No machines, of course! He was thinking in terms of humans and this was an alien building, constructed for alien purposes. One would not expect to find desks, chairs, or filing cabinets. But there should be other items—alien items—and there were none of these.
Emma nudged him in the ribs. “Look up there,” she said. He looked where she was pointing and saw the strange objects hanging from the ceiling. There were hundreds of them, all suspended by strings or cords. They fluttered in the slight circulation of air that flowed in the building.
“They look like Infinites,” said Emma.
“If they are,” said Conrad, who was standing just a little distance off, “there is no life in them. I can detect no life. If there were life, even a little, my senses would tell me so. If they are Infinites, they are dead and hung up to dry.”
Since entering the building and walking a short distance into it, they had scarcely moved. Now, from deep inside of it came a humming of excitement.
“The boys have found something,” said Conrad. “Let us go and see.”
The four of them hurried forward, coming upon the robots, who had formed into a circle and were watching something with exclamations of wonder.
“Let us through,” said Conrad, speaking sharply. “What is going on? Make room for us.”
The robots parted, and there, in the center of the circle, Spike and the killer monster were dancing a rigadoon. But whether it was a dance or a combative circling, with each opponent waiting for an opening to attack the other, there was no way to determine. They jigged and skittered, moving very fast, making tentative lunges at one another and then turning quickly aside.
“Stand back, the rest of you,” screamed Horace. “I’ll put an end to this!”
He had the rifle halfway to his shoulder when the building rocked so violently that the humans and many of the robots were thrown off their feet. As he fell and skidded on the tilting floor, Timothy heard the slamming of a door.
He fell into something. When he attempted to scramble out, the texture of whatever he had fallen into was so slick that he could find no purchase point to hoist himself out of it.
As suddenly as it had started, the bucking of the building ceased and Timothy realized that what he had fallen into was one of the holes scooped out of the floor. His body fitted the hole neatly and he thought that if a man could curl up in it, the hole would be a restful place to sleep. Perhaps that was what it was; conceivably all these holes were beds for Infinites. Being somewhat smaller than humans’, their bodies must have fitted into the holes most trimly.
“Are you stuck in there?” Conrad asked, bending over him.
“No, not stuck. It’s just difficult to get out. Lend me a hand, if you will.”
Conrad extended a hand, pulled him free, and set him on his feet.
“I think,” the robot said, “that we may be in trouble. I suspect we have been moved.”
“Moved?”
“The building moved.”
“It threw me off my feet.”
“I think it did more than that.”
Someone had opened the door by which they’d entered, and robots were pouring out of it, fleeing from the building. Horace, who apparently had stepped outside, came back through the door, fighting his way against the rush of fleeing robots. Coming toward Timothy, he waved the rifle in the air and bellowed, “The building was a trap. It sucked us in and then it took us somewhere else.” He asked Conrad, “Have you any idea where we are?”
Conrad shook his head. “Not the least,” he said.
Timothy stood confounded, not sure what was going on, what Horace might be saying. “Somewhere else?” he asked. “There should be no problem. A matter of some miles, perhaps.”
“You fool,” said Horace, harshly, “that is not what I meant. Not miles. Light years, more than likely. This is not our planet. We’re not on the Earth. Take a look outside.”
Horace grabbed him by the arm and jerked him roughly, propelling him toward the door.
“Go out and look!”
Timothy staggered toward the door, thrust forward by Horace’s broad hand between his shoulder blades.
It was dusk or dawn. The air was crisp and fresh, and the sky looked strange. The land lay in folds; rolling hills led to other, ever-higher rolling hills, fading to a far horizon line. Above the horizon hung a bloated yellow moon.
Perhaps there was something about it that Horace had seen to make him think it was a different planet. To Timothy it appeared a quiet place, with no peculiarities. The air was breathable and the gravity like that of Earth.
One of the robots asked, “Is everyone out? Clear of the monastery?”
“Everyone is out,” replied another robot voice.
“Controls?” Horace was yelling. “Did anyone spot controls?”
“Controls?”
“Yes, controls, something to operate the monastery. To control and guide it.”
“No one did, I’m sure,” Conrad answered. “It’s not a vehicle. There would be no controls.”
“It moved from there to here,” cried Horace. “It moved. Otherwise, how are we here?”
“It is beginning to break up,” said another robot. “It is cracking at the seams. Listen to it.”
They listened, and the groaning and the screeching of the structure could be heard—the rending of too-ancient metal.
“It barely held together to get us here,” said Conrad. “This is the end of it. A few years more and it would not have moved at all.”
“Damn it!” Horace bellowed. “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”
“I agree with you,” said Conrad, speaking quietly. “There are times when nothing works out right.”
Timothy turned about and walked free of the crowd packed in front of the collapsing monastery. It was just as well, he thought. If the monastery had proved, in fact, to be an operative traveler, there would be no telling what sort of harebrained scheme Horace would cook up. At least here they were momentarily safe and in an environment that up to now had been congenial. They could breathe and move about, the temperature was not oppressive, and probably there would be food of some sort they could eat.
He was standing on a hillside and there was turf beneath his feet—but what kind of turf? It still was too dark to see, although to his right the sky was becoming lighter. Horace had said they were on another planet, but there was nothing as yet to support his assertion. The hills looked like Earth hills. It still was too dark to see much of anything.
Someone moved up the hill toward him and he saw that it was Emma. He walked down to meet her. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” said Emma, “but I’m frightened. Horace says we are no longer on the Earth. He says there are two moons and Earth does not have two moons, and I don’t understand at all how it could have happened.”
“Two moons? There’s only one moon. It’s hanging in the west. Or what I take to be the west …”
“There’s another directly overhead,” said Emma. “It is a smaller moon.”
He craned his neck to look and there the moon was, directly overhead. As Emma had said, it was a small moon, less than half the size of Earth’s moon. So that is how Horace knew.
The monastery still was groaning. The eastern sky was brighter than it had been before. In another little while the sun would come popping up.
“Have you seen Spike?” Emma asked.
“Not a sign of him.”
“He’s off playing his silly games with that stupid monster.”
“I’m not sure they’re games,” said Timothy.
“What could it be but games? Spike always was playing some foolish sort of game.”
“Yes, you’re likely right,” he told her.
The gang of robots that had been massed downslope from the monastery were withdrawing, trooping down the hill to a point where the incline leveled out to a valley floor. A sharp command rang out and the robots began swiftly shifting into military conformati
ons.
The dawn light had strengthened and it was possible to see a little better. The surge of rolling hills lost the starkness of the night, their profiles softening. Looking first at them in the dark, he had envisioned them as green hills, but now he saw there was no greenness in them. They were tawny, the color of a lion or a cougar, beneath a violet sky. Why should a sky be violet—not a small part of it, but allover violet?
Horace came clumping up toward them. He stopped just downslope, the rifle slung in the crook of his arm.
“We’ve been had,” he said, angrily. “We were kidnapped and flung into this place, wherever it may be.”
“But we are not alone,” said Emma. “We have the robots with us.”
“A tribe of fools,” said Horace. “A pack of stumblebums.”
“They’ll be some help,” said Timothy. “Conrad strikes me as competent—he can get things done.”
“We have lost everything we had,” cried Emma. “All the stuff that was in the traveler. The blankets! And all the rest of it! The skillets and the pots!”
Horace put an arm around her shoulder. “They brought the blankets and some other stuff,” he said. “We’ll manage somehow.”
Sobbing, she clung to him; clumsily he held her, patting her back. Timothy watched uncomfortably. It was the first time in all his life he’d seen Horace display even the slightest affection for his sister.
The east was brightening rapidly, and now it could be seen that a river ran through the valley that lay between the hills and that small groves of trees grew along the river and on the lower slope of some of the hills. They were funny trees, however; they had the appearance of giant ferns or overgrown rushes. On the hills above the valley, the tawny growth that could be grass billowed in the wind. Good pasture, Timothy thought, but there were, so far as he could see, no herds of herbivores nor, in fact, any single grazer.
A metal plate slid from the collapsing monastery and skated for a few feet down the hill. The structure, by this time, had completely fallen in upon itself to become only a heap of flattened metal.
Down in the valley the robots’ military formation had broken up. All that remained of it was a phalanx, the hollow square, Timothy thought, that had been classic, from Alexander’s Macedonians through the centuries to Napoleon’s last stand at Waterloo. The rest of the robots were scattering like scurrying bugs fleeing from the center. Apparently they were setting out as scouts to look the country over.
Three of them were heading purposefully up the hill toward the humans. The three reached them, placing themselves in such a way as to partially surround them. One of them spoke, “Sirs and madam, Conrad has sent us to escort you to the safety of the camp.”
“You call that hollow square a camp?” growled Horace.
“We are out searching for fuel to make a fire. Others will bring in water and what else may be needed.”
“Well, all right,” Horace agreed, grudgingly. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m hungry.”
He started down the hill with Emma trotting at his side and Timothy following.
The sun had cleared the horizon by now. Glancing over his shoulder, Timothy noted its similarity to the sun of Earth—perhaps a little larger and a little brighter, although that was hard to judge. In a lot of ways, this planet was much like Earth. Underneath his feet grew fine-textured grass intermixed with a vinelike ground cover.
From the hollow square below them rose a wisp of smoke.
“They found fuel,” said Horace. “Something that will burn. We’ll have a hot breakfast after all.”
Inside the protective square, Conrad told them about the fuel. “Wood,” he said, “from the fern trees. Not as good a wood as one might like, but it burns, giving heat and light. A hollow center surrounded by a pith, but a fairly dense pith. Also we found coal.”
He thrust his hands out to show the coal, shattered slabs of shiny black.
“We dug it out of a rock formation in the river bank. Not topnotch coal, more like lignite, but coal. We’ll keep looking as we travel and we may find better coal. Between poor wood and poor coal, however, we have fire. Back on Earth most of the coal had long since been mined and burned.”
“Travel?” Emma quavered. “Where will we travel?”
“We have to travel somewhere,” Conrad told her. “We can’t stay here. We have to find a place where we can get shelter and food.”
“Food?”
“Yes, of course, madam, food. The little that you have will not last.”
“But it might be poison!”
“We’ll test it,” Horace said.
“We have no way to test it.”
“I agree,” said Horace. “No laboratory. No chemicals, no knowledge of chemistry even if we had the chemicals. But there is a way. We’ll use ourselves as guinea pigs.”
“This is one you’ll have to do yourselves,” said Conrad. “Robots cannot help you.”
“We’ll take a tiny bite,” said Horace. “We’ll test the taste. If it tastes bad, burns the tongue, or puckers up the mouth, we’ll spit it out. If it tastes good, we’ll swallow a tiny piece of it, then we’ll wait and see.”
One of the robots cried out a warning, gesturing up the hill. A vehicle—a flier—of gleaming metal was streaking down the hill toward them. It flew only a few feet above the ground. It swooped upon them and passed over them, then turned sharply to bank against the hills beyond the river. It swung around and followed the slope of the opposite hills to cross the river at a point somewhat upstream from them, then came about to come skimming down the stream, no more than ten feet above the ground, passing almost directly above the hollow square of robots. It continued down the river for some distance, then lazily climbed up the range of hills, flying far above them until it finally disappeared.
“We’re being watched,” said Conrad. “They came to look us over.”
“What can we do about it?” Horace asked. “What should we do to protect ourselves?”
“We’ll keep close watch,” said Conrad. “We’ll look out for them.”
Late in the afternoon, the scouts who had gone down the river returned to report that the stream finally flowed into an extensive swamp. During the night, the upriver scouts came back. The hills, they said, gave way some miles ahead to a high plateau, with mountains thrusting up in the distance.
“That’s what we needed to know,” said Conrad. “We go upriver.”
In the morning they started out. As the hills closed in on the stream, the going got harder. Thick veins of coal lay in the sheer rock faces along the stream. The trees began to change. Those that looked like giant ferns and rushes grew fewer. Honest, earth-type trees took over. The hills persisted. They lay in ranges, separated by narrow valleys, each range rising higher. Conrad did not push the march. He and Horace bickered from time to time, but never went beyond the bickering.
They came on food that was fit for human consumption—a couple of kinds of tubers, a yellow fruit that was fairly common, beans that grew in stubby pods on a crawling ground vine. The testing of each food was done in a gingerly fashion. Some possibilities were rejected out of hand—they smelled or tasted bad. Horace picked up a touch of gastritis from berries that he sampled; that was the only nasty episode. The robots brought in small mammals; all but one proved good eating. The fish they took from the streams they came upon smelled so foul that they did not try them.
The robots made hunting weapons, but the bows were awkward and the arrows often failed to fly true. They essayed flint-napping, but from the lack of proper stone and technique, most of the projectile points turned out lopsided. Yet the ranging robots did manage to bring in some game.
The good weather held. No clouds showed in the violet sky. The days were hot, the nights only slightly cooler.
Finally the hills ended, and they came out on a great, flat, dry plateau sprinkled with buttes, with the white-blue of distant mountains poking above the horizon. Carrying water in casks laboriously fashioned out o
f native wood, the band started across the level plain. Tempers were beginning to run short.
There had been no further sighting of the ship that had buzzed them when they first arrived, although Timothy had the eerie feeling that they were being watched.
Several times they caught a momentary sight of Spike and the killer monster outlined against the sky. Although he could not be certain, Timothy had the impression that Spike had gained some sort of ascendancy, harrying the monster, driving him.
The plain seemed endless. Day after day they plodded along, and little changed. The mountains kept their distance, never seeming nearer. There was nothing but endless distances. At the foot of one of the buttes they found a small, reluctant spring and from it collected sufficient water to fill the empty casks. The small stream that flowed from it ran less than a quarter mile before it disappeared into the thirsty ground. Horace groused continually; Emma wrung her hands. Conrad paid small attention to them; he kept the march moving, boring ever deeper into the barren wasteland.
Late one searing afternoon, the flatness of the plain broke, dipping down into a canyon. From the lip of the break, they sighted, at the bottom of the canyon, a ribbon of a river, flanked by narrow strips of vegetation on either side. To their left a massive butte reared up, its western slope cut sheer in ages past by the ancient river that had carved the canyon. Between the edge of the slope and the steepness of the canyon wall lay a level bench with the crumbling ruins of what at one time would have been a small town.
They wasted little time upon the ruins. Scurrying robots found a narrow path that led down to the bottom of the canyon, and the party made its way cautiously along the trail which wound its way along the face of a towering cliff of rose-red rock. At the bottom of the trail, the cliff turned in upon itself, forming an extensive rock shelter. From the opening of the shelter came a drift of cooler air, providing some relief from the blasting of the sun.
Conrad, followed by the three humans, stepped off the trail to enter the shelter.
“Here,” said Conrad, “we will tarry for a time. It’s not all I’d hoped we’d find, but at least we’ll have some protection while we plan our further move. The water from the river is only a little distance off. Along its banks, we may find food that humans can consume.”
Highway of Eternity Page 21