping against our legs in their maddened haste, all heading for the ramp and the bouncing pellets.
With the coming of the ratlike horde, the hobbies had scurried to one side, beyond the doorway, to get out of the way. We followed the hobbies. The little scurrying animals paid us no attention. Their only interest were the pellets and they dashed back and forth, fetching and carrying as if their lives depended on it, running into one another, leaping over one another, each one for itself.
Outside the dark balls kept coming in, bursting with dull thumps, continuing to scatter pellets.
Hoot came over beside me, pulled up his feet and collapsed upon his belly. He let his tentacles down upon the floor.
"They harvest food," he said, "against the coming of the great hunger."
I nodded. It made sense, of course. The dark balls were pods filled with seeds and this broadcasting of them was the method by which the trees could give them distribution. But they likewise were something more than pods of seed. They could be used as weapons and they had been used on us. As if the tree had been aware of us and once we'd come in range, had opened fire. If the range had been a little shorter and if we'd been trapped out in the open, they could have done us damage. My ribs still ached from the hit I'd taken and there was a little scratch along one cheek that was very tender. We had been extremely lucky that the building had been close.
Sara sat down upon the floor and laid her rifle in her lap.
"You all right?" I asked.
"Tired is all," she said. "I suppose there is no reason we can't camp right here."
I looked around and saw that Tuck had gotten off his hobby, but Smith still was sitting in the saddle, bolt upright, as straight as he could sit, with his head held tall and rigid, twisted a little to one side, as if he were listening. On his face he still wore that idiotic, terrifying happiness.
"Tuck," I said, "would you and George unload the hobbies. I'll look around for wood."
We had a camp stove with us, but there was no sense in using up the fuel if we could rustle wood. And there is, as well, something to be said in favor of a campfire as a thing to sit around and talk.
"I can't get him down," said Tuck, almost weeping. "He won't listen to me. He won't pay attention."
"What's the matter with him? Was he hit?"
"I don't think so, captain. I think he has arrived."
"You mean the voice . . ."
"Right here in this building," said Tuck. "At one time it might have been a temple. It has a religious look to it."
From the outside, come to think of it, it had had a churchy look but you couldn't get much idea of how it looked inside. By the door, with the sunlight slanting from the west, there was plenty of light, but other than that the interior was dark.
"We can't leave him sitting there all night," I said. "We've got to get him down. You and I together can pull him from the saddle."
"Then what?" asked Tuck.
"What do you mean then what?"
"We take him down tonight. What do we do tomorrow?"
"Why, hell," I said, "that's simple. If he doesn't snap out of it, we boost him in the saddle. Tie him on so he can't fall off."
"You mean you'd cart him off again when he finally had arrived? When he had finally reached the place he's been yearning toward for a great part of his life?"
"What are you trying to say?" I yelled. "That we should hunker down and squat right here and never leave because this blubbering idiot . . ."
"I must remind you, captain," Tuck said, nastily, "that it was this blubbering idiot who charted the way for us. If it had not been for him . . ."
"Gentlemen," said Sara, getting to her feet, "please lower your voices. I don't know if you realize it, captain, but we may not be leaving here as soon as you might think."
"Not leaving here," I said, between my teeth. "What is there to stop us?"
She gestured toward the doorway. "Our friend, the tree," she said, "has us zeroed in. I've been watching. All the stuff he's throwing at us is landing on the ramp. There aren't any misses. It would be worth your life to step outside that door. Fast as they are moving and little as they are, those seed-gathering animals are taking casualties,"
I saw that the ramp still seemed alive with the bouncing, dancing seeds and here and there upon it lay tiny bodies, limp and motionless.
"The tree will get tired of it," I said. "It will run out of energy or out of ammunition."
She shook her head. "I don't think so, captain. How tall would you say that tree might be. Four miles? Five miles? With foliage from a few hundred feet off the ground to its very top. The spread of the foliage at its widest point close to a mile, perhaps. How many seed pods do you think a tree like that might bear?"
I knew that she was right. She had it figured out. If the tree wanted to, it could keep us pinned down for days.
"Dobbin," I said, "maybe you can tell us what is going on. Why is the tree pegging pods at us?"
"Noble sir," said Dobbin, "nothing will I tell you. I go with you. I carry your possessions. No further will I do. No information will we give and no help. Most shabbily you have treated us and in my heart I cannot find the reasons for doing further for you."
Hoot came ambling out of the dark interior of the building, his tentacles waving, the eyes on the end of the two of them shining in the light.
"Mike," he hooted at me, "a curious feel this place has about it. Of old mysteries. Of much time and strangeness. There be something here, a something that falls minutely short of a someone being."
"So you think so, too," I said.
I had another look at Smith. He hadn't moved a muscle. He still sat bolt upright in the saddle and his face still was frozen with that dreadful happiness. The guy was no longer with us. He was a universe away.
"In many ways," said Hoot, "there is a comfort in it, but so strange a comfort that one must quail in fear at the concept of it. I speak, you understand, as an observer only. One such as I can take no part in such a comfort. Much better comfort and refuge can I have if I so desire. But it be information I impart most willingly if it be of service."
"Well," said Sara, "are you two going to get George down off that hobby or do you plan to leave him there?'
"It looks to me," I said, "as if it makes no difference to him if he stays up there or not, but let us get him down."
Tuck and I between us hauled him from the saddle and lugged him across the floor and propped him up against the wall beside the door. He was limp and unresisting and he made no sign to indicate that he was aware of what was going on.
I went over to one of the hobbies and unlashed a pack. Rummaging in it, I found a flashlight.
"Come on, Hoot," I said. "I'm going to scout around and see if I can find some wood. There must be some old furniture or such."
Moving back into the building, I saw that it was not as dark as I had thought at first. It was the contrast of the brightness of the sunlight pouring through the door that had made it seem so dark. But neither was it light. An eerie sort of twilight filled t
he place like smoke and we moved through it as though we moved through fog. With Hoot pattering along beside me, we went deeper into the interior of the building. There wasn't much to see. The walls were blocked out by the twilight mist. Here and there objects loomed up darkly. Far overhead a glint of light showed here and there, let in by some chink or window. Off to our right flowed a tide of busy little ratlike creatures harvesting the seeds. I shone the light on them and little red, burning eyes glowed fiercely back at us. I snapped off the light. They gave me the creeps.
Something tapped my arm. I glanced down and saw that Hoot was tapping me with a tentacle. He pointed silently with another one. I looked and saw the heap, a mound of blackness, not neat and rounded, but a little ragged, as if a pile of junk had been thrown into a pile.
"Maybe wood," said Hoot
We walked toward it and it was larger and farther off than we had thought it was, but we finally reached it and I threw a beam of light upon it. There was wood, all right—broken, shattered sticks and chunks of it, as if someone had smashed up a bunch of furniture and heaved it in a pile. But there was more than wood. There was metal, too, some of it rusted and eroded, but some of it still bright. At one time chunks of metal had been fashioned, apparently into tools or instruments, but they had been bent and twisted out of shape. Someone had done a good wrecking job, as good a one upon the metal objects as had been done upon the furniture. And there was, as well, what seemed to be hunks of torn cloth and some strangely shaped chunks of wood with fiber tied about them.
"Much rage," said Hoot, "expended upon objects of inanimation. Mystery very deep and logic hard to come by."
I handed him the flashlight and he wrapped a tentacle about it and held it steady so I could see. I knelt and began to pick up wood and load it on one arm, selecting pieces that were campfire length. It was dry and heavy and it should make good fuel and there was a lot of it and we'd not run out of it, no matter how long we might be forced to stay. I picked up one of the strangely shaped pieces with fabric tied about it and, seeing my mistake, was about to throw it to one side when the thought occurred to me that the fiber might serve as, tinder, so left it on the load.
I built myself a good armload and rose slowly to my feet. The wood was loaded in the crook of my left arm and I found that I needed my right hand to keep the load from sliding loose.
"You hang onto the light," I said to Hoot. "I need all the arms I have."
He didn't answer and when I looked down at him, I saw that he was rigid. He had stiffened out like a dog pointing at a bird and two of his tentacles were pointed straight up at the ceiling—if the building had a ceiling.
I glanced up and there was nothing there to see, except that I had the feeling I was looking up onto a great expanse of space, that the space extended, without interruption, from the floor on which I stood up to the very top of all the spires and turrets.
And out of that extent of space came a whisper that grew in volume—the sound of many wings beating frantically and fast, the same harsh whispering that could be heard when a flock of feeding birds burst from a marshy stretch of ground and beat across the sky. But it was no sudden rush of hurried flight that existed for a moment and then was done with. As we stood listening on the floor below, it kept on and on and on. Somewhere up there in the misty darkness that marked the building's upper structure a great migration seemed to be taking place, with millions of wings beating out of nowhere into nowhere. They—whatever they could have been that had the beating wings—were not merely circling in that space above our heads. They were flying with a steady, almost frantic, purpose, and for a moment of that flight they crossed those few thousand feet of emptiness that loomed above us and then were gone while others took their place, a steady stream of others, so that the rush of wings was never broken. I strained my eyes to see them, but there was nothing to be seen. They were too high to see or they were invisible or, I thought, they might not be even there. But the sound was there, a sound that in some other time or place might not be remarkable, but that here was remarkable and, unaccountably, had the freezing impact of the great unknowable. Then, as suddenly as they had come, the beating wings were gone; the migration ended, and we stood in a silence that was so thick it thundered.
Hoot let down his two pointing tentacles "Here they were not," he said 'They were otherwhere".
Immediately as he said it, I knew he had been feeling the same thing I'd been sensing, but had not really realized. Those wings—the sound of those wings—had not been in that space where we had heard them, but in some other space, and we had only heard them through some strange spatio-temporal echo. I don't know why I thought that; there was no reason to.
"Let's get back," I said to Hoot. "All of us must be hungry. It's been a long time since we've eaten. Or had any sleep. How about you, Hoot? I never thought to ask. Can you eat the stuff we have?"
"I in my second self," he said. And I recalled what he had said before. In his second self (whatever that might be) he had no need of food.
We went back to the front of the building. The hobbies were standing in a circle, with their heads all pointing inward. The packs had been taken off their backs and were stacked against the wall, close behind the doors. Alongside them sat Smith, still slumped, still happy, still out of the world, like an inflated doll that had been tossed against a wall, and beside him was propped the body of Roscoe, the brainless robot. The two of them were ghastly things to see, sitting there together.
The sun had set and outside the doors lay a dusk that was not quite so thick as the dusk inside the building. The ratlike creatures still were pouring out the door and pouring back again, harvesting the seeds.
"The firing has slacked off," said Sara, "but it picks up again as soon as you stick out your head."
"I suppose you did," I said.
She nodded. "There wasn't any danger. I ducked back in again, real fast. I'm a terrible coward when it comes to things like that. But the tree can see us. I am sure it can."
I dumped my armload of wood. Tuck had unpacked some pots and pans and a coffee pot stood ready.
"Just about here?" I asked. "Close to the door so the smoke has a chance of getting out"
Sara nodded. "I'm beat out, captain," she said. "Fire and food will be good for all of us. What about Hoot? Can he . . ."
"He isn't doing any eating or any drinking," I explained. "He's in his second state, but let's not talk about it."
She caught my meaning and nodded.
Tuck came up beside me and squatted down. "That looks to be good wood," he said. "Where did you find it?"
"There's a heap of junk back there. All sorts of stuff."
I squatted down and took out my knife. Picking up one of the smaller sticks, I began to whittle off some shavings. I pushed them in a pile, then reached for the piece of wood that had the fiber tied to it. I was about to rip some of the fiber loose when Tuck put out a hand to stop me.
"Just a second, captain."
He took the piece of wood out of my hands and turned it so that it caught some of the feeble light still coming from the doorway. And now, for the first time, I saw what it was that I had picked up. Until that moment it had been nothing more than a stick of wood with some straw or grass tied to it. "A doll," said Sara, in surprise.
"Not a doll," said Tuck. His hands were shaking and he was clutching the doll hard, probably in an attempt to keep his hands from shaking. "Not a doll. Not an idol. Look at its face!"
In the twilight the face was surprisingly plain to see. It was barely human. Primate, perhaps, although I couldn't be sure it was even that. But as I looked at it, I felt a sense of shock; human or not, it was an expressive face, and never had I seen a face with so much sadness in it or so much resignation to the sadness. It was no fancy carving. The face, in fact, was crude, it had been simply hacked out of a block of wood.
The whole thing had about it the look of a primitive corncob doll. But the knowing hands that had carved the face, driven by God
knows what sadness of their own, had caught within its planes a misery of existence that wrenched one's heart to see.
Tuck slowly raised the doll in both his hands and clutched it tight against his breast. He looked from one to the other of us.
"Don't you see?" he cried at us. "Don't you understand!"
SIX
Night had fallen. The fire carved a magic circle of light out of the darkness that pressed in all about us. Back of me I could hear the gentle creak as the hobbies rocked gently back and forth. Smith still sprawled limp against the wall. We had tried to rouse him to give him food, but there was no such thing as rousing him. He was simply a sack, still with us in body, but certainly not in mind; his mind was somewhere else. Beside him leaned the metallic body of the mindless robot, Roscoe. And off a little ways sat Tuck with that doll of his clutched tight against his breast, not moving, with his eyes staring out into the darkness.
We were off to a damn poor start, I thought. Already the expedition had started to fall apart.
"Where is Hoot?" asked Sara.
"Off somewhere," I said. "Prowling. He's a restless sort of being. Hadn't you ought to try to get some sleep?"
"And you'll sit up and watch?"
"I'm not Launcelot," I told her. "if that's what you're getting at. You can depend on it—I'll rout you out later on so I can get some sack time."
"In a little while," she said. "Did you happen to notice this place is built of stone?"
"I suppose I had," I said. "I hadn't thought about it."
"Not like the buildings in the city," she said. "This one is made of honest stone. I'm not up on stone. Looks like granite, maybe. You have any idea what the city might be made of?"
"Not stone," I said. "That stuff was never quarried from the ground. Some sort of fabricated material, most likely. Chemical, perhaps. The atoms bonded more tightly than anything we know. Nothing in God's world, more than likely, could pull that stuff apart. When I fired the laser bolt into the landing field, the field wasn't even scorched."
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