Cemetery World (8 page)

Chapter 7

I stopped reading and looked across the fire at Cynthia Lansing.

“The coin?” I asked.

She nodded. “It was in the envelope, wrapped in a piece of foil, a kind of foil that has not been used for centuries. I gave it to Professor Thorndyke and asked him if he’d keep it …”

“But did he know what it was?”

“He wasn’t sure. He took it to another man. An expert on old Earth coins and such. It was an uncirculated Athenian owl, probably minted a few years after a battle fought at a place called Marathon.”

“Uncirculated?” Elmer asked.

“It had not been used. There was no wear on it. When a coin is circulated it becomes smooth and dull from much handling. But aside from some deterioration due to time, this one was exactly as it had been the day that it was struck.”

“And there can’t be any doubt?” I asked.

“Professor Thorndyke said there could be none at all.”

The baying of the dogs still could be heard beyond the ridge that rose above our camp. It was a lonely and a savage sound and I shivered as I listened to it and moved closer to the fire.

“They are after something,” Elmer said. “Maybe coon or possum. The hunters are back there somewhere, listening to the dogs.”

“But what are they hunting for?” asked Cynthia. “The men, I mean, the men who sent out the dogs.”

“For sport and meat,” said Elmer.

I saw her wince.

“This is no Alden planet,” Elmer told her. “No planet soft and full of pinkness. The people who live back here in the woods are probably one-half savage.”

We sat listening and the baying of the dogs seemed to move away.

“On this treasure business,” Elmer said, “leave us try to figure out what we have. Somewhere in this country to the west of us someone came fleeing out of Greece and hid out a bunch of boxes, some of which probably contained treasure. We know one of them did and some of the others may have. But the location might be a little hard to come by. It’s indefinite. A river flowing from the north into the old Ohio. There might be quite a lot of streams coming from the north …”

“There was a hut,” said Cynthia.

“That was ten thousand years ago. The hut must be long gone. We’d be looking for a hole, a tunnel, and that might be covered over.”

“What I want to know,” I said, “is why Thorney should have thought this strange character out of Greece might be Anachronian.”

“I asked him that,” said Cynthia, “and he said that : Greece or somewhere in that area of the planet would most likely be the place an alien observer would have set up his observation post. The first settled communities of the human race were established in what once was known as Turkey. An observer would not have set up a post too close to what he wished to study. He’d want to be in a position to do some observation and then get out of there. Greece would be logical, Professor Thorndyke said. Such an observer would have had some means of rather rapid transportation and the distance between the first settlements and Greece would have been no problem.” 

“It doesn’t sound logical to me.” said Elmer, bluntly.

“Why Greece? Why not the Sinai? Or the Caspian? Or a dozen other places?”

“Thorney goes on hunches as much as evidence or logic,” I told them. “He has a well-developed hunch sense. He is very often right. If he says Greece I’d go along with him. Although it would seem this hypothetical observer of ours could have moved location time and time again.”

“Not if he were picking up loot all the time,” said Elmer. “He’d get weighed down with it. It would be quite a job to move. He probably brought along several tons of it when he moved to the Ohio.”

“But it wasn’t loot,” cried Cynthia. “You have to understand that it wasn’t loot. Not loot in terms of money, or in terms of whatever value the Anachronians might employ. Whatever he picked up were cultural artifacts.”

“Cultural artifacts,” said Elmer, “running very heavily to gold and precious stones.”

“Let’s be fair about it,” I said to Elmer. “It might just have happened that the broken box was filled with that kind of stuff. Some of the other boxes might have been filled with arrowheads or spear points, early woven stuffs, mortars and pestles.”

“Dr. Thorndyke thought,” said Cynthia, “that the boxes my old ancestor saw contained only a small fraction of what the observer had collected. Probably only a few of the more significant items. Back somewhere in Greece, perhaps in other caverns carved into the rock, there may be a hundred times as much as was in the boxes.”

“Whatever it may be it spells out treasure,” Elmer said. “Artifacts of any sort, command a price and I suppose they’d be worth even more if they were artifacts from Earth. But Earth or not, there is a booming trade in them. A lot of wealthy men, and they have to be wealthy to pay the prices asked, have collections of them. But aside from that, I understand it’s chic to have an artifact or two on the mantelpiece or in a display cabinet.”

I nodded, remembering Thorney, pacing up and down the room, striking his clenched fist into an open palm and fulminating. “It’s getting so,” he’d yell, “that an honest archaeologist hasn’t got a chance. Do you know how many looted sites we’ve found in the last hundred years or so—dug up and looted before we ever got to them? The various archaeological societies and some of the governments have made investigations and there is no evidence of who is doing it or where the artifacts are taken to be hidden out. We’ve found no trace of them or whoever might be responsible. They are looted and warehoused somewhere and then they trickle back into collectors’ hands. It’s big business and it must be organized. We’ve pushed for laws to forbid private ownership of any artifact, but we get nowhere. There are too many men in government, too many men who have special interests, who are themselves collectors. And undoubtedly there are funds available, from someone, to fight such legislation. We are simply getting nowhere. And because of this vandalism we are losing the only chance we have to gain an understanding of the development of galactic cultures.”

The baying of the dogs had changed to excited yapping.

“Treed,” said Elmer. “Whatever they were running has taken to a tree.”

I reached out to the little pile of wood Elmer had brought in, laid new sticks on the fire, used another to push the spreading coals together. Little tongues of blue-tipped flame ran up from the coals to lick against the new wood. Dry bark ignited and threw out sparks. The fresh fuel caught and the fire leaped into new life.

“A fire is a pleasant thing,” said Cynthia.

“Could it be,” asked Elmer, “that even such as I should be warmed by such a feeble flame? I swear that I feel warmer sitting here beside it.”

“Could be,” I said. “You’ve had a lot of time to grow—into a man.”

“I am a man,” said Elmer. “Legally, that is. And if legally, why not otherwise?”

“How is Bronco getting on?” I asked. “He should be here with us.”

“He is sitting out there soaking it all up,” said Elmer. “He is weaving a woodland fantasy out of the dark shapes of the trees, the sound of nighttime wind in leaves, the chuckle of the water, the glitter of the stars, and three black shapes huddled at a campfire. A campfire canvas, a nocturne, a poem, perhaps a delicate piece of sculpture—he’s putting it all together.”

“He works all the time, poor thing,” said Cynthia. “It is not work for him,” said Elmer. “It is his very life. Bronco is an artist.”

Somewhere off in the dark something made a flat cracking sound, and an instant later it was followed by another. The dogs, which had fallen silent, resumed excited barking. “The hunter shot whatever it was that the dogs had treed,” said Elmer.

After he had spoken, no one said a word. We sat there imagining—or at least I was imagining—that scene off there in the darkened woods, with the dogs jumping about the tree, excited, the leveled gun and the burst of muzzle flame, the dark shape falling from the tree to be worried by the dogs.

And as I sat there listening and imagining, there was another sound, faint, far off—a rustling and a crackling. A breath of breeze came down the hollow and swept the sound away, but when the breeze died down, the sound was there again, louder now and more insistent.

Elmer had leaped to his feet. The flicker of the fire sent ghostly metallic highlights chasing up and down his body.

“What is it?” Cynthia asked and Elmer did not answer. The sound was closer now. Whatever it might be, it was heading toward us and was coming fast.

“Bronco!” Elmer called. “Over here, quick. By the fire with us.”

Bronco came spidering rapidly.

“Miss Cynthia,” Elmer said, “get up.”

“Get up?”

“Get up on Bronco and hang on tight. If he has to run, stay low so a tree branch won’t knock you off.”

“What is going on?” asked Bronco. “What is all the racket?”

“I don’t know,” said Elmer.

“The hell you don’t,” I said, but he didn’t hear me; if he did, he didn’t answer.

The noise was much closer now. It was no kind of noise I had ever heard before. It sounded as if something was tearing the very woods apart. There were popping sounds and the shriek of tortured wood. The ground seemed to be vibrating as if something very heavy was striking it repeated hammer blows.

I looked around. Cynthia was up on Bronco and Bronco was dancing away from the fire out into the dark, not running yet, but staying limber and ready to run at a second’s notice.

The noise was almost upon us, shrieking and deafening and the very ground was howling. I leaped to one side and crouched to run and would have run, I suppose, except I did not know where to run, and in that instant I saw the great bulk of whatever it was up on the ridge above us, a huge dark mass that blotted out the stars. The trees were shaking wildly and crashing down to earth, overridden and smashed by the black mass that charged along the ridgetop, almost brushing the camp, and then going away, missing us, with the noise rapidly receding down the hollow. On the ridge above, the smashed-down trees still were groaning softly as they settled into rest.

I stood and listened as the noise moved away from us and in a little time it was entirely gone, but I still stood where I was, half-hypnotized by what had happened, not knowing what had happened, wondering what had happened. Elmer, I saw, was standing, as hypnotized as I.

I sat down limply by the fire, and Elmer turned around and walked back to the fire. Cynthia slid off Bronco.

“Elmer,” I said.

He shook his massive head. “It can’t be,” he mumbled, talking to himself rather than to me. “It would not still be there. It could not have lasted …”

“A war machine?” I asked.

He lifted his head and stared across the fire at me. “It’s crazy, Fletch,” he said.

I picked up wood and fed the fire. I put on a lot of wood. I felt an urgent need of fire. The flames crawled up the wood, catching fast.

Cynthia came over to the fire and sat down beside me. “The war machines,” said Elmer, still speaking to himself, “were built to fight. Against men, against cities, against enemy war machines. They’d fight to the very death, until the last effective ounce of energy was gone. They were not meant to last. They were not fashioned to survive. They knew that and we who built them knew it. Their only mission was destruction. We fashioned them for death, we sent them out to death …”

A voice speaking from the past of ten thousand years before, speaking of the old ethics and ambitions, of ancient blood striving, of primordial hate.

“The ones who were in them had no wish to live. They were already dead. They had a right to die and they postponed their dying …”

“Elmer, please,” said Cynthia. “The ones who were in them? Who was in them? I had never heard that anyone went in them. They had no crews. They were …”

“Miss,” said Elmer, “they were not all machine. Or at least ours were not all machine. There was a robot brain, but human brains as well. More than one human brain in the one I worked on. I never knew how many. Nor who they were, although we knew they were the still competent brains of competent men, perhaps the most competent of military men who were willing to continue living for a little longer to strike one final blow. Robot brain and human brain forming an alliance …”

“Unholy alliance,” Cynthia said.

Elmer shot a quick glance at her, then looked back at the fire. “I suppose you could say so, miss. You do not understand what happens in a war—a sort of sublime madness, an unholy hatred—that is twisted into an unreasoning sense of righteousness …”

“Let us quit all this,” I said. “It may have been no war machine. It may have been something else entirely.”

“What something else?” asked Cynthia.

“It’s been ten thousand years,” I said.

“I suppose so,” Cynthia said. “There could be a lot of other things.”

Elmer said nothing. He sat quietly. Someone shouted on the ridge above us and we all came to our feet. A light was bobbing up there somewhere and we heard the sound of bodies forcing their way through the swath of fallen trees.

Someone shouted again. “Ho, the fire!” he said. “Ho, yourself,” said Elmer. The light kept on bobbing.

“It’s a lantern,” Elmer said. “More than likely the men who were out hunting with the dogs.”

We continued to watch the lantern. There was no more shouting at us. Finally the lantern ceased its bobbing and moved down the hill toward us.

There were three of them, tall scarecrow men, grinning, their teeth shining in the flicker of our fire, guns across their shoulders, one carrying something on his back. Dogs frisked about them.

They stopped at the edge of the campfire circle, stood in silence for a moment, looking us over, taking us in. “Who be you?” one of them finally asked.

“Visitors,” said Elmer. “Travelers, strangers.”

“What be you? You are not human.” He made it sound like “hooman.”

“I am a robot,” Elmer said. “I am a native of this place. I was forged on Earth.”

“Big doings,” said another one of them. “Night of big doings.”

“You know what it was?” asked Elmer.

“The Ravener,” said the first who had spoken. “Old stories told of it. Great-grandpappy, his father told him of it.”