Highway of Eternity

by Clifford D. Simak

  He was marooned in primitive North America, with no other human being closer than hither Asia, across a land bridge that would, in later years, become the Bering Strait. If he finally were condemned to stay within this time frame, he quite possibly could walk those thousands of miles to hunt out other humans—and to what end, he asked himself. The chances were that they would either kill him or make of him a captive.

  There was a better way—to wait for someone from Hopkins Acre to come hunting him. Enid, he was sure, would return if it were possible. Jay, he was certain, would move heaven and earth to rescue him, but Jay would need the help of others.

  At the best, he admitted, his circumstance was not too hopeful. On the face of it, he probably would not be important to the people of the future. He was, after all, no more than an intruder, perhaps an unwelcome intruder, who had come blundering in on them.

  The monster spoke to him again, a faint and distant voice.

  Boone! Boone, please have mercy on me!

  “Go chase yourself,” said Boone, muttering to himself rather than to the monster, for he had no faith in the monster’s voice. There probably was no voice; the words were no more than his own perverse imagination.

  The wolves had come back to the bull—seven of them now, where he had never seen more than six before—and were tearing at the carcass.

  “Good eating to you,” he said to them. Both the hide and the meat of the ancient animal would be tough. It would take some effort to rip through the hide to get at the flesh, which would not be the best of eating. But to a wolf it would be meat to fill an empty gut.

  Before the day was over, Boone would need some of the meat; he had nothing else to eat.

  It would be dangerous to walk out to the carcass and drive the wolves away so that he could slice out some meat. The only tool he had was a jackknife of the very cheapest sort, put together so shoddily that any undue pressure might break it all apart. He’d have to wait a while until the wolves were less hungry and therefore less possessive. By that time, perhaps, they would have so torn the hide as to expose areas of flesh from which he could hack a chunk for his own consumption. He’d be, he decided, the scavenger to the wolves.

  He rose from his squatting position before the fire and began walking, beating out a path from the fire to the sandstone spur and back again. Pacing, he tried to formulate a plan for his survival. His ability to step around a corner worked only under extraordinary stress. More than likely, after an indeterminate time, it would bring him back to exactly where he was. It had been only by a fluke that his strange ability had taken him and Jay around a corner into Martin’s traveler. He couldn’t count on the same thing happening again.

  He still had five cartridges in the rifle and with each of the cartridges he could bring down a more than adequate hunk of meat. Once it was down, however, he either would have to defend it or hide it against the scavengers, and it soon would deteriorate beyond any possible use. He could smoke it, of course, but he was not up on the procedure for the smoking of meat; he could salt it, but he had no salt. He was innocent of all the proper techniques to wrest a living from a land like this. He could, perhaps, find fruit or roots that could aid in his survival, but how could he know which of them would be safe to eat and which would poison him? So the problem, boiled down, came to how he could, day after day, hunt down and collect enough protein to keep his body functional.

  That meant weapons that he could devise. And if that was to be the plan, he must get at it immediately, gaining some expertise in their manufacture and use before the last cartridge had been fired. The first step would be to find stone that could be worked. The sandstone ledges jutting out of the butte held nothing he could use. But there were other places where he might find the necessary stone.

  Finally he halted his pacing and squatted down beside the fire. The wolves were feasting, burrowing into the ripped-open body cavity of the bull. From time to time they raised their blood-smeared muzzles to stare at him and then went back to feeding. In another couple of hours, it might be safe for him to walk out and claim his portion of the kill. The sun stood close to noon or a bit beyond. The vultures were gathering. A dozen or more of them circled high in the sky, dropping lower with each circle that they made.

  The monster spoke again. Boone, be reasonable. Listen to me.

  “I’m listening,” said Boone.

  I am robbed of all my senses. I cannot see and I cannot hear. All I can perceive is what you say to me and so far all that you have said has been most unkindly. I am nothing. I am a nothingness wrapped in nothingness. And yet I am aware of self. I could go on like this for uncounted millennia, knowing I am nothing, unable to reach out. You are my only hope. If you do not have mercy on me, I shall exist this way forever, buried by sand and dust with no other being aware that I am here. I shall be the living dead.

  “You are eloquent,” said Boone.

  Is that all you have to say?

  “I can think of nothing further.”

  Dig me out, the monster pleaded. Dig me out of the wreckage that I am and keep me with you. Take me when you go. Anything, just so I am not alone.

  “You want me to rescue you?”

  Yes, please rescue me.

  “That might be only a temporary solution to your problem,” Boone told the monster. “By your own act, I may be sentenced to stay here in this wilderness, as you term it. I may die here and you will be left alone again, facing the same fate that you face now.”

  Even so, for a time we would be together. We would not be alone.

  “I think,” said Boone, “I’d prefer being alone.”

  But there is always hope. Something could happen that would save us both.

  Boone did not answer.

  You do not answer, said the monster.

  “There is nothing more to say. I’ll have none of you. You understand that? I’ll have none of you.”

  To have mercy on an ordinary enemy—yes, that would be nobly human. But this was no ordinary enemy. Trying to figure out, for his own peace of mind, what kind of enemy it was, he found he could put no name to it.

  It could all be a trap, he told himself, and felt the better once he had thought of that. Out there, somewhere in that tangled mass of wreckage that had been the monster in its totality, lay one small component that could be the monster’s brain or a fantastically complex computer that was the monster’s essence. Should he paw among the wreckage to find and retrieve the essence, he well could become the victim of the monster, seized by a still-operative component that would make an end of him.

  No, thank you very much, he said to himself; I am right, I’ll have none of it.

  The wolves had finished with their more voracious eating. Several of them had stretched out on the ground, looking uncommonly satisfied, while others still worried at the meat, but with no great urgency. The vultures were much lower in the sky. The sun had moved a considerable distance down the west.

  Boone picked up his rifle and walked toward the kill. The wolves watched his advance with interest; when he moved up close, they moved away, then took a stand, doing a little growling at him. He waved the rifle gently at them, and they moved off a little further. Some of them sat down to watch.

  Reaching the bull, he leaned the rifle against it and opened his jackknife. It seemed a feeble tool. The gut cavity of the bull had been ripped open, and some of the skin had been torn free of one of the hams. The flesh on the ham, Boone knew, would be tough meat. But there was little possibility that the knife blade would cut through the bull’s tough hide to reach the better cuts. He’d have to take what he could.

  He seized the torn hide with both hands and jerked with all his strength. The hide peeled back reluctantly. He set his feet and jerked again. It peeled off farther this time. The knife, to his amazement, did a better cutting job than he had thought it would. He sliced off a large cut of meat, laid it to one side, and then cut off another—far more than he could eat at one sitting, but this probably would b
e the only chance he had. Other wolves would drift in, drawn by the scent of blood, and vultures would drop down. By morning’s light, there would be little left.

  A huge wolf, bigger than any of the others, advanced toward the kill, snarling as it came. Others rose to their feet to follow. Boone picked up the rifle, shook it at them, roaring viciously. The big wolf halted and so did the others. Boone laid down the rifle and cut another slab of meat.

  Never taking his eyes off the wolves, Boone collected the meat and began backing off. He moved slowly. Move too fast, he told himself, and the wolves might rush him.

  The wolves watched, not moving, interested in what he would do next. He kept on backing off. When he was better than halfway to the fire, they rushed forward, closing in on the dead bison, snapping and snarling at one another. They paid him no further attention.

  Back at the fire, he found a clean, grassy area and dropped the meat on it. Ten times more than he could eat at one time. He stood looking at it, considering what to do.

  It wouldn’t keep. In a couple of days it would be going bad. The thing to do, he thought, was cook it all. Cook it, eat what he needed, wrap the rest in his undershirt, bury the parcel in the ground, then sit on the hole where he had buried it. Unprotected, it would be dug up by the wolves, once they had finished off the bull. With him sitting on it, it would be safe. Or he hoped it would.

  He set to work. Selecting stout limbs from the pile of juniper he had stacked for firewood, he trimmed them to proper lengths, sharpened their ends. He cut the meat into smaller pieces, thrust the sharpened ends of the limbs through them, impaling several gobbets of meat on each of the stakes. The fire had burned down to a bed of coals. He raked still-flaming chunks of wood to one side and used them to start another fire. He jammed the stakes into the ground, canting them to extend, with their freights of meat, above the coals.

  He sat down and watched the cooking, adjusting the stakes from time to time. His mouth watered at the smell of the cooking meat. But mouth-watering as it might be, it wouldn’t be tasty. He had no salt with which to season it.

  The wolves were still quarreling over the carcass of the bull. A few of the vultures had dropped down, but had been chased off by the wolves. Now they sat, hunched, at a respectful distance, waiting for their chance at meat. The sun was just above the horizon. Night was coming on.

  Out there on the plain lay the carcass of a bison that had been known in Boone’s time only as a fossil. Further out would be other living fossils—mastodons, mammoths, primitive horses, and perhaps camels. Even the wolves feasting on the bison might be fossils.

  Crouched beside the bed of coals, Boone kept close watch on the cooking meat. Pangs of hunger assailed him. Since the almost inedible oatmeal in the morning, he had eaten nothing. He had fallen on hard times.

  When he had jumped into the traveler with Enid, he recalled, the thought had crossed his mind that they would go into the future, instead of to this world of extinct beasts and living fossils. Then the urgency of those last seconds at Hopkins Acre had driven the thought from his mind.

  There would have been something to interest him in the future, but there was very little here. He thought about the future he had heard of at Hopkins Acre—a world almost empty of visible humanity, although humankind still was there as incorporeal beings, pure intelligence, with the survival factor that had made men the masters of the planet finally refined into small quantitive qualities that were no more than dust motes, if even that.

  Change, he thought. Earth had undergone change during the nearly five billion years of its existence. What seemed at first small factors became in time significant in a process that no intelligence could pinpoint before it was too late to take measures to counteract.

  Even given intelligence, the great reptiles could not have guessed what was happening to bring them to extinction sixty-five million years ago. Other forms of life had suffered extinction that could not be foreseen. He had read that the first great extinction had come two billion years ago when the first green plants converted carbon dioxide to oxygen, changing Earth’s atmosphere from a reducing to an oxidizing medium, bringing death to most earlier, more primitive forms, to whom oxygen was poison.

  There had been many times of dying; the species that had died in the past were a hundred times more numerous than those still living. Finally, up there in the future, it seemed the human race was dying. Perhaps it would still exist, but in a form that might cancel it as a factor in the further evolution of Earth.

  Enid had told him that trees would supersede mankind, taking the place of man, once man was finally done. The idea was ridiculous, of course. By what process or capacity could trees take the place of mankind? Yet if anything were to replace humanity, it was perhaps fitting that it should be trees. All through history, trees had been friend of man—and man had been both friend and enemy to trees. Men had cut down the great forests wantonly; yet other men had cherished or, at times, even worshipped trees.

  One of the stakes that held the gobs of meat above the coals tilted, its base shifting in the ground, and fell into the fire. Cursing, Boone snatched it off the coals. Holding the stake with one hand, he brushed the meat free of ash with the other. It must be done enough for eating. Gingerly, he slid one of the gobbets off the stake, bouncing it in his hand. When it was cool enough, he took a bite of it. For lack of salt it was tasteless, but its warmth and texture felt good in his mouth. He chewed it. It took a lot of chewing, but his stomach seemed very glad of it. Once he had eaten all he could, he laid the stake down on a patch of grass and took off his jacket, shirt, and undershirt. Stretching the undershirt out on the ground, he took up the other stakes and stripped the meat off them into a pile on the shirt. Threading the rest of the uncooked meat on the stakes, he set them above the coals, put on his shirt and jacket, and settled down to wait for the remainder of the meat to cook.

  Darkness was creeping in. He could barely make out the wolves that still were clustered about the bison. In the east, the sky was flushed with the rising of the moon.

  He watched the meat above the coals until it was done, pushed off the gobbets onto the undershirt, wrapped the meat well in it, used his knife to dig a hole, placed the meat into the hole, filled the hole even with the ground, tamped it down, and then sat upon the hole. Anything that wants that meat, he told himself, will have to go through me to get it.

  He felt an expansiveness and a certain pride in himself. Whatever might happen in the days to come, he had done well so far. He had food for several days. Perhaps he should not have wasted the bullet, but he could not bring himself to regret doing it. He had given the bull a quick and decent death. If he had not, the wolves would have pulled the old bull down and started tearing him apart while he was still alive.

  Maybe it made no difference, the wasting of the bullet. Any time now Enid would be back to pick him up. He thought about it for a time, trying to make himself believe it, but not successfully. There was a good possibility she would return, but an equally good possibility that she wouldn’t.

  He turned up the collar of his coat against the chill of night. Last night he’d had a blanket, but now he had none. He had only the clothes he stood in. He nodded, dozing, and woke with a start. There had been no reason to awake; nothing was amiss. He went back to sleep, the rifle cradled in his lap.

  He stirred again, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and he was not alone. Across the fire from him sat, or seemed to sit, a man wrapped in some all-enveloping covering that might have been a cloak, wearing on his head a conical hat that dropped down so far it hid his face. Beside him sat the wolf—the wolf, for Boone was certain that it was the same wolf with which he’d found himself sitting nose to nose when he had wakened the night before. The wolf was smiling at him, and he had never known that a wolf could smile.

  He stared at the hat. Who are you? What is this about?

  He spoke in his mind, talking to himself, not really to the hat. He had not spoken aloud for fear of s
tartling the wolf.

  The Hat replied. It is about the brotherhood of life. Who I am is of no consequence. I am only here to act as an interpreter.

  An interpreter for whom?

  For the wolf and you.

  But the wolf does not talk.

  No, he does not talk. But he thinks. He is greatly pleased and puzzled.

  Puzzled I can understand. But pleased?

  He feels a sameness with you. He senses something in you that reminds him of himself. He puzzles what you are.

  In time to come, said Boone, he will be one with us. He will become a dog.

  If he knew that, said The Hat, it would not impress him. He thinks now to be one with you. An equal. A dog is not your equal.

  Sometimes dogs come very close to us.

  But they are not one with you. There was another step to take, but it was never taken. Long ago man should have taken it. Now it is too late.

  Look, said Boone, he is not one with me. The wolf is not the same as me.

  The difference, Boone, is not as great as you may think.

  I like him, said Boone. I have admiration for him and a certain understanding.

  So has he for you. He sat nose to nose with you when he could have slashed your throat. That was before you killed the bull. He was hungry then. Your flesh could have filled his belly.

  Can you tell him, please, that I thank him that he did not slash my throat.

  I think he knows that. It was his way of saying he wants to be a friend of yours.

  Then tell him I accept his friendship, wish to be a friend of his.

  But Boone was talking to an emptiness. The Hat was no longer there. The place he’d sat was empty.