“I don’t know,” said Horton.
“Well, anyhow,” said Nicodemus, “I have a chef transmog and a physician transmog and a biochemist transmog—well, you get the idea. A full college course encoded in each of them. I counted them once, but now I have forgotten. A couple of dozen, I would guess.”
“So you actually might be able to fix this tunnel of the Carnivore’s.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Nicodemus. “I don’t know what the engineer transmog contains. There are so many different kinds of engineering—chemical, mechanical, electrical.”
“At least you’ll have an engineering background.”
“That’s right. But the tunnel the Carnivore talked about probably wasn’t built by humans. Humans wouldn’t have had the time …”
“It could be human-built. They’ve had almost a thousand years to do a lot of things. Remember what the fifty years you’ve been talking about accomplished.”
“Yeah, I know. You could be right. Relying on ships might not have been good enough. If the humans had relied on ships, they wouldn’t have gotten out this far by now and …”
“They could have if they developed faster-than-light. Maybe once you develop that, there would be no natural limit. Once you break the light barrier, there might be no limit to how much faster than light you could go.”
“Somehow I don’t think they developed faster-than-light ships,” said Nicodemus. “I listened to a lot of talk about it during that period after I was drafted into this project. No one seemed to have any real starting point, no real appreciation of what is involved. What more than likely happened is that humans landed on a planet not nearly as far out as we are now and found one of the tunnels and are now using the tunnels.”
“But not only humans.”
“No, that’s quite apparent from Carnivore. How many other races may be using them we can have no idea. What about Carnivore? If we don’t get the tunnel operating, he’ll want to ship with us.”
“Over my dead body.”
“You know, I feel pretty much the same. He’s a rather uncouth personage and it might be quite a problem to put him into cold-sleep. Before we tried that, we’d have to know his body chemistry.”
“Which reminds me that we’re not going back to Earth. What is the scoop? Where does Ship intend to go?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Nicodemus. “We talked off and on, of course. Ship, I am sure, tried to hold nothing back from me. I have the feeling Ship doesn’t quite know itself what it intends to do. Just go, I suppose, and see what it can find. You realize, of course, that Ship, if it wishes to, can listen in on anything we say.”
“That doesn’t bother me,” said Horton. “As it stands, we’re all tied up in the same can of worms. You for much longer than will be the case with me. Whatever the situation, I suppose I’ll have to stand upon it, for I have no other base. I’m close to a thousand years away from home, and a thousand years behind the Earth of this moment. Ship undoubtedly is right in saying that if I went back I would be a misfit. You can accept all of this intellectually, of course, but it gives you a strange feeling in the gizzard. If the other three were here, I imagine it would be different. I have the sense of being horribly alone.”
“You aren’t alone,” said Nicodemus. “You have Ship and me.”
“Yes, I suppose so. I seem to keep forgetting.”
He pushed back from the table. “That was a fine dinner,” he said. “I wish you could have eaten with me. Before I go off to bed, do you think it would disaccommodate my gut if I had a slice of that roast, cold?”
“For breakfast,” said Nicodemus. “If you want a slice for breakfast.”
“All right, then,” said Horton. “There’s still one thing that bothers me. With the setup that you have, you don’t really need a human on this expedition. At the time I took the training, a human crew made sense. But not any longer. You and Ship could do the job alone. Given the situation as it is, why didn’t they just junk us? Why did they bother putting us on board?”
“You seek to mortify yourself and the human race,” said Nicodemus. “It is no more than shock reaction to what you have just learned. To start with, the idea was to put knowledge and technology on board, and the only way it could be put on board was in the persons of humans who had that knowledge and technology. By the time the ships took off, however, another means of supplying technology and knowledge had been found in the transmogs which could make even such simple robots as myself into multispecialists. But even so there would be, in us, still one factor lacking—that strange quality of humanness, the biological human condition which we still lack and which no roboticist has as yet been able to build into us. You spoke of your training robot and your hatred of him. This is what happens when you go beyond a certain point in robotic improvement. You gain good capability, but the humanity to balance the capability is lacking and the robot, instead of becoming more humanlike, becomes arrogant and insufferable. It may always be so. Humanity may be a factor that cannot be arrived at artificially. An expedition to the stars, I suppose, could function efficiently with only robots and their transmog kits aboard, but it would not be a human expedition, and that is what this and the other expeditions were all about—to seek out planets where the people of Earth could live. Certainly the robots could make observations and reach decisions and nine times out of ten the observations would be accurate and the decisions quite correct, but in that tenth time, one or both could be wrong because the robots would be looking at the problem with robotic eyes and making the decisions with robotic brains that lacked that all important factor of the human quality.”
“Your words are comforting,” said Horton. “I only hope you are right.”
“Believe me, sir, I am.”
Ship said, Horton, you’d better get to bed now. The Carnivore will be coming to meet you in the morning, and you should get some sleep.
8
But sleep came hard.
Lying on his back, staring up into the blackness, the strangeness and the loneliness came pouring in upon him, the strangeness and the loneliness that had been held off till now.
Only yesterday, Nicodemus had said to him. It was only yesterday that you went into cold-sleep, because all the centuries that have come and gone since then mean less than nothing to you.
It had been, he thought, with some surprise and bitterness, only yesterday. And now alone, to remember and to mourn. To mourn, here in the darkness of a planet far from Earth, arrived at, so far as he was concerned, in the twinkling of an eye, to find the home planet and the people of that yesterday sunk in the depths of time.
Helen dead, he thought. Dead and lying underneath the steely glitter of stranger stars on an unknown planet of an unrecorded sun, where the glaciers of frozen oxygen reared their bulk against the black of space and the primal rock lay uneroded through millennia piled upon millennia, a planet as unchanging as was death itself.
The three of them together—Helen, Mary, Tom. Only he was missing—missing because he had been in cubicle number one, because a stupid, flat-footed, oafish robot could think of no other system than doing a task by numbers.
Ship, he whispered in his mind.
Go to sleep, said Ship.
To hell with you, said Horton. You can’t baby me. You can’t tell me what to do. Go to sleep, you say. Take a lead, you say. Forget it all, you say.
We do not tell you to forget, said Ship. The memory is a precious one, and while you must mourn, hold the memory fast. When you mourn, know that we mourn with you. For we remember Earth as well.
But you won’t go back to it. You plan to go on. After this planet, you plan to go on. What do you expect to find? What are you looking for?
There is no way of knowing. We have no expectations.
And I go with you?
Of course, said Ship. We are a company, and you are part of it.
The planet? We’ll take time to look it over?
There is no hurry, said Ship.
We have all the time there is.
What we felt this evening? That’s a part of it? A part of this unknown that we’re going to?
Good night, Carter Horton, said Ship. We will talk again. Think of pleasant things and try to go to sleep.
Pleasant things, he thought. Yes, there had been pleasantness back where the sky was blue, with white clouds floating in it, with a picture-ocean running its long fingers up and down a picture-beach, with Helen’s body whiter than the sands they lay upon. There had been picnic fires with the night-wind moving through the half-seen trees. There had been candlelight upon a snow-white cloth, with gleaming china and sparkling glass set upon the table, with music in the background and contentment everywhere.
Somewhere in the outer darkness, Nicodemus moved clumsily about, trying to be quiet, and through the open port came a far-off strident fiddling of what he told himself were insects. If there were insects here, he thought.
He tried to think of the planet that lay beyond the port, but it seemed he could not think of it. It was too new and strange for him to think of it. But he found that he could conjure up the frightening concept of that vast, silent depth of space that lay between this place and Earth, and he saw in his mind’s eye the tiny mote of Ship floating through that awesome immensity of nothingness. The nothingness translated into loneliness, and with a groan, he turned over and clutched the pillow tight about his head.
9
Carnivore showed up shortly after morning light.
“Good,” he said. “You’re ready. We travel in no hurry. Is not far to go. I checked the tunnel before I left. It had not fixed itself.”
He led the way, up the sharp pitch of the hill, then down into a valley that lay so deep between the hills and was so engulfed in forest that the darkness of the night had not been dispelled entirely. The trees stood tall, with few branches for the first thirty feet or so, and Carter noted that while in general structure they were much like the trees of Earth, the bark tended to have a scaly appearance and the leaves mostly merged toward black and purple rather than to green. Underneath the trees, the forest floor was fairly open, with only an occasional scattering of spindly and fragile shrubs. At times, tiny skittering creatures scampered across the ground, which was littered with many fallen branches, but at no time did Carter manage to get a good look at them.
Here and there rock outcroppings thrust out of the hillside and when they descended another hill and crossed a small but brawling stream, low cliffs rose on the opposite bank. Carnivore led the way to where a path went up through a break in the wall of rock and they scrambled up the steep incline. Carter noted that the cliffs were pegmatite. There was no sign of sedimentary strata.
They scrambled up the cleft and emerged on a hill that rose to another ridge, higher than the other two they had crossed. At the top, a scatter of boulders and a low ledge of rock outcropping ran along the ridge. Carnivore sat down upon a slab of stone and patted a place beside him, inviting Horton to sit.
“Here we pause and catch the breath,” he said. “The land is rugged hereabouts.”
“How much farther?” Carter asked.
Carnivore waved a nest of tentacles that served him as a hand. “Two more hills,” he said, “and we are almost there. Did you, by the way, catch god-hour last night?”
“God-hour?”
“Shakespeare called it that. Something reaching down and touching. Like someone being there.”
“Yes,” said Horton, “we caught it. Can you tell us what it is?”
“I do not know,” said Carnivore, “and I do not like it. It look inside of you. It lay you open to the gut. That’s why I left you so abruptly. It jitters me. It turns me into water. But I stayed too long. It caught me going home.”
“You mean you knew that it was coming?”
“It comes every day. Or almost every day. There are times, not for very long, when it may not come at all. It moves across the day. It is coming now of evenings. It comes each time just a fraction later. It walks across the day and night. It keeps changing of its hour, but the change is very small.”
“It’s been coming all the time you’ve been here?”
“All the time,” said Carnivore. “It does not leave one be.”
“You have no idea what it is?”
“Shakespeare said it something out of space. He said it works like something far in space. It comes when this point of planet that we stand upon faces some point far in space.”
Nicodemus had been prowling along the ledge of rock, stooping now and then to pick up a fallen chunk of stone. Now he came stalking toward them, holding out several small stones in his hand.
“Emeralds,” he said. “Weathered out and lying on the ground. There are others in the matrix.”
He handed them to Horton. Horton looked closely at them, holding them in the palm of his hand, probing at them with an index finger.
Leaning over, Carnivore had a look at them. “Pretty rocks,” he said.
“Hell, no,” said Horton. “More than pretty rocks. These are emeralds.” He looked up at Nicodemus. “How did you know?” he asked.
“I am wearing my rockhound transmog,” said the robot. “I put in my engineering transmog and there was room for one more, so I put in the rockhound …”
“Rockhound transmog! What the hell are you doing with a rockhound transmog?”
“Each of us,” Nicodemus said sedately, “was allowed to include one hobby transmog. For our own personal gratification. There were stamp transmogs and chess transmogs and a lot of others, but I thought a rockhound transmog …”
Horton pushed about the emeralds. “You say there are others?”
“I would suggest,” said Nicodemus, “that we have a fortune here. An emerald mine.”
Carnivore rumbled, “What do you mean, a fortune?”
“He is right,” said Horton. “This entire hill could be an emerald mine.”
“There pretty rocks have value?”
“Among my people, a great deal of value.”
“I never heard the like,” said Carnivore. “Mad to me it sounds.” He gestured with contempt at the emeralds. “Only pretty rocks, pleasing to the eye. But what to do with them?”
He rose slowly. “We go on,” he said.
“All right, we’ll go on,” said Horton. He handed the emeralds to Nicodemus.
“But we should look around …”
“Later,” Horton said. “They’ll still be here.”
“We’ll need a survey, so that Earth …”
“Earth is no longer a consideration for any of us,” said Horton. “You and Ship made that clear. No matter what happens, no matter what we find, Ship’s not going back.”
“You speak incomprehensible to me,” said Carnivore.
“Forgive us,” Horton told him. “It is a small private joke. Not worthy of explaining.”
They went on down the hill and across another valley, then up another hill. This time there were no rest pauses. The sun rose higher and dispelled some of the forest gloom. The day grew warm.
Carnivore slouched along at a ground-gaining pace which seemed easy for him, with Horton puffing along behind him and Nicodemus bringing up the rear. Watching him, Horton tried to make up his mind what kind of creature Carnivore might be. He was a slob, of course—there was no doubt of that—but a vicious, killing slob that could be dangerous. He seemed friendly enough with his continual chatter about his old friend Shakespeare, but he would bear watching. So far he had given no indication of other than bluff good humor. There was no question that the affection he held for the human, Shakespeare, had been anything but geniune, although his talk of eating Shakespeare still rankled. His nonrecognition of the value of emeralds was a puzzling factor. It seemed impossible that any culture should fail to recognize the value of gemstones, unless it were a culture which had no concept of adornment.
From the last hill they had climbed, they went down, not into a valley, but into a cuplike depression rimmed by hills.
Carnivore stopped so suddenly that Horton, walking behind him, bumped into him.
“There it be,” said Carnivore, pointing. “You can see it from here. We almost are upon it.”
Horton looked where he was pointing. He could see nothing but the forest.
“That white thing?” asked Nicodemus.
“That is it,” said Carnivore, delighted. “That is it, the whiteness of it. I keep it clean and white, scrubbing off the tiny plants that essay to grow upon it, washing off the dust. Shakespeare called it Grecian. Can you tell me, sir or robot, what a Grecian is? I inquire of Shakespeare, but he only laugh and shake his head and say too long a story. I think at times he does not know himself. He only used a word he heard.”
“Grecian comes from a human folk called Greeks,” said Horton. “They achieved a greatness many centuries ago. A building built as they once built is called Grecian. It is a very general term. There are many factors to Grecian architecture.”
“Simply built,” said Carnivore. “Wall and roof and door. That is all it is. Good habitat to live in, though. Tight to wind and rain. Do you not see it yet?”
Horton shook his head. “Soon you will,” said Carnivore. “We be there very quickly.”
They went on down the slope and at the bottom of it, Carnivore stopped again. He pointed to a path. “That way to home,” he said. “That way, step or two, to spring. You want good drink of water?”
“I would,” said Horton. “That was a strenuous hike. Not too far, but all up and down.”
The spring gushed out of the hillside into a rock-rimmed pool, the water escaping from the pool to go trickling away in a tiny stream.
“You go ahead of me,” said Carnivore. “You are guest of mine. Shakespeare said guests all go first. I was guest of Shakespeare. He was here ahead of me.”
Horton knelt, and bracing his hands, lowered his head to drink. The water was so cold that it seemed to burn his throat. Sitting up, he squatted on his heels while Carnivore dropped to his four feet, lowered his head and drank—not really drinking, but lapping up the water as a cat would do.