"Buster," I told him, "the tree drew a bead on me. There don't nothing shoot at me that I don't shoot back."
"We'll have to go around," said Sara.
Tuck looked up at us. "Around that way is shorter," he said. He swept his arm toward the left, where the stump of the free still stood, sliced diagonally by the laser beam.
Sara nodded. "Go ahead," she said.
Tuck stepped off the trail and the hobbies followed. The ground was rough, strewn with rounded stones the size of a person's head, studded with small, ground-hugging plants armed with heavy thorns. The ground itself was sand, interspersed with a reddish clay and mixed in both the sand and clay were shattered chips of stone, as if throughout millions of years busy little creatures had beaten rocks with hammers to reduce their mass to shards.
As soon as we moved off the trail to begin our detour around the tree, the heaving mass of gray and slimy creatures moved out convulsively in their bumping, hitching motion, to cut us off. They moved in a mass, a flowing sheet of motion with many tiny bobbing eddies, so that the entire group of them seemed to be in constant agitation. They looked very much, I thought, like an expanse of choppy water.
Tuck, seeing them move to cut us off, increased his pace until he was almost galloping, but stumbling and falling as he galloped, for the ground was most uneven and treacherous to the feet. Falling, he bumped his legs and knees against the rounded stones and his outstretched hands, flung out against the falls, smashed into the thorn-bearing vegetation that flowed along the ground. He dropped the doll and stopped to pick it up and blood from his thorn-torn fingers ran into the fabric.
The hobbies increased their pace as well, but slowed or came to a halt each time that Tuck, his legs entangled in his robe, came crashing down.
"We'll never make it," Sara said, "with him out there floundering around. I'm going to get down."
"No, you're not," I said.
I tried to vault out of the saddle and I did get out of it, but it was an awkward operation and could by no stretch of imagination have been called a vault. I landed on my feet, but it was only with the utmost effort that I kept from falling on my face, right into a patch of the prickly vegetation. I managed to stay upright and ran ahead and grabbed Tuck by the shoulder.
"Get back and climb up on Dobbin," I panted. "I'll take it from here on."
He swung around on me and there were tears of anger in his eyes. His face was all squeezed up and there was no question that he hated me.
"You never let me have a chance!" he screamed. "You never let anyone have a chance. You grab it all yourself."
"Get back there and get on that hobby," I told him. "If you don't, I'll clobber you."
I didn't wait to see what he did, but went on ahead, picking my way as best I could over the difficult terrain, trying only to hurry, not to run, as had been the case with Tuck.
My legs were wobbly and I had a terrible, unhinged sense of emptiness in. my gut; my head had a tendency to float lazily upward and take on a spin.
During all of this, the wobbly legs, the empty gut, the floating head, I still managed to keep plunging ahead at a fairly steady pace and at the same time stay aware of the progress of that flowing blanket of gray sliminess that poured out from the fallen tree.
It was moving almost as fast as we were moving and it was proceeding on what a military man probably would have called an interior line and I could see that no matter what we did we couldn't quite escape it. We would brush against the outer edge of it; the creatures in the forefront of the mass would reach us, but we'd escape the main body of them.
The keening of the creatures, as the distance between us lessened, became sharper—an unending wail, like the crying of lost souls.
I looked back over my shoulder and the others were coming on, very close behind me. I tried to speed up a bit and almost came a cropper, so settled down to covering ground as rapidly as I could with safety.
We could swing a little wider on the detour, and have had a chance of outdistancing the wailing horde that humped across the land. But the chance was not a sure one and would lose a lot of time. As we were going, we would just graze the outer edge of them.
There was no way, of course, to figure out beforehand what danger they might pose. If they should prove too dangerous, we could always run for it. If the laser rifle had not been broken, we could have handled almost any danger, but the ballistics weapon Sara carried was all that we had left.
For a moment I thought that after all we would reach our point of intersection before they had arrived, that we would move on past them and be on our way and free of them. But I miscalculated and they came rolling up on us, the edge of that great humping carpet of them hitting us broadside as we cross their front.
They were small, not more than a foot or so in height and they looked like naked snails except that instead of snail faces they had a parody of human faces—the kind of ridiculous, vacant, pitifully staring faces that can be found upon certain cartoon characters, and now their keening wails turned into words—not into the actual sound of words, perhaps, but inside one's head that sound of wailing turned into words and you know what they were crying. Not all of them were crying the same thing, but crying about the same thing and it was horrible.
Homeless, they cried in their many tongues. You have made us homeless. You have destroyed our home and now we have no home and what will become of us? We are lost. We are naked. We are hungry. We will die. We know no other place. We want no other place. We wanted so little and we needed so little and now you have taken that very little from us. What right did you have to take that very little from us—you who have so much? What kind of creatures are you that you fling us out into a world we do not want and cannot know and cannot even live in? You need not answer us, of course. But there will be a time when an answer will be asked of you and what will be your answer?
It wasn't that way, of course, not all of it flowing together, not connected, not a definitive statement, not a structured question. But in the bits and pieces of the crying that hammered in on us that is what it meant, that is what those slimy, bumping, bereft creatures meant to say to us—knowing, I think, that there was nothing we could do for them or would be willing to do for them, but wanting us to realize the full enormity of what we'd done to them. And it was not only the words that were carried in their crying, but the look of those thousands of pathetic faces that hurled the cries at us—the anguish and the lostness, the hopelessness and the pity, yes, the very pity that they felt for us who were so vile and so abandoned and so vicious that we could take their home from them. And of all of it, the pity was the worst to take.
We won our way free of them and went on and behind us their wailing faded and finally dropped to silence, either because we were too far away to hear it or because they had stopped the wailing, knowing there was no longer any purpose to it, knowing, perhaps, that there had never been a purpose to it, but still constrained to cry out their complaint.
But even with the wailing no longer heard, the words beat in my brain and the knowledge grew and grew and grew that by the simple act of pressing a trigger I had killed not only a tree, but the thousands of pitiful little creatures that had made the tree their home and I found myself, illogically, equating them with the fairies which, in my boyhood, I'd been told lived in an ancient and majestic tree which grew behind the house, although these wailing things, God knows, looked not in the least like fairies.
Dull anger rose inside me to counterweigh the guilt and I found myself trying to justify the felling of the trees and that part of it was easy, for it could be stated and set forth in very simple terms. The tree had tried to kill me and would have killed me if it had not been for Hoot. The tree had tried to kill me and I had killed it instead and that was as close to basic justice as anyone could come. But would I have killed it, I asked myself, if I had known that it had been the home of all the wailing creatures? I tried to tell myself that I might not have acted as I had if I had only kn
own. But it was no use. I recognized a lie even when I told it to myself. I had to admit that I would have acted exactly as I did even if I'd known.
A sharp ridge rose up ahead of us and we began to climb it. As we started up it the sharpened upper edge of the tree stump barely showed above the ridge, but as we climbed more and more of the massive stump came into view. At the time I had used the laser I had been facing north and had aimed at the tree's western face, then had raked the laser down, cutting the stump on a sharp diagonal, making the tree fall eastward. If I had used my head, I told myself, I could have started on the eastern edge and made the tree fall to the west. That way it would not have blocked the trail. It beat all hell, I told myself, how a man never thinks of a better way to do a thing until he'd already done it.
Finally we reached the ridge-top and from where we stood looked down upon the stump, the first time we had really seen it in its entirety. And the stump was just a stump, although a big one, but in a neatly drawn circle about it was a carpeting of green. A mile or more in diameter, it stretched out from the stump, an oasis of green-lawn neatness set in the middle of a red and yellow wilderness. It made one ache to look at it, it looked so much like home, so much like the meticulously cared-for lawns that the human race had carried with it and had cultivated or had tried to cultivate on every planet where they had settled down. I'd never thought of it before, but now I thought about it, wondering what it was about it, wondering what it was about the trimmed neatness of a greensward that made the humanoids of Earth carry the concept of it deep into outer space when they left so much else behind.
The hobbies spread out in a thin line on the ridge-top and Hoot came scrambling up the slope to stand beside me.
"What is it, captain?" Sara asked.
"I don't know," I said.
And that was strange, I thought. For I could have said it was a lawn and let it go at that. But there was something about it that told me, instinctively, that it was no simple lawn.
Looking at it, a man wanted to walk down on it and stretch out full length upon it, putting his hands behind his bead, tilting his hat over his eyes, and settle down for an easy afternoon. Even with the tree no longer standing to provide the shade, it would have been a pleasant spot to take a midday nap.
That was the trouble with it. It looked too inviting and too cool, too familiar.
"Let's move on," I said.
Swinging a little to the left to give the circular patch of green plenty of room, I set off down the ridge. As I walked I kept a weather eye cocked to the right and nothing happened, absolutely nothing. I was prepared to have some great and fearsome shape burst upward from an expanse of sward and come charging out at us. I imagined that the grass might roll up like a rug and reveal an infernal pit out of which horrors would come pouncing.
But the lawn continued to be a lawn. The massive stump speared up into the sky and just beyond it lay the mighty bulk of the shattered trunk—the ruined home of the humping little shapes that had cried out their anguish to us.
Ahead of us lay the trail, a slender, dusty thread that wound out into the tortured landscape, leading into a dim unknown. And looming over the horizon other massive trees that towered into the sky.
I found that I was tottering on my feet. Now that we were past the tree and swinging back onto the trail, the nervous tension that had held me together was swiftly running out. I set myself the task of first one foot, then the other, fighting to stay erect, mentally measuring the slowly decreasing distance until we should reach the trail.
We finally did reach it and I sat down on a boulder and let myself come unstuck.
The hobbies stopped, spread out in a line, and I saw that Tuck was looking down at me with a look of hatred that seemed distinctly out of place. There he sat atop Dobbin, a scarecrow tricked out in a ragged robe of brown and with the ridiculous doll-like artifact clutched against his chest. He looked like a sulky, overgrown girl, but with a strange wistfulness about him, if you left out his face. If he'd stuck his thumb into his mouth and settled down to sucking it, the picture would have been entirely rounded out. But the face was the trouble, the impression of the ragged little girl stopped when you saw that hatchet face, almost as brown as the robe he wore, the great, pool-like eyes glazed with the hatred in them.
"You are, I presume," he said, with his rat-trap mouth biting off the words, "quite proud of yourself."
"I don't understand you, Tuck," I said. And that was the solemn truth; I didn't understand what he had in mind with that sort of talk. I had never understood the man and I supposed I never would.
He gestured with his hand, back toward the cut-down tree.
"That," he said.
"I suppose you think I should have left it there, taking shots at us."
I had no yen to argue with him; I was too beat out. And it was beyond me why he should be up in arms about the tree. Hell, it had been taking shots at him as well as the rest of us.
"You destroyed all those creatures," he said. "The ones living in the tree. Think of it, captain! What a magnificent achievement! A whole community wiped out!"
"I didn't know about them" I said. I could have added that even if I had, it would have made no difference. But I didn't say it.
"Well," he demanded, "have you nothing more to say about it?"
I shrugged. "It's their tough luck," I said.
Sara said, "Lay off him, Tuck. How could he have known?"
"He pushes everyone," said Tuck. "He pushes everyone around."
"Most of all himself," said Sara. "He didn't push you, Tuck, when he took your place. You were fumbling around."
"A man can't take on a planet," Tuck declared. "He has to go along with ft. He has to adapt. He can't bull his way through."
I was ready to let it go at that. He had done his grousing. He'd got it off his chest. He had had his say. It must have been humiliating, even for a jerk like Tuck, when I took over from him and he had something coming. He had a right to take it out on me if it helped him any.
I struggled off the boulder to my feet.
"Tuck," I said, "I wonder if you'll take over now. I need to ride a while."
He got down off Dobbin and as I moved up to mount we came face to face. The hatred still was there, a more terrible hatred, it seemed to me, than had been in his face before. His thin lips scarcely moved and he said, almost in a whisper, "I'll outlast you, Ross. I'll be alive when you're long dead. This planet will give you what you've been asking for all your entire life."
I didn't have too much strength left, but I had enough to grab him by an arm and fling him out, sprawling, into the dusty trail. He dropped the doll and groveled, on his hands and knees, picking it up.
I hung onto the saddle to keep from falling down. "Now lead out," I told him. "And, so help me Christ, you do one more stupid thing and I'll get down and beat you to a pulp."
TEN
The trail wound across the arid land, crossing flats of sand and little pools of cracked, dried mud where weeks or months, or maybe even years before, rainwater had collected. It climbed broken, shattered ridges, angling around grotesque land formations. It wended its way around dome-shaped buttes. The land stayed red and yellow and sometimes black where ledges of glassy volcanic stone cropped out. Far ahead, sometimes seen, sometimes fading in the horizon blueness, lay a smudge of purple that I thought were mountains, but could not be sure.
The vegetation continued sparse—little bushes that crouched close against the ground, the sprawling thorn that ran along the surface. The sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky, but it was not hot, just pleasantly warm. The sun, I was sure, was smaller and fainter than the sun of Earth—either that, or the planet lay a greater distance from it.
On some of the higher ridges were little, cone-shaped houses of stone, or at least structures that looked like houses. As if someone or something had needed temporary shelter or protection and had gathered up flat slabs of stone, which lay about the ridges, and had constructed a flimsy ba
rrier. The stones were laid up dry, with no mortar, piled one atop another. Some of the structures still stood much as their builders must have left them, in many of the others stones had fallen out of place, and in still others the entire structure had collapsed and lay in fallen heaps.
And there were the trees. They loomed in all directions, each one standing alone and lordly in its loneliness and each of them several miles from any other. We came close to none of them.
There was no life, or none that showed itself. The land ran on and on, motionless and set. There was no wind.
I used both hands to hang onto the saddle and continually I fought against falling down into the darkness that stole upon me every time I forgot to fight it back.
"You all right?" asked Sara.
I don't remember answering her. I was busy hanging on to the saddle and fighting back the darkness.
We stopped at noon. I don't remember eating, although I suppose I did. I do remember one thing. We had stopped in a rugged badlands area below one of the ridges and I was propped up against a wall of earth, so that I was looking at another wall of earth and the wall, I saw, was distinctly stratified with various strata of different thicknesses, some of them no more than a few inches deep while others would have been four or five feet, and each of them a distinctive color. As I looked at the strata I began to sense the time which each one represented. I tried to turn it off, for with this recognition was associated a most unrestful feeling, as if I were stretching all my faculties to a straining point, as if I were using all my energy and strength to drive deeper into this sense of time which the wall of earth invoked. But there was no way to turn it off; for some reason I was committed and must keep on and could only hope that at some point along the way I would reach a stopping point—either a point where I could go no further or a point where I had learned or sensed all there was to learn or sense.
Time became real to me in a way I can't express in words. Instead of a concept, it became a material thing that I could distinguish (although it was not seeing and it was not feeling) and could understand. The years and eons did not roll back for me. Rather, they stood revealed. It was as if a chronological chart had become alive and solid. Through the wavering lines of the time structure as if the structure might have been a pane of glass made inexpertly, I could faintly glimpse the planet as it had been in those ages past—ages which were no longer in the past but now stood in the present, as if I were outside of time and independent of time and could see and evaluate it exactly as I could have seen and evaluated some material structure that coexisted with me on my own time level.
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