They were big and ugly and they were coming fast. I had seen what they could do and I wasn't about to wait and let them get to work on me. I lit out of there, heading for the trail that led toward the city. The shield weighed me down and I threw it away. The scabbarded sword banged against my knees and I tried to get the belt unbuckled, and while I was doing this the sword tripped me and I went sprawling like a cartwheel. Just before I came out of my spin and was falling flat upon my face, a hand reached out and grabbed me by the sword belt and held me high enough so that I cleared the ground, just barely. I hung there, swaying back and forth and watched the ground jerk by underneath my nose and out of one corner of my eyes I saw Roscoe's feet moving like a blur.
My God, how he could run.
I tried to angle my head around to see where we might be, but I was so near the ground I couldn't see a thing. It wasn't comfortable and it was embarrassing, but I wasn't beefing any. Roscoe was covering the ground in a satisfactory manner, much faster than if he'd had to wait for me.
Then finally I saw pavement underneath my face and Roscoe jerked me up and set me on my feet. I was a little dizzy and inclined to stagger, but I saw we were in the narrow city street we'd traveled days before, with the straight white walls arrowing up into the sky above us.
Angry snarling and vicious trumpeting sounded behind me and when I spun around I saw the pursuing beasts throwing their bodies into the narrow cleft of street, throwing them ferociously and vainly, fighting to get at us, fighting to get in. But we were safe. Finally I had an answer as to why the streets should be so narrow.
TWENTY-SIX
The ghostly ships still stood upon the whiteness of the landing field with the great white cliffs of the city rising up like the inner sides of a gigantic cup. The field was as clean as ever and there was a deathly silence over everything. Nothing stirred; there was no breath of wind.
The shriveled, shrunken body of the gnome hung limp and listless at the end of a rope tied to a rafter in the storeroom. The storeroom looked as it had before, with boxes, bales and bundles piled high. There was no sign of the hobbies.
In that great room to which the ramp led up from the street the slabs of stone were still in place, with the circular control dial to one side of them. One of the slabs was glowing and in the glow was a nightmare world of what seemed a brand-new planet, its half-molten, half-crystallized surface heaving in a slow pulsation, pitted with craters of red-hot slag, steam vents sending out slender plumes of smoke and superheated water. In the distance volcanoes belched flame and heavy clouds of smoke.
Roscoe had unloaded his packs and the water tin just inside the door that opened on the ramp and now was hunkered down, scratching at the floor, but making no marks upon it, and for once he wasn't mumbling to himself.
I went on breaking up the wooden bench I'd taken from the storeroom, feeding the fire I'd built upon the floor. And here I was, I thought, a latter-day barbarian camping in the deserted city of a vanished race, with another barbarian swinging at the end of a rope in the next door and a mechanical intelligence working on a problem that no one knew, perhaps least of all himself.
It was incredible that Roscoe could know what he was doing. There would have been no need to program him for the kind of calculations that he seemed to be engaged in working out. Was it possible, I wondered, that the beating his brain case had taken while being used as a polo ball had not only knocked out of him all ordinary sense, but had knocked genius into him?
The sun had passed its zenith and the lower part of the street outside lay in darkness, but by craning my neck, I could see the sunlight on the upper storeys of the soaring buildings. And from that upper part of the city came the faint, far-off sound of wind funneling through the higher levels. Down in the lower levels there was no hint of breeze.
A deserted city and why had it been deserted? What had happened to drive its people from it Or had they been driven? Perhaps they had accomplished their purpose and the city had served its purpose and they had simply left, for there may have been other planets where they could carry out other purposes, or maybe the same purpose as they had followed here. And could that purpose have been solely the planting of the trees—the planting of them and their careful nurturing until they had reached a size where they no longer needed care? It would have taken centuries, perhaps millennia, before the trees could be left on their own. The surveying to determine where they should be planted and the planting of them, the preliminary task alone would have required many years. And after that the building of the pits to store the seeds and the raising of the little rodents that collected them—there would be much to do.
But it would have been worth the work and time if the trees, indeed, were planted for the purpose hinted in Knight's manuscript. Each tree a receiving station that picked up information by a means that I could not imagine (the interception of mental waves, perhaps?) that filtered out from the galaxy. Millions of receivers hanging above the expanse of the galaxy, picking up the knowledge radiations, processing and enhancing them and storing them against a time when the planters could come at periodic intervals and extract the knowledge which had been thus collected. And where would the knowledge thus derived be stored? Certainly not in the trees themselves, but in the seeds, perhaps, storing it in a complicated DNA-RNA complex altering the purely biological characteristics of the nucleic acids so that instead of biological information alone many other kinds of information also might be stored.
I sweated, thinking of it. In the pits and bins in which the rodents dropped the seeds rested a treasure greater than anyone could dream. Anyone who could gather the seeds and crack the technique and the code to give up the knowledge they contained would have the intellectual resources of the galaxy at their fingertips. If one could beat the planters of this planetary orchard to the harvest, there would be rich pickings to be had. The planters, well aware of such a danger, had taken extraordinary precautions against word of the planet and its purpose ever leaking out. Outsiders could come here, were even encouraged to come here once they were in range, but once here there was, it seemed, no way to leave and carry back to the galaxy news of what they'd found.
How often did the planters come, I wondered. Every thousand years, perhaps. In each thousand years, most certainly, there'd be new galactic knowledge worthy of acquiring. Or did they come no longer? Had something happened to them that had stopped their harvest trips? Or could they have abandoned the entire project as no longer worth the effort? In the millennia which may have passed since this city had been built and this planet planted, had there been a shift in values and in viewpoint so that now to them, now either a more mature or a senile race, this planting of the planet (or, perhaps, of many planets) might seem no more than a childish program performed in the mistaken enthusiasm of their youth.
My legs were getting cramped from crouching and I put out a hand to rest, palm down, on the floor, preparatory to changing my position and as I reached out, my hand came down upon the doll. I didn't pick it up; I didn't want to look at it. I simply ran my fingers over the carven planes of that saddened face and I thought, as I did this, that the planters of the planet, the builders of the city, had not been the first. Before they had arrived there had been another race, the one that had built the churchlike edifice at the city's edge. One of them had carved the doll and it might be, I told myself, that the carving of the doll had been a greater feat, a more intellectual, certainly a more emotional, accomplishment than the building of the city and the planting of the trees.
But now neither race was here. I, a member of another race, perhaps not so great but as weasel-motivated as any race in the galaxy, was here. I was here and I knew the story and the treasure, and the treasure was a very solid thing, much more valuable than that haunted myth which Knight had hunted. It was something that could be sold and in that context I could understand it better than I could understand a myth. Knight may have known—he must have known to write of it as he had—but by the time he knew
he probably had become so committed, so immersed in the phantom that he hunted that he would have passed it by as worthless.
Poor fool, I thought, to pass up a chance like this. Although, I realized, he may have passed it up only after he had realized there was no way off the planet.
I was not convinced, I told myself. There had to be a way. There always was a way if you worked hard enough at it. No gang of stupid orchardists could keep me here.
First something to eat and a little rest and I'd get at those other worlds. Despite what Sara had said about the chance that all of them would be isolated worlds, it did not stand to reason that there'd not be one of them that had some space-capable intelligence. And that was all I asked. Just to get my hands, by any means, upon a ship, any kind of a ship.
I wondered what I should do with the gnome and decided that I'd leave him hanging there, dangling from his beam. Even if I took him down I'd not know what to do with him; I could not know what he might have wished for me to do with him. Hanging from the beam had been the way he'd wanted it and that's the way he had it and I'd not interfere. Although I wondered why he did it. And recognized the fact that the way he'd done it emphasized that he was humanoid. Nothing other than a humanoid ever hanged itself.
I glanced over at Roscoe. He had quit his ciphering and now was sitting flat upon his bottom, with his feet stuck out before him staring into space. As if he had suddenly struck upon some astounding truth and had frozen into immobility to consider it.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Sara had been right. There was nowhere to go. The worlds offered no way out. I had been through them all, driving myself, sleeping only in snatches when I became so worn-out that I was afraid I'd become negligent and sloppy in my evaluation of them. I did not hurry the work. I spent more time, most likely, than was absolutely necessary, in having a good look at each of them in turn.
It had taken a while to figure out how to operate the wheel to bring each world into being, but once I had done that I settled down to work, paying attention to nothing else. Roscoe did not bother me and I, in turn, paid slight attention to him except to note that much of the time he was not around. I got the impression, somehow, that he was prowling through the city, but did not take the time to wonder what might be the purpose of his prowling.
One could not say, of course, that no one of the worlds held the kind of technology I sought. Only a small portion of each stood revealed and it would have been foolhardy for me to have entered one of them unless there had been ample evidence that it was the kind of place I hunted. For once one entered one of them, the chances of escaping from it would have been almost nil. Without Hoot and the creature of the wheel we never would have escaped from the sand dune world. But the fact was that I found no world that tempted me in the least to enter it, not a single one that showed any sign of even the most rudimentary intelligence. All of them were vicious worlds, mostly primal worlds—jungle hells or frozen wastes or still in the state of crust formation. There were others that had thick atmospheres, with swirling clouds of gases that made me choke just to look at them. There were a few that were clearly dead worlds—great level plains without vegetation, dimly lighted by a dim and blood-red, dying sun. There was one charred cinder of a planet, burned out in a nova flare-up of its sun.
Why, I wondered, had the doorways to the worlds been fashioned? Certainly if anyone had wanted to use the doorways to these other planets, he would have planned for them to open on the outskirts of a city, or at least a village. He would not have settled for a jungle or an icy waste or a burned-out cinder. Could they have been there for no other reason than to get rid of unwelcome visitors? But if that had been the case, one world or at most a half a dozen would have been sufficient; there would have been no need of hundreds. There was no reason for that many worlds or those kind of worlds. Although I realized that there must, in the minds of that other race, have been logical reasons for it all, and these logical reasons could not possibly occur to me because they did not lie within the parameters of human logic.
So I came to an end of them and was no better off than I had been before; worse off, perhaps, for when I had started on it there had been hope and now the hope was gone.
I went back to the fire, but the fire was out. I pressed my palm down on the ashes and there was no warmth. Roscoe was gone; I could not remember seeing him for days.
Had he deserted me, perhaps not actually deserting me, but simply wandering off and not bothering to come back? This might be, I admitted to myself, the end of it. There might be no more that a man could do.
I sat down beside the dead ashes of the fire and stared out into the twilight of the street.
There still might be other possibilities—somewhere in the city a man might find a way or clue; out on the planet, traveling east or west or south rather than toward the mountains looming to the north, there might be an answer waiting. But I didn't have the will for it. I didn't want to move. I didn't want to try again. I was ready to give up.
Move over, gnome, I said.
But that was wrong, I knew. It was defeatist talk. It was dramatizing. When the time came to try again, when and if I caught a glimmer of a hope, I'd get up and go.
But now I simply sat and felt sorry for myself—and not only for myself, but for all the rest of us. Although why I should feel sorry for Smith or Tuck or Sara, I didn't really know. They'd gotten what they wanted.
Down in the twilight of the street a shadow moved, a darkness in the gray, and a twinge of terror went fluttering through me, but I didn't stir. If whatever might be down there wanted to come up and get me it would find me here, beside the campfire ashes. I still had the sword and I was awkward with it, but I'd still put up a fight.
My nerves must have been worn down to frayed ends for me to be thinking this. There was no reason to believe there was anything in the city that was out to get me. The city was deserted and abandoned; nothing moved in it but shadows.
But the shadow, as I watched, kept on moving. It left the street and came up the ramp toward me, moving jerkily, like an old man stumping down a narrow lane that offered uneven footing.
I saw that it was Roscoe and, poor thing that be was, I was glad to have him back. As he came nearer I rose to greet him.
He stopped just before he reached the door and speaking carefully, as if he might be fighting against falling into his rhyming routine, he said, slowly and deliberate, with a pause between each word, "You will come with me."
"Roscoe," I said, "thanks for coming back. What is going on?"
He stood in the twilight, staring stupidly at me, then he said, still slowly, carefully, with each word forced out of him: "If the mathematics work . . ." Then came to a halt. Mathematics had given him quite a bit of trouble.
"I had troubles," he said. "I was confused. But I have worked it out and I am better now. Working it out helped to get me better." He was talking with somewhat less difficulty, but it still wasn't easy for him. The long speech had been an effort for him. You could feel him forcing himself to speak correctly.
"Take it easy, Roscoe," I counseled. "Don't try too hard. You are doing fine. Just take it easy now."
But he wasn't about to take it easy. He was full of what he had had to say. It had been bottled up inside of him for a long time and it was bubbling to get out.
"Captain Ross," he said, "I was fearful for a time. Fearful I would never work it out. For there are two things on this planet and they both struggled for expression and I could not get them sorted, sported, forted, courted . . ."
I moved forward quickly and grabbed him by the arm. "For the love of God," I pleaded, "take it easy. You have all the time there is. There isn't any hurry. I'll wait to hear you out. Don't try to talk too fast."
"Thank you, captain," he said with an effort at great dignity, "for your forebearance and your great consideration."
"We've traveled a long road," I told him. "We can take a little time. If you have any answers, I can wait for them. Myself, I'm
fresh out of anything like answers."
"There is the structure," he said. "The white structure of which the city is made and the spaceport floored and the spaceships sealed."
He stopped and waited for so long that I was afraid something might have happened to him. But after a time he spoke again.
"In ordinary matter," he said, "the bonding between the atoms involves only the outer shells. Do you understand?'
"I think I do," I said. "Rather foggily."
"In the white material," he said, "bonding extends deeper than the outer orbits of the electrons, down deep into the shell. You grasp the implication?"
I gasped as I understood at least a little of what he had just told me.
"All hell," I said, "couldn't break the bond."
"Precisely," he declared. "That is what was thought. Now you will come with me, captain, if you please."
"But just a minute," I protested. "You haven't told it all. You said there were two things."
He looked at me for a long moment, as if he might be debating if he should tell me further, then he asked a question, "What do you know, captain, of reality?"
I shrugged. It was a foolish question. "At one time," I told him, doubtfully, "I would have told you I could recognize reality. Now I'm not so sure."
"This planet," he said, "is layered in realities. There are at least two realities. There may be many more."
He was almost fluent now, although there still were times he stuttered and had to force his words out and his delivery of them was spaced imperfectly.
"But how," I asked, "do you know all this? About the bonding and reality?"
"I do not know," he said. "I only know I know it. And now, please, can we go?"
He turned and went down the ramp and I followed him. What had I to lose? I had nothing going for me and maybe he had nothing going for him, either, maybe all he said were just empty words born of an enlarged imagination, but I was at a point where I was ready to make a grab at any straw.