“Welcome aboard,” said Joe. “I am very glad to have you.”
“One thing you said interests me,” said Cynthia. “You said Ivan is a Russian.”
“Ah, yes, indeed he is. I suppose you think that the Russian was an enemy, as he surely was. But how we came together is the story of our life. Once I had been fitted out and made ready for the war, loaded with munitions and all equipment tested, I set out across Canada and Alaska for the Bering Strait, traveling underwater for a few short miles to reach Siberia. I reported back occasionally on my progress, but not too often, for to do so might have meant detection. I had been given certain objectives, of course, and one by one I reached them, to find in every instance they had been neutralized. Shortly after I reached the first objective I could not raise the homeland and, in fact, after that, I never raised home base. I was quite cut off. At first I thought it was only a temporary failure of communications, but after a time concluded that there was something much more significant than communication failure. I wondered if my country had been finally beaten to its knees or if the few military centers might have gone even deeper underground, but whatever might be the reason for the failure, I told myself, I would carry out my duty. I was a patriot, a true-blue patriot. You understand the term?”
“I am a history student,” Cynthia told him. “I understand the concept.”
“So, driven by my bitter patriotism, I went on. I visited all my assigned objectives and they all had been reduced. I did not stop there. I prowled, seeking what in those days were called targets of opportunity. I monitored the atmosphere for signals that might betray hidden bases. But there were no signals, neither ours nor theirs. There were no targets of opportunity. At times. I came upon small communities of people who ran or hid from me. I did not bother them. As targets, they were too insignificant. You do not use a nuclear charge to kill a hundred people. Especially when the death of those hundred would have no possible tactical advantage. All I found were ruined cities in which still might live tiny, pitiful huddles of humanity. I found a blasted countryside, great craters, miles across, blasted to the bedrock, drifting clouds of poison, miles of once-rich land reduced to nothing—occasional clumps of dead or dying trees and not a blade of grass. There is no way to tell you how it was, no way for you to imagine how it might have been.
“So I turned homeward, going slowly, for there was no hurry now and I had much to think about. I shall not burden you with the thoughts, the sorrow, and the guilt. I was a patriot no longer. I had been cured of patriotism.”
“There is one thing that puzzles me,” I said. “I know there is more than one of you—human beings, that is. Perhaps several of you. Yet you speak of yourself as I.”
“There was at one time,” Joe said, “five of us, five men who were willing to sacrifice their bodies and their positions as human beings to man a war machine. There was a professor of mathematics, a most distinguished scholar; a military man, a general of the armies; an astronomer of considerable repute, a former stockbroker, and the last a most unlikely choice, one might think—a poet.”
“And you are the poet?”
“No,” said Joe. “I don’t know what I am. I think I am all five of us together. We are separate minds no longer. We have become, in some strange way we cannot understand, a single mind. I am amazed at times that I, as this single mind, still can recognize myself as one or another of the five of us, but each time I have this sense of recognition it is not actually the recognition of another, but rather of myself. As if interchangeably and at different times I can be any one of us. But mostly I am not any one of us, but all of us together.”
“It is the same with Ivan, although there were only four of him. But now there likewise is only one of him.”
“We are leaving Ivan out of the conversation,” said Cynthia.
“Not at all,” said Joe. “He is a most active listener. He could speak either for himself or through me if he had the wish. Do you wish so, Ivan?”
A deeper, thicker voice said, “You tells it so well, Joe. Why don’t you go ahead?”
“Well, as I was telling you,” said Joe, “I was heading home, I had come to a stretch of prairie that seemed to go on forever. Steppe-land, I suppose. It was bleak and lonely and there seemed no end to it. It was there that I spotted old Ivan, here. He was far away and not much more than a speck, but when I used a telescopic optic, I knew what he was—an enemy of mine. Although, to tell the truth, by that time it was rather difficult to think in terms of enmity. Rather, I felt a thrill at just knowing that out there on the plain was something like myself. Strange identity, perhaps, but identity. Ivan told me later that he had much the same reaction, but the point was that neither one of us could know what the other thought. So we both began maneuvering and we both were rather tricky. There were a couple of times when I had Ivan in my sights and could have unloaded on him, but something held me back and I couldn’t do it. Ivan, for some screwy Russian reason, has never been willing to admit that the same thing happened with regard to me, but I am sure it did. Ivan was too good a war machine for it not to happen. But, anyway, there were the two of us, sashaying back and forth, and after a day or two of this, it got ridiculous. So I said something to this effect: OK, let’s break it off. We know damn well neither of us wants to fight. We’re probably the only two surviving war machines and the war is over and there is no longer any need of fighting, so why can’t we be friends. Old Ivan, he didn’t protest none, although it took a little time for him to agree to it, but finally he did. We rumbled straight toward one another, moving slow and easy, until we bumped noses. And we just sat there, nose to nose, and we stayed there, I don’t know how long—maybe days or months or years. There wasn’t really anything that we could do. The jobs we’d had had disappeared. There was in the entire world no longer any need of war machines. So we stayed out on that God-forsaken plain, the only living things there were for miles around, with our noses bumped together. We talked and we got to know one another so well that finally for long periods there was no need to talk.
It was good just to sit there, doing nothing, thinking nothing, saying nothing, nose to nose with Ivan. It was enough that we were together, that we were not alone. It may seem strange to say that two ungainly, ugly machines got to be friends, but you must remember that while we might be machines, we still were human beings. At that time we were not single minds. We were five minds and four minds, nine minds all together, and all of us were intelligent and well-educated men and there was a lot to talk about.
“But finally both of us began to see how footless and how pointless it was just to stay sitting there. We began to wonder if there might be people in the world that we could help. If man was going to recover from what the war had left, he would need all the help that he could get. Among the nine of us we had a lot of savvy, of a kind that man might need, and each of us was a source of power and energy if ways could be found for man to make use of that power and energy.
“Ivan said there was no use going west. Asia was finished, he said, and he’d roamed through enough of Europe to know it was finished, too. No social organization of any kind was left there. There might be scattered bands of men already sunk in savagery, but not enough of them to form any sort of economic base. So we headed east, for America, and there, in places, we found little scattered settlements—not too many, but a few—where man was slowly getting on his feet, at a point where he could use the kind of help we had to offer. But so far we have been of no help at all. The little settlements will not listen to us. They run screaming for the woods whenever we show up and no matter how we try to tell them we’re only there to help they will not respond in any way at all. You two are the first humans who would talk with us.”
“The trouble with that,” I told him, “is that talking to us will do little good. We aren’t of this time. We are from the future.”
“I remember now,” said Joe. “You said that you knew Elmer from the future. Where is Elmer now?”
&nb
sp; “As of right now, he is somewhere among the stars.”
“The stars? How could old Elmer …”
“Listen to me,” I said. “Let me try to tell you. Once it became apparent what was bout to happen to the Earth, a lot of people went out to the stars. One shipload of them would colonize one planet and another shipload another. After some ten thousand years of this, there are an awful lot of humans living on an awful lot of planets. The people who were recruited for the star-trips were the educated, the skilled, the technological people, the kind of people who would be needed to establish a colony in space. What were left were the uneducated, the untrained, the unskilled. That is why, even in this time, the settlements you have been trying to help need the help so badly. That probably is why they refuse your help. What is left is the equivalent of the peasants, the ne’er-do-wells …”
“But old Elmer, he wasn’t really people …”
“He was a good mechanic. A new colony would need folks like him. So he went along.”
“This matter of Elmer in the future and of people fleeing into space,” said Joe, “is a most intriguing thing. But how come you are here? You said that you would tell us. Why don’t you just settle back and tell us now?”
It was just like old-home week. It was all so good and friendly. Joe was a nice guy and Ivan wasn’t bad. For the first time since we had hit the planet, it was really nice.
So we settled back and between the two of us, first me, then Cynthia, and then me again, we told our story to them.
“This Cemetery business still must be in the future,” said Joe. “There is no sign of Cemetery yet”
“It will come,” I said. “I wish I could recall the date when it was started. Perhaps I never knew.”
Cynthia shook her head. “I don’t know, either.”
“There’s one thing I am glad to know about,” said Joe. “This matter of a lubricant. It was something we were a bit concerned about. We know that in time we’ll need it and we had hoped we could contact some people who would be able to supply us with it. If they could get their hands on the crude and supply it to us, we could manage to refine it to a point where it could be used. There wouldn’t have to be a lot of it. But we haven’t been having too much luck with people.”
“You’ll get it, all refined and ready, according to your specifications, from Cemetery,” I told him. “But don’t pay the price they ask.”
“We’ll pay no price,” said Joe. “They sound like top-grade lice.”
“They are all of that,” I said. “And now we have to go.”
“To keep your appointment with the future.”
“That is right,” I said. “And if it happens as we hope it will, it would be nice to find you there and waiting for us. Do you think you could manage that?”
“Give us the date,” said Joe, so I gave him the date.
“We’ll be there,” he said.
As we started down the ladder, he said, “Look, if it doesn’t work. If there’s no time-trap there. Well, if that should happen, there’s no need to go back to that shack. Horrible job, you know, cleaning it up, dead man and all of that. Why not come and live with us? It’s nothing very fancy, but we’ll be glad to have you. We could go south for winter and …”
“Thanks, we will,” said Cynthia. “It would be very nice.”
We went on down the ladder and started walking up the hollow. The cleft in the cliff lay just ahead and before we reached it, we turned around to look back at our friends. They had switched around so that they were facing us and we raised our hands to them, then went toward the cleft.
We were almost in the cleft when the surging wave that wasn’t water hit us, and as it receded, we stood shaken and in dismay.
For we stood, not in the hollow as we remembered it, but in the Cemetery.
Chapter 20
The cliff was still there, with the twisted cedars growing on its face, and the hills were there and the valley that ran between them. But it was wilderness no longer. The stream had been confined between walls of lain rock, done most tastefully, and the greensward, clipped to carpet smoothness, ran from the foot of the cliff out to the rock-work channel. Monuments stood in staggered rows and there were clumps of evergreen and yew.
I felt Cynthia close against me, but I didn’t look at her. Right then I didn’t want to look at her. I tried to keep my voice steady. “The shades have messed it up again,” I said.
I tried to compute how long it might take for the cemetery to stretch from its boundary as we’d found it to this place and the answer had to be many centuries—perhaps as far into the future as we had been sent into the past.
“They couldn’t be this bad at it,” said Cynthia. “They Simply couldn’t be. Once maybe, but not twice in a row.”
“They sold us out,” I said.
“But they could have sold us out,” she said, “when they sent us so far back into the past. Why should we be sold out twice? If they simply wanted to get rid of us, they could have left us where we were. In such a case, there would have been no time-trap. Fletch, it makes no sense at all.”
She was right, of course. I hadn’t thought of that. It did simply make no sense.
“It must be,” I said, “just their slab-sidedness.”
I looked around the sweep of Cemetery.
“We might have been better off,” I said, “if we had stayed with Joe and Ivan. We’d have had a place where we could have lived and a way to travel. We could have gone with them everywhere they went. They would have been good company, I don’t know what we have here.”
“I won’t cry,” said Cynthia. “I’ll be damned if I will cry. But I feel like it.”
I wanted to take her in my arms, but I didn’t. If I had touched her, she would have busted out in tears.
“We could see if the census-taker’s place is where it was,” I said. “I don’t think it will be, but we can have a look. If I know Cemetery they will have evicted him.”
We walked down the hollow and the walking was easy. It was like walking on a carpet. There was no uneven ground, no boulders that we had to dodge around. There were just the monuments and the clumps of evergreen and yew.
I glanced at some of the dates on the monuments and there was no way of telling, of course, how recent they might have been, but the dates I saw were evidence that we were at least thirty centuries beyond the time we’d hoped to reach. For some reason, Cynthia paid no attention to the dates, and I didn’t mention them. Although, come to think of it, perhaps she did and made no mention of them, either.
We reached the river and it seemed much the same as it had before, except that the trees that had grown along its banks were gone to give way to the monuments and landscaping that marked the Cemetery.
I was looking at the river, thinking of how, in spite of all events, some things manage to endure. The river still flowed on, tumbling down the land between the hills, and there was no one who could stay its hurry or reduce its force.
Cynthia caught my arm.
She was excited. “Fletch, isn’t that where we found the census-taker’s house?” She was pointing toward the bluffs and when I looked where she was pointing, I gasped at what I saw. Not that there was anything about it that should have made me gasp. Except, perhaps, the utter beauty of it. What took my breath away, I am sure, was how the entire scene had changed. We had seen the place (in our own time bracket) only hours before. Then it had been a wilderness—thick woods running down to the river, with the roof of the house in which the dead man lay barely showing through the trees, and with the bare, knob-like blufftops shouldering the sky. Now it was all neat and green and very civilized, and atop the bluff where had stood the little weather-beaten house where we had enjoyed lunch with a charming gentleman now stood a building that came out of a dream. It was all white stone, but with a fragile air about it that seemed to rule out the use of stone. It lay low against the blufftop and its front had three porches supported by fairy pillars that, from this distance, seemed
to be pencil-thin and narrow, rainbow-flashing windows all along its length. A flight of long stairs ran down to the river.
“Do you think …” she asked, stopping in mid-sentence.
“Not the census-taker,” I said. “He’d never build a place like that.”
For the census-taker was a lurker, a hider, a scurrier. He scurried all about, trying very hard to make sure that no one saw him, and snatched from beneath their noses those little artifacts (not yet artifacts, but artifacts at some time in the future) that would tell the story of those he was hiding from.
“But it is where his house was.”
“So it is,” I said, at a loss for anything else that I might say.
We walked along the river, not hurrying but looking at the place atop the bluff, finally coming to the place where the stairs came down to the river, ending on the riverbank with a plaza paved with great blocks of stone, with room made here and there, for plantings of—what else?—yew and evergreen.
We stood side by side, like a couple of frightened children confronted by a thing of special wonder, looking up the flight of stairs to the gleaming wonder that stood atop the bluff.
“Know what this reminds me of,” said Cynthia. “The stairway up to Heaven.”
“How could it? You’ve never seen the stairway up to Heaven.”
“Well, it looks the way the old ones wrote about it. Except there should be trumpets sounding.”
“Do you think that you can make it without the trumpets sounding?”
“I think,” she said, “it is likely that I can.”
I wondered what it was that was making her so lighthearted. Myself, I was too puzzled and upset to be the least lighthearted. The entire thing was pretty, if you cared for prettiness, but I didn’t like particularly the placement of the building where the census-taker’s house had been. That there must be some connection between the two of them seemed a reasonable conclusion and I found myself hard put to arrive at that connection.