"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 the 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 who 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 . . ."
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 alw
ays 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 . . ."
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