Highway of Eternity

by Clifford D. Simak

  Now off the road, parked on the flat floor of the arroyo, he climbed wearily from the single bucket seat of his car. Even on the smoother surface of the ancient freeway, his vehicle provided a rough and punishing ride. Every one of his muscles, it seemed, ached from the pounding he had taken.

  He walked a few feet from the car and stretched. The arroyo was silent. There was no wind and not even any insect sounds. The high sky above him was pale blue. In it was a single high-soaring bird, maybe an eagle, more likely a buzzard. On either side of the gulch, the walls came down, sluiced and streaked by erosion, crumbling at the edges in the fierce blast of sunlight. Here and there small boulders and thin stone strata thrust partway from the soil. At the foot of the walls, where they joined the now dry streambed floor, lay scattered mounds of fallen stone.

  Just beyond where he stood the arroyo bent, swinging around abruptly to take a different direction. He followed it and stopped, staring at the wall to his left. Protruding from the wall were the dead whiteness of old bone and the burnished gleam of ancient horn. A skull buried beneath the surface had been revealed by the erosion of the wall.

  It was a bovine skull, but the skull was too massive and the one projecting horn too heavy and too long to ever have belonged to even the largest of the longhorns.

  It had to be a bison, but not a bison of the Old West. What he was looking at, he told himself, was a prehistoric bison, one of the monstrous brutes that had been hunted by the first men in America. Looking at the floor of the arroyo beneath the skull, Martin saw the fractured whiteness of other bits of bone. How long ago, he wondered, had this buried beast cropped the prairie grass? A prairie then, but a desert now. Twenty thousand years, he told himself, probably more than that. There might have been a time when such a discovery would have the promise of some profit. But if the world of the present was actually in the shape he had deduced, there’d be no profit now.

  A small buttress of the wall, a section that for the moment had resisted the power of rushing water, thrust out a few feet into the gully. As he stepped around it, the flare of reflected sunlight caught him in the eyes. He halted, puzzled. The flare had come from something embedded in the wall. The flare was gone, but whatever was embedded there still glittered.

  He advanced slowly and stood in front of the shining object. It was a sphere, highly polished, looking for all the world like one of the crystal spheres used by phoney fortune tellers. It was the size of a basketball and its surface was so smooth and reflective that he saw the image of himself reflected in it with the sort of reflection that a curved mirror would project.

  He raised his hands to lift it from the wall and it spoke to him.

  Kind sir, it said, take me in your hands and hold me. Give me the warmth of other life and your loving kindness. I have been alone so long!

  Martin froze, his hands still extended, but not moving to pick the sphere from out the wall of earth. His teeth chattered with sudden fright. Something had spoken to him, deep inside his mind, for he was sure there had been no sound of words—the same sort of speech as was used by that doll-like simpleton, The Hat.

  Free me, the voice pleaded. Lift me down and keep me. I shall be a friend to you, a faithful servant to you. I ask no more than that you keep me with you. I could not bear the agony should you reject me, should you walk away from me.

  Martin tried to speak. The words rattled in his throat.

  Fear me not, the voice said. As I am, I have no power to harm you and, if I had, I would have no wish to do so. I have waited for so long, for a long eternity. Please, kind sir, have mercy on me. You’re the last and only hope I have. There will be no other chance for me. I cannot face foreverness alone.

  Words finally came to Martin, gulping, hurried words, as if he feared he could not get them out. “What are you?” he asked. “Are you really speaking to me?”

  I am really speaking to you, said the sphere. I hear you in my mind and speak to you from my mind. Your spoken words mean nothing to me. I can hear no sound. Once I had an auditory sense, but that long since is gone.

  “But what are you?”

  My history is a long one. Suffice it now to say that I am an ancient artifact from a mysterious race of which there is now no record.

  The damn thing is lying, Martin told himself.

  The sphere protested: I do not lie to you. Why should I lie to you, my rescuer?

  “I did not say that you were lying. I spoke not a word to you.”

  The thought lay within your mind. I thought that you spoke to me.

  “My God,” said Martin, “you read my mind. Can you read the minds of everyone?”

  That is my manner of conversing, said the sphere. And, yes, I can read the mind of any thinking creature that is close enough.

  “All right,” said Martin. “All right.”

  He advanced a step and lifted the sphere from the wall. It left behind it the imprint of itself. It had a good heft to it, a feeling of solidity, but it was not heavy. He held it for a moment, then placed it gently on the smooth floor of the arroyo, squatting down beside it.

  Kind sir, asked the sphere, does this mean you’ll keep me?

  “Yes, I think I’ll keep you.”

  You never shall regret it, said the sphere. I shall be the best friend you’ve ever had. I will be your …

  “Let us not talk of it now,” said Martin. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  He picked up the sphere and walked along the gully, heading for the car.

  Where are we going, sir?

  “I’m taking you to my car,” said Martin. “I’ll place you in it. Then I have a few things to do. I’ll leave you there, then later I’ll join you.”

  You will return? Kind friend, you will return?

  “You have my promise,” Martin said.

  He placed the sphere in the car and walked away, back down the arroyo, well beyond the point where he’d found the sphere. This will be far enough, he told himself. It can’t read my mind over such a distance. Or, at least, he hoped it couldn’t. He had an idea by the tail and he needed time alone to think it out.

  This was something new, he told himself. There must be profit in it. It could be the key, wisely used, to a better life in this godforsaken world. His mind skittered rapidly as he thought about it. He took the idea and turned it round and round. The sphere had possibilities, a lot of possibilities, and he had to think of them long and hard.

  In this benighted world, there must be something one could offer that would have some appeal. The world was filled with hopelessness, and maybe that was it. The people could not be promised riches, for there were no riches to be given. The hope of riches would be an empty hope and everyone would know that. But hope itself—pure and naked hope—that might be something else. If there were some way to give them hope, they’d buy it. They’d flock in thousands for a whiff of hope. But it would have to be more than a namby-pamby hope. It must be such as to touch off a howling fanaticism.

  He thought about fanaticism and that it was hard to come by. He paced back and forth, thinking of hope and fanaticism and what he might gain by arousing a hopeful fanaticism. Somewhat easier living, perhaps, but not a lot of money. What could be gained, perhaps, would be position and power. Given position and power, a canny man could do a lot.

  He wrestled with the idea he had snared and the mystery of an ancient artifact, although he still did not entirely buy that the sphere was really an ancient artifact.

  A dash of religion might turn the trick. That, by God, was it—religion! A new messiah and an ancient artifact performing in a sacred mystery atmosphere.

  He squatted down and thought about it. He’d have to take it easy to start with, he told himself. No big splash, no circus background. Start small and humble and let the crusade grow by word of mouth.

  To make it go, he would have to tell the people what they wished to hear. By slow degrees he must find out what they wanted, then feed them what they wanted.

  There was one quest
ion still: What was the sphere? Not an ancient artifact from a long-lost race, as it had told him. Although, true or not, it was a good approach to what he had in mind. He tried to think of all the things it might be and rejected them one by one. He was wasting time, he told himself. He did not need, right now, to know what the sphere actually might be. He could use it without knowing.

  He went back over the plan and thought it through, point by point, searching for glitches that could trip him up. He found none that he could not circumvent. After all, a hopeless people, offered hope, would not question it too closely. They’d be eager for it, they would lap up a promised salvation and would scream for more. Worked out right, he told himself, the scheme was foolproof. It would take a great deal more thinking and more planning, and he would give it those. He’d think it out in every detail before he went ahead with it. It was a solid and workable plan, and he was the one who could work it out.

  He rose from his crouch and headed for the car. He had been in the arroyo longer than he’d thought. The sun was about to set.

  You came back, the sphere shrieked joyously at him. I had thought you might not. I agonized you might not.

  “No need for you to have agonized,” said Martin. “I am here.”

  He checked the battery and it was up, as up as it would ever get. He moved the sphere to the well beside the seat and climbed in to start the car.

  “One question,” he asked the sphere. “How about your ethics? Have you any ethics?”

  What are ethics? asked the sphere. Please explain to me.

  “Never mind,” Martin told it. “You’ll do. We’ll make a team together.”

  He turned the car around and headed for the road.

  18

  Horseface

  Horseface sat at ease at a table that stood in front of the cafe hut, now empty of the robot and equipment. Near him floated the net with the chest in which the galactic chart had been locked away. The visor that Enid had thought she stole was on the table, close to hand. The trolley car still stood on its track, waiting for the next passenger, who might never come. And around all this was wrapped the foggy grayness of the Highway of Eternity.

  As he had done many times before, Horseface pondered on the Highway. So far, all his pondering had come to nothing, and he supposed it always would. He wondered who or what had engineered this never-ending thread of road, yanked askew and canted out of normal time and space. He had first heard of it very long ago and very far away, from an incredible creature that seemed to mock all the needs and qualities of life. It was this incredibility who had called it the Highway of Eternity, but who did not answer when he asked the reason for the name.

  “Don’t go looking for it,” the incredibility had warned him. “It cannot be found by looking. It must be stumbled upon.”

  Horseface had stumbled upon it millennia ago and, curiously, had then found its representation worked into the ancient galactic chart. But he was sure his race had never built it, though they had been aware of it.

  Having stumbled upon the Highway, he had decided it might make a place to sit and ponder his various choices of action. He had installed the hut with the tables and chairs, and had put the robot in charge. Since the tracks were there, he had placed the trolley on them and had rigged alarms so that he would be notified should someone or something appear along this section of the Highway.

  For many centuries, nothing happened. Then, only a few years before, the alarms had been tripped by Boone in his first stepping around a corner. That strange happening had seemed to provide a possible key for which Horseface had been looking to solve the problem presented by the humans at Hopkins Acre.

  He had been hopeful, but not completely convinced, until Boone’s second appearance. Then he had recognized that he was witnessing an entirely new talent in a race from which he had not suspected such talents. The talent itself was less important than the fact that within the race there existed a capacity to develop masked new capabilities in an evolutionary mode. With his realization of that, Boone had become central to his project.

  Now that project, Horseface told himself, was finally underway, working out far better than he had hoped. What now remained were years of monitoring and close watching to make certain no hitches developed, but he would have help with that. Spike and The Hat would be accepted by the family, as Spike had been for years.

  Horseface chuckled as he thought of that. Galactic Center had considered Spike their undercover agent, and he had been inserted into the family at the moment they were about to flee into the past to escape the Infinites. Spike’s reports to Horseface had reinforced his hunch that this band of humans was worth his close attention.

  Of course, there was no guarantee that he would not fail in this project as he had failed in others in the past. Intelligence, it appeared, had a miserable chance of developing to its full capacity. There had been other races he had tried to help over long centuries of effort, and each had been a failure. There had been races he had not helped who had failed as well. The Rainbow People had failed finally because they had lost all true values by repressing their emotions until such emotions had shriveled away. The Infinites had become lost in their drive toward their fanatical crusade. Even Horseface’s own people had failed when their too-successful search for immortality had caused a sacrifice of racial fertility that left him, finally, as the last surviving member of his race.

  A soft plopping sound jerked his attention from his reminiscenses. The Hat stood opposite him, shaking himself as a dog would shake off water. With the shaking, his disarranged garments fell into their accustomed places. The Hat sat down carefully.

  I am not deserting my post, The Hat told Horseface. I shall return and carry on my duties. I come to escape the wolf. He tosses me about and shakes me. He walks away, making me hope he has deserted me; then he turns and pounces on me. His teeth have battered and chewed upon me, and …

  “You must put up with it,” Horseface said. “It is a rôle you must play. While you seem only a ragged doll, they will not suspect you spy upon them. Consider the rôle I must play. I must act a clown, talk as they would expect from an uncouth alien, tell them untruths, and play seedy tricks upon them.”

  Like the trick he had played upon the little Enid, making her believe she must hold her finger upon a point while he tied a knot. He had gained her confidence by making her feel she helped to create the net, which, of course, had been there all along, needing only his thought to make it visible.

  And to convince her of her importance on the net, he had let her believe that she was stealing the visor he had placed on the pink-and-purple world where he had left the chart chest. The compulsion to go to it had been put into her mind while she believed they were both thinking at each other. Then he had let her think she was saving him from the purple monster that was only trying to ride the net with them.

  You need not have done any of it, The Hat said, if you had minded your own business. But you must interfere in the lives of others. No one seeks your advice or help. You are simply an objectionable busybody.

  “Perhaps I am,” Horseface admitted. “But I cannot do otherwise, when a small push might place some race on the path toward a full development of the intellectual powers possible.”

  And I have helped you, said The Hat. I have even acted on my own many times. That is how I got in trouble with the wolf. There your precious Boone was, stupidly dozing by his campfire, with the wolf edging up on him. The wolf would have torn out his throat in another minute had I not taken over its small mind and engulfed it with a sense of brotherhood for Boone and doglike devotion to him.

  “Yes,” said Horseface. “You did well, as I have said before. You did well in programming the travelers whenever the family fled in them. Even when you programmed Martin’s to bring him and the Infinites here, you did well—although I did not think so when he first appeared.”

  And I saved Corcoran while you were in the chart, The Hat added. I watched him and when I saw he was abo
ut to fall, I zapped him unconscious and brought him to the Highway. And now I become a plaything for the wolf so that I can spy on your chosen Enid and Boone. It is not a proper reward for …

  Horseface interrupted. “Tell me, do you see any signs that the two of them will mate?”

  They have done so already, The Hat answered. I think Enid is feeling guilty that it took place before the rite they term a wedding. I do not understand this wedding business.

  “Don’t try,” Horseface told him. “The sexual ethics of all races make little sense. And the syndrome that humans call love is beyond all understanding.”

  But The Hat was no longer listening. The Hat had collapsed into his rag doll phase and lay limply across the table.

  Poor little tyke, Horseface thought in sudden sympathy. Perhaps he had been used hardly and deserved a rest.

  Horseface recalled the day he had found the creature, tucked away in a display niche of an ancient museum of his own people, perhaps left against a time when the race would be gone. He had glanced at The Hat and passed on, unwilling to load himself down with relics of the past. Later, however, he had gone back to retrieve the doll. He never ceased to bless the urge that led him to do so, for The Hat had strange abilities beyond any he could understand, such as the power to move and carry across space and time without such aids as the net.

  So Enid and Boone had mated and the die was cast. It was, Horseface knew, a genetic gamble, but better than many other gambles he had made. Horseface knew much about genetics.

  From their union, there was a chance that a new race would spring—an offshoot of humanity that combined the evolutionary trend shown by Boone and the toughness of that small group of humans who had stubbornly dared to resist the menace of the Infinites.

  He had admired that stubbornness and he had helped the rebels, recognizing the promise in them. He had supplied them with one of the most simple of the time machines developed by his race as an ancient forerunner of the net. The Infinites had time travel, of course, but theirs were such complicated devices that the rebels could not have understood them. Lying again, Horseface had let the rebels believe they were stealing it from the Infinites.