"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 expected 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 had 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, buri
ed 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 and 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.
I held my breath and wished that I could read what he was writing, for despite all his clownishness, I was convinced that it was important.
Suddenly he froze, with his finger in the dust, no longer writing.
"Paint," he said, and I waited for the string of rhyming words, but they did not come. 'Paint," he said again.
I leaped to my feet and Roscoe rose to stand beside me. Paint was coming down the trail, loping gracefully. He was alone; Sara was not with him.
He came to a sliding halt before us.
"Boss," he said, "back I come, reporting for orders. She say for me to hurry. She say to you good-bye, she say to tell God bless you, which is beyond my feeble intellect to comprehend. She say she hope you get safely back to Earth. This humble being, sir, ask you what is Earth."
"Earth is the home planet of our race," I told him.
"Please, illustrious sir, you take me back to Earth?"
I shook my head. "Why should you want to go to Earth?"
"You, sir," he said, "are being of compassion, You did not run away. You come into place of terror and fail to run away. From ridiculous predicament you rescue me with dainty gallantry. I would not willingly wish to wander from your side."
"Thank you, Paint," I said.
"Then, gratefully, I march with you, all the way to Earth."
"No, you don't," I said.
"But you said, fair sir . . ."
"I have something else for you to do."
"Gladly will I perform in small recompense for your rescue of me, but, dear human, I had wished so hard for Earth."
"You'll go back," I said, "and wait for Sara."
"But she say good-bye distinctly. She say it as she meant it."
"You'll wait for her," I said. "I don't want her coming out and no way to get back."
"You think she will come out?"
"I don't know," I said.
"But wait for her I do?"
"That's exactly it," I said.
"But I wait," he wailed "You go off to Earth and waiting still I am. I may be wait forever. If you want her, most kindly being, why don't you come back and say to her . . ."
"I can't do that," I said. "Damn fool though she may be, she has to have her chance. Like George. Like Tuck."
And I was surprised when I heard what I was saying.
Decision, I had told myself. There was a decision to he made. And here, finally, I had made it—without thought, with no pondering, a decision made without any reason, on no more than instinct. As if I, myself, may not have made it, as if someone else, standing off somewhere in the wings of time, had made it for me. As if Hoot had made it for me.
And as I thought of this, I remembered him telling me that I could not interfere, almost pleading with me not to go back into the valley and drag her out of there, as I had said I'd do. Stricken, I wondered how much of himself Hoot had left in me when he'd gone into his third self. And I tried to snare some remembrance of what it had been like, hand in tentacle, but all of it still was buried, out of reach, somewhere inside my mind, and I couldn't reach it.
"Then I return," said Paint, "full of sadness, but obedient. Earth it may not be, but better than the gully."
He turned to go, but I called him back. I took the rifle and the cartridge belt and tied them to the saddle.
"The weapon she left for you," Paint 'told him. "No need of it has she."
"If she comes out, she will," I said.
"She not coming out," Paint declared. "You' know not coming out. Stars in her eyes she had when she go between the rocks."
I didn't answer. I stood and watched him as he turned and went back down the trail, going slowly so he'd not be out of hearing if I should call him back.
I didn't call him back.
TWENTY-THREE
That evening, beside the campfire, I opened the box that I had grabbed off the table in Knight's shack.
We had traveled well that day, although with every step I took I fought against the terrible feeling that something called me back, that,
as a matter of fact, there was an actual force which sought to turn me back. Slogging along, I tried to figure who it was (not what it was, but who it was) who tried to hold me back. Sara, perhaps—the feeling that I should do something for her, if it were no more than going back to wait in hope she would return. A sense of guilt at deserting her, although I knew well and good I'd not deserted her, no more than we had deserted either George or Tuck. A belief that I had somehow failed her, and in certain instances I undoubtedly had failed her, but not in this particular instance. I think that more than anything else the thing that bothered me was that she apparently had not believed me about what Hoot and I had seen back in the valley. The idea persisted that somehow I should have made her understand, should have so convinced her she'd have had no thought of returning there. The going back I could understand—if someone had stood just for a moment inside the gates of Heaven he would not suffer gladly being yanked from out the gates. The thing I could not understand was how she could have, willfully and deliberately, failed to understand, clinging to a beloved delusion in the face of fact.
Or could Hoot have been the one, I wondered, who was tugging at me? Was there something lying hidden in my mind, something that he had planted there in those last few seconds, that kept up a faceless nagging at me? I tried once again to dredge up the bit of information—any bit of information—bearing upon that final encounter, but once again I failed.
Or could it be Paint? I had played a dirty trick on Paint, setting him a task I was unable or unwilling to perform myself. Perhaps, I told myself, I should turn around and go back and tell him he was relieved of the charge I had placed upon him. I tried to fend it off, but could not erase from mind the vision of Paint a thousand years from now, (a million years from now if he still existed a million years from now) still mounting solemn guard outside the portals, waiting for an event that was not about to happen, still faithful to words long gone into the wind as the mouth that spoke them had long gone into dust.
Miserable with all these thoughts, I stumbled down the trail.
To a watcher, we must have seemed a strange pair, I with my ridiculous shield and sword, Roscoe with the pack slung upon his back, clumping along behind me, mumbling to himself.
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