Spread out on the purple grass were rectangles of white fabric, and grouped among the spread-out rectangles were colorful hampers made, perhaps, of metal. And the thought came to her—the poor things were having a picnic when she had so rudely interrupted them.
She walked forward and nudged one of the pieces of fabric with her toe. It lifted off the ground, falling back in folds. As she had thought, it was fabric. Tablecloths, to be spread down upon the grass, forming a clean surface on which the food would have been spread out.
It was strange, she thought, that the concept of a picnic should have come into being on this planet as well as on the Earth. Although here, of course, all this might mean something else entirely—it might not even be concerned with eating out of doors.
She dropped the yellow stone into a pocket and bent to examine the contents of the hampers. There was no doubt that this picnic, if that was what it might be called, had to do with eating. There was no question in her mind that what she saw was food. There were fruits, apparently freshly picked from tree or bush. There were evidences of cooking—blocks and bricks and loaves—and in one of the hampers was placed a huge bowl of what probably was a salad, a tangled mass of leaves and gobs of quivering slimy matter. A fetid effluvium rose from the bowl.
Almost gagging from the smell, she stood up and stepped back, taking several deep breaths to clear her nose. Then, as she glanced around, she saw the box.
It was a small black box, perhaps a foot square and six inches in depth, lying on the ground just beyond what she had decided was the tablecloth. Most of it seemed to be of metal, but the side facing her was of what appeared to be a gray, opaque glass or crystal. She could see no way to open it. And she had no time to experiment with it. Horseface would soon be returning, and she didn’t want him to find her gone.
She was still staring at the box when the face of it suddenly lighted, to show an image of Horseface toiling across the grass, bent almost double by the weight of a huge chest that he carried on his back.
Basic television, she thought, and another parallel with Earth. A picnic and a television receiver. On the plate, Horseface had slipped the chest from his back and set one end of it on the ground while he wiped his steaming face. The chest was apparently a heavy load to carry.
Had the driftwood spider-things been watching him all the time and could they have known of her as well? They had seemed genuinely surprised when they peeked around the pyramid to see her.
As she thought of them, she saw them in the plate. The image of Horseface flipped off, and there they were, toiling down the narrow bottom of a dry canyon. There seemed to be something grimly purposeful in their traveling.
We’d better get out of here, she told herself. Somehow she had the feeling that the sooner gone the better. She’d go back to the net and wait for Horseface. As soon as she thought of him, he was on the plate, again trudging along under the weight of the chest.
Strange—as soon as she thought of someone, he was on the screen. Mental tuning? She could not know. But this box was more than simple television. It was, perhaps, a spying apparatus that could penetrate into unguessed places and unknown situations.
She lifted the box, which was not heavy, and started rapidly down the slope, suddenly realizing that she might have betrayed a trust in leaving the net unguarded. When she finally saw it still there, a flood of relief flowed through her and she began to run.
She glanced to her right to see Horseface still plodding toward the net with the chest upon his shoulder. She felt an unexplained urgency to leave this planet quickly and assumed that Horseface must share her feeling, perhaps with good reason. The chest could not be his. He was stealing it.
She reached the edge of the net and tossed the television box onto it. The box was large enough to fit firmly there. Now Horseface was running heavily toward her, gasping and panting, with the chest bouncing on his shoulder.
She leaped on the net, balancing on it, reaching out to seize the chest and steady it as he hoisted it from his shoulder, thrusting it toward the net. She caught hold of a leather handle on one end of it and braced herself, hauling on the handle to make sure the chest stayed on the net and did not slide off it.
It struck the net and bounced, beginning to slide toward the edge. She dug in her heels and hauled at the chest, pulling it sidewise to stop the slide.
Out of the corner of an eye she saw the writhing of something deep purple rear out of the purple grass, and tentacles reached out. Horseface bleated in terror and ducked away, leaping for the net. His hands caught the edge, and he pulled himself part way up it, his legs dangling in the air. Enid grasped one of his arms and hauled. The purpleness fell toward them. Enid stared, stricken, at the gape of mouth, the sharp and gleaming teeth, the writhing of tentacles, and the malicious glint of what could have been an eye. Under them, the net jerked violently as a tentacle grasped its trailing edge.
Feet set, Enid heaved on Horseface and he came into the net, sliding along it. The net was rising, the purpleness dangling from it, clear of the ground now, but almost indistinguishable against the purple of the grass. The tentacle still grasped the net. Enid’s hand fumbled blindly in her pocket for the yellow gemstone. She raised it and slammed it down against the tentacle. The purpleness shrilled in pain and the tentacle fell away. She watched but did not see the purpleness hit the ground. It was a purpleness blending into purpleness, and there was nothing to be seen.
Horseface was crawling swiftly up the net. He had grasped one of the leather handles of the chest and was hauling it behind him.
The net was rising in the air, and Enid began crawling on it, getting away from the edge. The televisor was sliding toward her and she reached out to grasp it. It flickered at her; when she looked down at it, Boone was there. He was in a place of grayness and seemed to be gray himself and there was a gray wolf with him.
“Boone!” she cried at him. “Boone, stay there! I will come to you!”
8
Corcoran
Jay Corcoran stepped out of the traveler into a marvelous late-April springtime. The traveler lay in a small mountain meadow. Below it was a narrow valley with a silver streak of water. Above it towered the knife-edge hills. New leaves with the soft greenness of early growth clothed all the trees, and the meadow wore a carpet of pastel-blooming wildflowers.
David came up to stand beside him. “We traveled a bit further than I had intended,” he said. “I had no time to set a course. I just got out of there.”
“How far?” asked Corcoran. “Not that it matters very much.”
“Actually, I don’t suppose it does,” said David. “Closer, however, than I’d really like to the era from which we came. We’re now, in round figures—take or give a few hundred either way—975,000 years beyond the beginning of your reckoning. As to where, probably somewhere in what you would call the colony of Pennsylvania. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”
“In my day,” said Corcoran, “it was no longer a colony.”
“Give me a little time to figure it and I can pinpoint where we are within a mile or two and the time within a year or less, if you are interested.”
Corcoran shook his head. He pointed at the ridgetop up the slope from the meadow where they stood.
“Something strange up there. A certain irregularity. Could it be a ruin?”
“Could be,” said David. “Up this far in time, the entire Earth is littered with old, forgotten places. Worn-out cities, roads that outlived their usefulness, and shrines and other places of worship, deserted when religions changed. You want to climb up and see?”
“We might as well,” said Corcoran. “From up there, we could spy out the land.”
That the hilltop, indeed, was crowned by a ruin became apparent when they were no more than halfway up the slope.
“Not much left of it,” said David. “A few more centuries and it will be a tell—a mound. A lot more like it, scattered all about. What it was, no one will ever discover. Up here there are n
o archaeologists. The race has lost all interest in what it was. The bulk of history weighs too heavily. Somewhere, I would suppose, there is tucked away a written account that would tell us what this ruin was and give a full history of it. But no one will read it. There are now no historians.”
Almost at the summit, they came up against a wall, or what was left of it. It was tumble-down, no part of it rising more than ten feet or so. To come up to it, they picked their way carefully through fallen blocks of stone, many of them half-buried in the ground.
“There has to be a gate somewhere,” said Corcoran.
“It’s bigger,” said David, “than it seemed looking at it down in the meadow.”
Following the wall, they came upon the gate. An old man sat flat upon the ground to one side of it, leaning back against the wall. His tattered clothes fluttered feebly in the little breeze that blew across the ridge. He wore no shoes. His white beard came down across his chest, and his hair, as white as the beard, bunched about his shoulders. All that showed of his face was forehead, nose, and eyes.
They stopped stock-still at the sight of him. He stared back at them with no great surprise. He made no motion; all he did was wiggle his naked toes at them.
Then he spoke. “I heard you coming from a long way off. You are clumsy creatures.”
“I’m sorry we disturbed you,” said Corcoran. “We had no idea you were here.”
“You were not disturbing me. I allow nothing to disturb me. For years there has been nothing that disturbed me. I was a prospector at one time. I roamed these hills with sack and spade, seeking out whatever treasure I might find. I found some, but not much, and finally it occurred to me that treasure is worthless. Now I converse with trees and stones, the best friends that a man can have. There are too many people in the world, worthless kinds of people. All they do now is talk among themselves, with little purpose other than their love of the sound their voices make. Everything is done for them by robots. I have no robot; I live without the benefit of robot. And the little talk I have is with trees and stones. I don’t talk much myself. I am not in love with the sound of my voice as so many others are. Rather than talk, I listen to the trees and rocks.”
All the time he had been talking, his body had been sliding down the wall against which he leaned. Now he hunched himself upward into a more erect position and shifted his conversational gears.
“At one time,” he said, “I roamed the stars and talked with aliens, and the talk of aliens, I can tell you, is all gibberish. My team and I evaluated new planets and wrote weighty reports, all filled with hard-won data, to be delivered when we returned to the planet of our origin. But when we returned to Earth, only a few remained who had any interest in what we had found. The people had turned their backs on us. So I turned my back on them. Out in space, I met aliens. I met too many of them. There are those who will tell you that aliens are brothers under the skin to us. But I’ll tell you truthfully that most aliens are a very nasty mess …”
“In all the time that you were in space,” asked David, interrupting, “or here on Earth, for that matter, did you ever run into any talk about aliens who were called the Infinites?”
“No, I can’t say that I ever did, although I haven’t more than passed the time of day with anyone for years. I’m not what you would call a social person …”
“Is there anyone else, not too far away, who might have heard of the Infinites?”
“As to that,” the old man told him, “I cannot say, but if you mean is there anyone who might be more willing than I am to talk with you, you’ll find a group of ancient busybodies a mile or so down the valley below this mountain. Ask them a question and they’ll answer. They talk unceasingly. Once they hear a question or get their teeth into any proposition, they will never let it go.”
“You don’t do so badly yourself,” Corcoran said. He turned to David. “Since we’re here, maybe we should take a walk through the ruins before we hunt up the people in the valley.”
“There is nothing to see,” the old man told him. “Just a heap of stones and old paving blocks. Go if you wish, but there is nothing worth the looking. I’ll stay here in the sun. The trees and stones are friends of mine, and so is the sun. Although there can be no talking with the sun. But it gives warmth and cheer and it asks nothing in return, and that is a friendly thing to do.”
“We thank you, then,” said David, “for the time you have given us.”
Saying that, he turned about and started through the gate. There was no trail or road, but there were open places in the clutter of fallen stones. The old man had been right; there was not much to see. Here and there old walls still stood, and skeletons of ancient structures still clung to some of their former shapes, but nowhere was there a hint of what the ruin might have been.
“We’re wasting our time,” said David. “There is nothing here for us.”
“If we didn’t waste our time,” asked Corcoran, speaking tartly, “what would we do with it?”
“There’s that, of course,” said David.
“There is one thing that bothers me,” said Corcoran. “Here we are, almost a million years beyond my time. There is a million years between you and me. To you I should seem a shambling, uncouth primitive; to me you should seem a sleek sophisticate. But neither of us finds the other strange. What goes on? Didn’t the human race develop in all those million years?”
“You must take into account that my kind were back-country people,” David said. “The hillbillies of our time. We clung desperately to the old values and the old way of life. Perhaps we overdid it, for we did it as a protest and might have gone overboard. But there were sophisticates up here. We built a great technical civilization and explored space. We came to terms with politics. No feuding nationalists were left. We arrived at a full social consciousness. No one in the world we stand in now lacks a place to sleep, food to eat, or medical aid, although now there is seldom need of it. The diseases that killed you by the millions have been wiped out. The human lifetime has been more than doubled since your time. Given a good look at this society, you might be tempted to call it utopia.”
Corcoran snorted. “A hell of a lot of good utopia did you. Your time achieved utopia and now you are going to pot. I wonder if utopia might be what is wrong with you.”
“Perhaps it is,” said David, speaking mildly. “Rather than the fact of utopia, however, the acceptance of it.”
“You mean the feeling that you have it made and there is nowhere else to go.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
They walked along for a while, then Corcoran asked, “What about the others? Can you get in touch with them?”
“There’s not much that you and I can do, but Horace has Martin’s ship, and it has a communications system. He could do some checking around. He’d have to be careful about it. There undoubtedly are a number of groups like ours, scattered throughout time. Maybe none of them are any better off than we are. Whoever sent the killer monster against us would have sent monsters out against them as well. If there are some of them left, they probably would be wary about answering any calls.”
“You think the Infinites sent the killers out?”
“I would suspect so. I can’t think of anyone else who would have.”
“But why? The Infinites drove you, helter-skelter, back into time. You can’t pose much of a threat to them.”
“It is possible,” said David, “or the Infinites might think of it as possible, that we could all regroup and at a later date come back and set up a new society. We might not do this until after the Infinites were gone, and in that possibility they might see an even greater threat. If they left any of us behind there always would be the possibility, in their minds at least, that, once they were gone, we’d be likely to undo their work.”
“But their work’s already done.”
“Not until the last human is either dead or has assumed incorporeal status.”
All this time they had been climbi
ng up the slope toward the ridge top. There still was little worth the seeing. The shattered stones lay all about them, and growing among them were bushes and small trees. In occasional patches of soil not covered by the stones, flowers grew and bloomed, many of them wild, but some of them survivors from the gardens of the fallen city—a scattering of pansies, tulips in an angle formed by two still-standing walls, and a gnarled lilac laden with sweet-smelling sprays.
Corcoran halted by the lilac bush. Reaching up, he pulled down a branch, and sniffed the heady scent of the tiny clustered flowers.
It all was the same, he thought. There was little change in this world of a million years ahead. The land was the same. There still were flowers and trees, all of them familiar. The people were little changed, if changed at all. Long as it might seem, a million years was too short a time for noticeable physical evolution. But there should be intellectual change. Maybe there was. He had seen few people of this far future—only the old man at the gate and David and his family.
He stepped away from the lilac tree and continued along a short span of wall only partially fallen. Coming to the end of it, he saw that the ridge top was a short distance off. There was a strangeness about the ridge top—a faint haziness that hung above the serrated line of ruins standing in stark outline against the sky. He slowed his walking, came to a halt, and stood staring up at the haziness that was beginning to assume the form of a gigantic, circular, free-standing staircase winding up the sky.
Then he saw that he was wrong. The staircase was not free-standing; it wound around a massive tree trunk. And the tree—good God, the tree! The haziness was going away and he could see it more clearly now. The tree thrust upward from the ridge top, soaring far into the sky, not topping out, but continuing upward as far as he could see, the staircase winding round it, going up and up until the tree trunk and the staircase became one thin pencil line, then vanished in the blue.
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