The idea of more tightly bonded atoms made a feeble sort of sense, although as I ran it through my mind I couldn't figure out how it might be done. But this business of a many-layered reality was outright gibberish. It made no sense at all.
We reached the street and Roscoe headed for the spaceport. He was no longer mumbling to himself and he was walking rapidly, as if he might have a purpose—so rapidly that I had to hurry to keep up with him. He was changed— there was no doubt of that—but I had a hard time making up my mind whether it was an actual change or just a new phase of his madness.
When we emerged from the street onto the spaceport, I saw that it was morning. The sun was about halfway up the eastern sky. The spaceport, with its milky-white floor, surrounded by the whiteness of the city, was a place of glare and in that glare the whiteness of the ships stood up like daytime ghosts.
We headed out into the immensity of the port. Roscoe seemed to be moving just a little faster than he had before. Falling behind, I had to trot every now and then to keep up with him. I would have liked to ask him what it was all about, but I had no breath to waste in asking and, in any case, I wasn't sure he would tell me.
It was a long hike. For a long time it seemed we had scarcely moved and then, rather suddenly, we were a long way from the city walls and closer to the ships.
We were fairly close to Sara's ship before I saw the contraption at its base. It was a crazy-looking thing, with a mirror of some sort and what I took to be a battery (or at least a power source) and a maze of wires and tubing. It wasn't very big, three feet or so in height and maybe ten feet square and from a distance it looked like an artistic junk heap. Closer up it looked less like a junk heap; it looked like something a couple of vacation-bored kids would rig up from assorted odds and ends they had managed to accumulate, pretending that they were building some sort of wondrous machine.
I stopped and stared at it, unable to say a word. Of all the goddamned foolishness I had ever seen, this was the worst. During all the time I had been sweating out my heart, running through the worlds, this silly robot had been hunting through the city to pick up all kinds of forgotten and discarded junk and had been lugging it out here and setting up this thing.
He had squatted down before what I imagine he imagined to be a control panel and was reaching out his hands to the knobs and switches on it.
"Now, captain," he said, "if the mathematics should be right."
He did something to the panel and here and there tubes flickered briefly and there was a sound like the sound of breaking glass and a shower of glasslike fragments were peeling off the ship and crashing to the ground and the ship stood free of the milk-white glaze the buglike machine had squirted over it.
I stood frozen. I couldn't move. The fool machine had worked and the ship stood free and ready and I couldn't move. It was incomprehensive. I could not believe it. Roscoe couldn't do this. Not the fumbling, mumbling Roscoe I had known. I was only dreaming it.
Roscoe stood up and came over to me. He put out both his hands and gripped me by the shoulders, standing facing me.
"It is done," he said. "Both for it and I. When I freed the ship, I freed myself as well. I am whole and well again. I am my olden self."
And indeed he seemed so, although I'd not known his olden self. He had no difficulty talking and he stood and moved more naturally, more like a man, less like a clanking robot.
"I was confused," he said, "by all that happened to me, by the changes in my brain, changes that I could not comprehend and did not know how to use. But now, having used them and proved that they are useful, I am quite myself once more."
I found that the paralysis which had gripped me now was gone and I tried to turn so that I could run toward the ship, but he clung tightly to my shoulders and would not let me go.
"Hoot talked to you of destiny," he said. "This is my destiny. This and more. The movers of the universe, whatever they may be, work in many ways to achieve each individual destiny. How other can one explain why the hammering of crude mallets on my brain could have so changed and short-circuited and altered the pattern of my brain as to have brought about an understanding I did not have before."
I shook myself free of him.
"Captain," he said.
"Yes."
"You do not believe it even yet. You still think I am an oaf. And I may have been an oaf. But I am no longer."
"No," I said, "I guess you're not. There is no way to thank you."
"We are friends," he said. "There is no need of thanks. You freed me of the centaurs. I free you of this planet. That should make us friends. We have sat by many campfires. That should make us friends . . ."
"Shut up!" I yelled at him. "Cut out the goddamned sentiment. You are worse than Hoot."
I went around his ridiculous contraption and climbed the ladder of the ship, Roscoe climbing close behind me.
In the pilot chair I reached out and patted the panel.
This was it at last. We could take off any time we wanted. We could leave the planet and carry with us the secret of the planet's treasure. Just how a man could turn a treasure such as that into a cash transaction I had no idea at the moment, but I knew I'd find a way. Whenever a man had a commodity to sell, he'd find a way to sell it.
And was this what it all had come to, I asked myself—that I should have something I could sell? Not another planet (although I suppose I could have sold the planet, too) but the knowledge and the information that was stored upon the planet in the form of seeds, knowledge collected by trees that were thought receivers, storing the knowledge they collected in the seeds they scattered and, that scattered, were collected by colonies of little rodents and not eaten, but deposited in great pits and granaries against the day of harvest.
But there was more to it than that, I told myself. More to the planet than a great white city and knowledge-grabbing trees. It also was a planet where a man might simply disappear (or fade away, as Tuck faded) and when they faded or they disappeared, where did they go? Did they move into another reality, into another life, as Hoot had moved into another life? There had been another culture, an earlier culture than the one that had built the city. This earlier culture had built the now-empty red-stone building at the outskirts of the city and had carved the doll that sagged out of the pocket of my jacket. Could that culture, if it had survived, have been able to tell the secret of how a man might fade away?
Roscoe had spoken of a many-layered reality and was that what it was all about? And if this were the case, did such a segmented reality exist only on this planet or might it exist as well on other planets?
I had thought of it as gibberish and perhaps it still was gibberish, but Roscoe had been right about the mathematics (or whatever one might call them) which had freed the ship. Might he not be right about the reality as well?
But all of this, I told myself, had nothing to do with me. I had wondered what I'd wanted back there on the trail and it had not been what Sara or Tuck or George, or even Hoot, had wanted. All I'd wanted was to get off the planet and now I had the means of getting off. All of us, at last, had found the thing we wanted. All that remained for me was to seal the hatch and activate the motors.
It was a simple thing and yet I hesitated. I stayed sitting in the pilot's chair staring at the panel. Why, I asked myself, this reluctance to get started?
Could it be the others? There had been four of us to start with; did I shrink from only one returning?
I sat there and tried to be honest with myself and found that it was difficult to be honest with myself.
Tuck and George were out of reach and so was Hoot. There was no sense hunting them to bring them back. But there was Sara still. She could be reached and I could bring her back, somehow I still could manage that.
I sat and tried to fight it all out once again and there was a funny smarting in my eyes and with something close to horror I realized that tears were running down my cheeks.
Sara, I said to myself. Sara, for the
love of Christ, why did you have to go and find what you were looking for? Why can't you come back and go home with me? Why can't I go and get you?
I remembered that last night as we'd sat beside the campfire and she had said it could have been so good between us—so good between us if we'd not gone charging out to chase a legend. And why did the stupid legend have to turn out to be true and spoil it all for us?
And I remembered, too, that first day when she'd met me in the hall of that house back on Earth and we'd walked down the hall together, arm in arm, to the room where Tuck and George had waited.
Not Tuck or George or Hoot, for they were out of reach. Not Sara, because I couldn't bring myself to do it. But there was someone else.
I heaved out of the chair and went to the cabinet at the back of the cabin. From it I took the spare laser gun.
"We're going back," I said to Roscoe.
"Going back," said Roscoe, "for Miss Foster?"
"No," I said. "For Paint."
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was insane, of course, Paint was nothing but a hobby. He'd still be in the gulley, flat upon his back, if it hadn't been for me. How long did I have to keep flying to his rescue? He'd said he wanted to go to Earth and what did he know of Earth? He had never been there. He had even had to ask me what I meant by Earth. He hadn't wanted to go until I'd told him what it was. And yet I could not shake the memory of him going so slowly down the trail so he'd still be in hearing distance if I should call him back. And I remembered, too, how he'd carried me so bravely in the battle with the centaur. Although, come to think of it, neither he nor I could claim any credit there. The credit all was Sara's.
"I wish," said Roscoe, striding along beside me, "that I could understand, in fullness, the concept of multiple-realities. I am certain I have it all in mind, if I could only see it. It's like a puzzle with a million pieces and all you have to do is put the pieces all together and there it is, so simple that you wonder why you didn't see it all to start with."
It would have been better, I thought, if he went back to mumbling. It would be less disturbing that way. I wouldn't have to listen to his mumbling because I'd know it made no sense. But I had to keep on listening to his chattering because there might be something in whatever he was saying.
"It is a new ability," 'said Roscoe, "and it is most confusing. Environmental-sensing, I suppose, would be the proper term for it. No matter where you go you sense, and know, the environmental factors."
I didn't pay too much attention to him, for I had a lot of thinking to be done. I wasn't even sure we should be heading out again. The logical thing to have done would have been to close the hatch and take off and be shut of the planet. Although if I had wanted to cash in later we should have picked up a pocketful of the seeds so they could be tested to see if they really carried knowledge. We could have left, I told myself, with clear consciences. All accounts were settled. The purpose of the voyage had been accomplished and everyone had gotten what they wanted.
Half a dozen times I was ready to turn back, but each time kept on going. It was as if someone had a broad hand against my back and was shoving me along.
When we had left the city there had been no sign of the monstrous beasts which had chased us into it. I had half expected they might be waiting for us and I almost wished they had been. With the laser rifle they would have been no sweat. But they weren't there and we went on, past the great red building dreaming in the sunlight, past the mighty tree trunk prone upon the ground for miles and the noisome pit centering on the jagged stump.
The way seemed shorter than it had on the first trip out. We drove ourselves, as if there were some great urgency. And at night around the campfire Roscoe smoothed out a patch of ground and worked on endless equations, mumbling at his work, half to me, half to himself.
Night after night, as he wrote and mumbled, I sat with him in the flare of the campfire light and tried to figure out why we were here and not many millions of miles in space, heading back toward the galaxy. And it came clearly to me that it was not Paint alone, although Paint was a part of it. It was more than Paint; it was Sara who was dragging me back across the empty miles. I saw her face in the firelight, across the blaze from me, with the lock of hair forever falling in her eyes, with the streak of travel smudge smeared across one cheek, with her eyes looking at me steadily.
At times I pulled the doll from the jacket pocket and sat staring at its face—at that terrible, tortured face—perhaps to cancel out that other face across the fire from me, perhaps in the irrational hope that those wooden lips would part and speak, giving me an answer. For, again irrationally, the doll was a part of it as well, a part of all that was happening as many great imponderables seemed to be closing upon collision courses.
At last, after many days, we climbed a ridge and saw before us the beginning of that last badlands area—where the hobbies had deserted us and we'd found the pile of bones and Paint.
The trail led down the rise and across a flat and climbed, twisting, up into the badlands.
Far up the trail, just this side of the point where it plunged to disappear into the badlands, something was moving, a tiny point of light flashing in the sun. I watched it, puzzled for a moment, and then it moved into a position on the trail where it was outlined against the darker ground behind it. And there was no mistaking it—the rocking, bobbing lope.
Roscoe spoke quietly beside me. "It is Paint," he said.
"But Paint wouldn't come back without . . ."
And then I was running down the slope, waving my arms and shouting, with Roscoe close upon my heels.
From far off she saw us and waved back at us, a little gesturing doll upon the loping Paint.
Paint was coming like the wind. He fairly skimmed the ground. We met out on the flat, Paint skidding to a stop. Before I could reach her, Sara slid off Paint. She was raging at me. It was like old times.
"You did it again!" she yelled at me. "I couldn't stay. You loused it up for me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't forget what you and Hoot had told me. You knew it would be like that. You had it figured out. You were so sure of it you left Paint to bring me back."
"Sara," I protested, "for the love of God, be reasonable."
"No," she cried, "you listen. You spoiled everything for me. You took away the magic and you . . ."
She stopped talking in mid-sentence and her face was twisted up as if she were trying not to weep.
"No, that's not it," she said. "It wasn't only you. It was all of us . . . With our petty bickering and . . ."
I took two quick steps and had her in my arms. She clung to me. Hating me, perhaps, but clinging to me because I was the one last thing that she had to cling to.
"Mike," she said, her voice muffled against my chest, "we aren't going to snake it, it is simply no use. They won't let us make it."
"But that's all wrong," I told her. "The ship is clear. Roscoe found the way. We're going back to Earth."
"If generous, hopeful human will only take a look," said Paint, "he'll perceive what she be talking of. They follow all the way. They dog our hurrying footprints. They get more all the time."
I jerked up my head and there they were, crowding together along the rugged skyline of the badlands—a mighty herd of the massive beasts that bad left their bones in a wind-row in the gully.
They crept forward, pushing and shoving, and some of them were forced down the distant slopes to make way for those who crowded in behind them. There were hundreds of them, more likely thousands of them. They didn't seem to move; they flowed, spilling off the slopes, spreading out on either flank.
"They're behind us, too," said Roscoe, speaking far too quietly, making too much of an effort to stifle rising panic.
I twisted my head around and there, on the crest of the ridge we had just crossed, they were surging into view.
"You found the doll," said Sara.
"What doll?" I asked. At a time like this, of all crazy things . . .
"
Tuck's doll," she said. She reached out and tugged it from the pocket. "Do you know, all the time Tuck had it, I never really saw it."
I pushed her away from me and lifted the laser rifle. Roscoe grabbed my arm.
"There are too many of them," he said.
I pulled my arm savagely away from him. "What do you want me to do?" I shouted at him. "Stand here and let them run us down?"
There were more of them than ever and in any direction one might look. We were surrounded by them. They came surging up on every side. There was just one big herd of them and we were in the center of it and they all were facing us. They were taking it easy. They were not in any hurry. They had us pegged and they could take us any time they wanted.
Roscoe dropped to his knees and smoothed out a patch of ground with an outstretched palm.
"What the hell!" I yelled.
Surrounded by man-eating monsters and there was Sara, standing transfixed, staring at a doll, and here that bumbling, mumbling idiot down upon his knees, fiddling with equations.
"The world at times makes little sense," said Paint, "but with you and I on guard . . ."
"You keep out of this!" I yelled at him. I had enough to keep an eye on without having to bandy words with a stupid hobby.
I couldn't get them all, of course, but I'd get the most of them. I'd burn them by the thousands into smoking crisps of flesh and I might discourage them. They were brave and confident; they'd never faced a laser gun. They'd go up in puffs of smoke; they'd flare and not be there. Whenever they might take a mind to charge they would pay for it.
But I knew there were too many of them. They were all around us and when they began to move, they'd move on every side.
"Captain Ross," said Roscoe, "I think I finally have it."
"Well, good for you," I said.
Sara moved over close beside me. Her rifle was slung across one shoulder and she had that silly doll clutched against her breast, the way Tuck always carried it.