Cemetery World (18 page)

And, thinking of it, I became aghast at the abnormality of our condition, how awry it was from the quiet beauty of Alden, how distorted even from the mock majesty of Cemetery. For, in fact, those two places seemed abnormal now. We had become so firmly set in the reality of this mad adventure that the ordinary places we had known now seemed strange and far.

“You are not, I fear,” O’Gillicuddy was saying, “safely beyond the clutches of the ghouls. They still trail you with much blood thirstiness.”

“You mean,” I said, “they want our scalps for Cemetery.”

“You have plucked forth the naked truth,” said O’Gillicuddy.

“But why?” asked Cynthia. “Surely they are not friends of Cemetery.”

“No,” said O’Gillicuddy, “they are not, indeed. Upon this planet, Cemetery has no friends. And yet there is no one here who would not do most willingly a favor for them, hoping a favor in return. Thus great power corrupts.”

“But there is nothing they would want from Cemetery,” Cynthia pointed out.

“Not at the moment, perhaps. But a favor deferred is still a favor and one that can be collected later. One can pile up points.”

“You said no one would refuse a favor,” I said. “How about yourself?”

“In our case,” said O’Gillicuddy, “there is a difference. Cemetery can do nothing for us, but what is perhaps of more importance, it can do nothing to us. We hope no favor and we have no fear.”

“And you say we aren’t safe?”

“They are hunting for you,” said O’Gillicuddy. “They will keep on hunting. You handed them defeat this morning and it lies bitter in their mouths. One the steel wolf; killed and another died …”

“But they shot him themselves,” said Cynthia. “A bullet I meant for us. It was no fault of ours.”

“They still count it against you. There are two dead and there must be accountability. They do not accept the blame. They lay it all on you.”

“They’ll have a hard time finding us.”

“Hard, perhaps,” said O’Gillicuddy, “But find you they I will. They are woodsmen of the finest. They range like hunting dogs. They read the wilderness like a book. A turned stone, a disturbed leaf, a bruised blade of grass—it says volumes to them.”

“Our only hope,” said Cynthia, “is to find Elmer and I Bronco. If we were together …”

“We can tell you where they are,” said O’Gillicuddy, “but it’s a long, hard way and you would be turning back into the very arms of the raging ghouls. We tried most desperately to reveal ourselves to your two companions so that we could lead them back to you, but for all that we could do they remained unaware of us. It takes a sharper-tuned sensibility than a robot can possess to discover us.”

“It all seems pretty hopeless to me,” said Cynthia, sounding considerably discouraged. “You can’t guide Elmer and Bronco to us and you say the ghouls are sure to find us.”

“And that isn’t all,” said O’Gillicuddy, seeming ghoulishly happy at what he had to tell us. “The Raveners are on the prowl.”

“The Raveners?” I asked. “Are there more than one of them?”

“There are two of them.”

“You mean war machines?”

“Is that what you call them?”

“That’s what Elmer thinks they are.”

“But that can’t mean anything to us,” protested Cynthia. “Surely the war machines are not tied in with Cemetery.”

“But they are,” said O’Gillicuddy.

“Why?” I asked. “What has Cemetery got they possibly could want?”

“Lubricating oil,” said O’Gillicuddy.

I’m afraid I groaned at that. It was such a simple thing and yet so logical. It was something that anyone should have thought of. The machines would have built-in power, more than likely nuclear, although I’d never really known, and they would be self-repairing, but the one thing they would need, perhaps the only thing they would need and would not have, would be lubricants.

This would be something that Cemetery wouldn’t miss. Cemetery missed no bets at all. They passed up nothing that would make any other factor on the Earth in some way beholden to them.

“And the census-taker,” I said. “I suppose he is some way tied into it as well. And, by the way, where is the census-taker?”

“He disappeared,” said O’Gillicuddy. “He flitters here and there. He is not really part of us. He is not always with us. We don’t know where he is.”

“Nor what he is?”

“What he is? Why, he’s the census-taker.”

“That’s not what I mean. Is he a human being? Perhaps a mutated human being. There would have been a lot of human mutation. Some good, mostly bad. Although I imagine that over the years a great part of the bad died out. The ghouls have telepathy and God knows what else and the settlers probably have something, too, although we don’t know what it is. Even you, for ghosts are not…”

“Shades,” said O’Gillicuddy.

“All right, then, shades. Shades are not a normal human condition. Maybe there aren’t any shades any place except here on Earth. No one knows what happened during those years after the people fled into space. Earth is a different place today than it was then.”

“You got off the track,” said Cynthia. “You were asking if the census-taker was a Cemetery creature.”

“I am sure that he is not,” said O’Gillicuddy. “I don’t know what he is. I have always thought he was a sort of human being. He is a lot like humans. Not made the way they are, of course, and there is only one of him and …”

“Look,” I said, “you didn’t come here just to bear us company. You came here for a purpose. You wouldn’t have come just to bring us bad news. What is it all about?”

“There are many of us here,” said the shade. “We foregathered in some strength of numbers. We sent out a call for a gathering of the clan, for we feel great compassion and a strange comradeship with you. Not in all the history of the Earth has anyone before you tweaked the tail of Cemetery in such a hearty fashion.”

“And you like that?”

“We like it very much.”

“And you’ve come to cheer us on.”

“Not cheer,” said O’Gillicuddy, “although that we would also do and most willingly. But we feel that it is in our capacity to be of the slightest help.”

“We’re in the market,” said Cynthia, “for any help there is.”

“It becomes a complicated matter to explain,” said O’Gillicuddy, “and in lack of adequate information, you must fill in with faith. Being the sort of things we are, we have no real contact with the corporeal universe. But it seems we do have some marginal powers to interact with time and space, which are neither in the corporeal universe nor quite out of it.”

“Now, wait a second there,” I said. “What you are talking of…”

“Believe me,” said O’Gillicuddy, “we have wracked our mental powers and can come up with nothing else. It is little that we have to offer, but …”

“What you propose to do,” said Cynthia, “is to move us in time.”

“But by only the tiniest fraction,” said O’Gillicuddy. “A minute part of a second. Barely out of the present, but that would be quite enough.”

“It’s never been done,” Cynthia objected. “For hundreds of years it has been studied and investigated and absolutely nothing has ever come of it.”

“Have you ever done it?” I demanded.

“No, not actually,” said O’Gillicuddy. “But we have thought about it and speculated on it and we are rather sure …”

“But not entirely sure?”

“You are right,” said O’Gillicuddy. “Not entirely sure.”

“And once you’ve done it,” I asked, “how about our getting back? I would not want to live out my life a fractional part of a second behind all the universe.”

“We have worked that out, too,” the shade said blithely. “We would set a time-trap at the entrance of this cleft and by stepping into it…”

“But you’re not sure of that one, either.”

“Well, fairly certain,” said O’Gillicuddy.

It wasn’t very promising and, on top of that, I asked myself, how could we be sure that any of the rest of all he’d told was the truth? Maybe O’Gillicuddy and his gang of shades were doing no more than trying to push us into a situation where we’d serve willingly as subjects for an experiment they had cooked up. And, come to think of it, how could we be sure there were any shades at all? We had seen them, or seemed to see them, as they danced around the fire back at the settlement. But actually all we had to go on was what the census-taker had told us and this voice that said it was O’Gillicuddy.

And what about the voice of O’Gillicuddy? Was that imagination, too, as seeing them back at the settlement may have been, or imagining again that we had seen strange shapes back at the cave when they first had come to us? The trouble was that I was not the only one who was hearing it. Cynthia was hearing it as well as I, or she acted as if she did. Either that, or I imagined that she did. It was a hell of a thing, I told myself—to question not only the reality of your environment, but the reality of yourself as well.

“Cynthia,” I asked her, “are you really hearing all of this …”

The fire exploded in front of us. Ash and fire and burning brands sprayed across the cave and onto us. From outside came a hollow boom and then another and something traveling very fast smacked into the rock behind us.

We leaped to our feet, all three of us, and as we did something boiled inside the space between the rocks. Something—I don’t know what it was—but something like a tidal wave that had come charging in upon us, although it certainly was not water, and having come in, swirled and rolled with a mighty churning force.

Then it was gone and we hadn’t stirred. For all the boiling and the swirling of whatever it had been, it had not affected us, for we stood, the two of us, exactly where we’d stood when we jumped up to our feet.

But the fire was gone. There was no sign of it. And instead of night, there was brilliant sunlight shining on the valley just beyond the cleft.

Chapter 18

The valley was different. Nothing that one could pick out to start with, on the moment, and say this is not the same and something else is different. But it had a different look and as we stood in the mouth of the cleft, we began to pick out those things that were different.

There were fewer trees, for one thing, and they all were smaller. And it wasn’t autumn, for all the trees were green. The grass seemed different, too, not as lush, not as green, but with a yellow cast to it.

“They did it,” Cynthia whispered. “They did it without even asking us.”

I stood there, wondering if this was all a fantasy that was a piece with the fantasy of O’Gillicuddy and hoping that it was, knowing that if one of them were fantasy the other surely must be.

“But he said a fraction of a second,” Cynthia said, “and that would have been enough. Any little sliver of time that would shield us from the present. The flicker of an eyelash would have put us out of it.”

“They blundered,” I told her. “They blundered very badly.”

For I knew it was no fantasy. We had been moved in time and over a much greater segment of time than the small part of a second of which O’Gillicuddy had spoken.

“They never tried it before,” I said. “They weren’t even sure they could really do it. We were their first experiment and the damn fools blundered.”

We walked out into the valley, into the bright sunlight, and I glanced up at the cliff walls and there were no cedars growing there.

A surge of anger swept over me. There was no telling I how far back we had been thrown. Back at least to a time before the cedars had taken root, and the cedar, if I remembered rightly, took an enormous amount of time to grow.  Some of the cedars that had been growing on those rocky walls might have been centuries old.

We’d had it now, I thought. Before, up in our present, we had been lost in space, but now we were lost in time. And there was no way we could be sure of getting back. A time-trap, O’Gillicuddy had said, but if he knew no more of time-traps than he did of moving people into time, there could be no assurance that he could do what he said he could.

“We’re a long way back, aren’t we?” asked Cynthia.

“You’re damned right we are,” I said. “God knows how far back. And I don’t suppose our clever ghosts know about it, either.”

“But the ghouls were out there, Fletch.”

“Of course they were,” I said, “and it would have taken all of three seconds for Wolf to scatter them. There was no real need to send us back. O’Gillicuddy got stampeded.”

“Wolfs not with us,” said Cynthia. “Poor Wolf. They couldn’t send him back. What’ll we do now for a rabbit-catcher?”

“We’ll catch them ourselves,” I said.

“I feel lonely without Wolf,” she said. “It took so little time to get used to him.”

“They couldn’t do a thing about it,” I told her. “He was I nothing but a robot…”

“A mutant robot,” she said.

“There are no mutant robots.”

“I think there are,” she said. “Or could be. Wolf changed. What was it made him change?”

“Elmer threw the fear of God in him when he busted up his pals. Wolf got converted quick and switched to the winning side.”

“No, it couldn’t have been that. Sure, it would have scared him, but it would not have changed him the way that he was changed. You know what I think, Fletch?”

“I have no idea.”

“He evolved,” she said. “A robot could evolve.”

“Perhaps,” I said, not at all convinced, but I had to say something to stop her chattering. “Let’s look around a bit to find out where we are.”

“And when we are?”

“That, too,” I said. “If we can manage it.”

We went down the valley, moving slowly and somewhat uncertainly. There was, of course, no need to hurry now; there was no one at our heels. But it was not only that. There was, I think, in our slowness and uncertainty, a kind of reluctance to travel out into this world, a fear of what it might contain, not knowing what one might expect, and a consciousness, as well, that we were in the past, in an unknown alien time and that we had no right to be there. Somehow this world had a different texture to it—not only the lack of lush greenness in the grass or the smaller trees—but a sense of some strange difference that probably had no physical basis, but was entirely psychological.