Highway of Eternity (19 page)

“That's the point. He doesn't claim he knows where Boone is. He tells us he'll tell us where to look for him. Those are two different things.”

“As a matter of fact, they are. How about it, sir? How precise would be your information?”

I would help you in any way I could. The aid I offer will not be limited to the finding of Boone.

“What other kinds of help? In what regards could you be of aid to us?”

“Forget it,” Corcoran growled. “Pay him no attention. He is in a tight spot and he'll promise anything to get out of it.”

But in all human charity, wailed the monster, you must take pity on me. You must not condemn me to endless eons of no contact with external stimuli. I can not see; with the exception of this telepathic talk, I cannot hear. I feel no heat or cold. Even the passage of time is blurred. I cannot differentiate between a second and a year.

“You're in terrible shape,” said Corcoran.

Indeed I am. Kind sir, please empathize with me.

“I'll not lift a hand to help you. I'll not lift a finger.”

“You're being hard on him,” said David.

“Not as hard as he was on Athens. No harder than he would have been on us if he'd had the chance—if he'd not bungled it.”

Bungle it I did not. I am efficient mechanism. My luck ran out on me.

“It certainly did,” said Corcoran. “It is still running out. Now shut up. We want no more of you.”

It shut up. They heard no more of it.

After a time, David said, “Henry has not come back. You and I are left alone. The monster-mind says it has information. I think it reasonable to believe it does. It was here when Boone was here. It may have talked with him.”

Corcoran grunted. “You are trying to convince yourself that you should show a measure of magnanimity to a fallen enemy, that you should act nobly and be a gentleman about it. It's your neck if you want to risk it. I wash my hands of it. Do whatever you damn please.”

The sun had set and deep dusk was flowing in. Somewhere out in the emptiness, a wolf howled and another answered. Corcoran finished eating. “Give me your plate and the silverware,” he said to David. “I'll go down to the seepage basin and rinse them off.”

“Want me to come along as guard for you?”

“No, I'll be quite safe. It's just a step or two away.”

Squatting beside the dug-out basin, Corcoran rinsed off the dishes. In the east, the moon was riding low. Off in the distance, a half-dozen wolves had joined in lamenting their hard and sorry lives.

When he got back to the fire, David had the blankets out. “It's been a long day,” he said, “and we should get some sleep. I'll stand first watch. I imagine we should keep a watch.”

“I think we should,” said Corcoran.

“I'm worried about Henry,” David told him. “He knows that in a situation such as this we should not divide our forces.”

“He's probably only delayed,” said Corcoran. “By morning, he'll be back, and everything will be all right again.”

He wadded up his jacket to use as a pillow and pulled the blanket up. Moments later, he was asleep.

When he awoke, he was lying on his back. Above him, the sky was growing lighter with the first touch of dawn, and David had not called him to take his turn at watch.

Damn him, Corcoran thought. He knew better than that. He doesn't have to prove that he can take it or that he's a better man than I am.

“David!” he shouted. “Damn it, what do you think you're doing?”

On the butte, the birds were singing, saluting the first brightening of the east. Except for the singing, there was no sound at all, and the flicker of the dying fire was the only motion anywhere. Out on the plain, the white bones of the bison gleamed in the soft dawn light; and a little way to the right of them, he could make out the junk heap that marked the death of the killer monster.

Corcoran stood up, shaking off the blanket that had covered him. He moved toward the fire, reaching out for a stick of wood to use in rearranging and consolidating the scattered coals. He crouched down before the fire and it was then he heard the slobbering sound that sent a wave of terror through him. It was not a sound he had ever heard before and he had no idea what it was, but there was about it a freezing quality that held him rigid. It came again and this time he was able to turn his head to see where it might come from.

For a moment all that he could see was a pale blob crouched over a dark blob on the ground. He strained his eyes to see the better but it was not until the pale blob lifted its head and stared straight at him that he recognized it for what it was—flat cat face, tasseled ears, the gleam of six-inch fangs—a sabertooth crouched above its prey, feeding with that horrible slobbering to indicate the tooth-someness of what it was ingesting.

Corcoran knew the prey. Out there, under the claws and fangs of the sabertooth, lay David!

Grasping the stick he had picked up from the pile of wood, Corcoran rose. He shifted the stick in his hand, getting a better grip. It was a puny weapon, but was the only thing he had. The cat also rose to its feet. It was much larger than he had thought. It was fearsome in its size. It stepped over the dark blob that was David and took a few steps forward. It stopped and snarled, the down-curving fangs gleaming in the growing light. The cat's forelegs were longer than its hind legs; its back sloped and the beast seemed to slouch. There was light enough now for Corcoran to make out the speckled coat, brown splotches on light tan.

He did not stir. After its few steps, neither did the cat. Then slowly, deliberately, as if not yet decided, it pivoted about. It slew-footed its way back to its prey, lowered its head, nuzzling the dark blob and arranging the catch so it could get a firm grip. Then the cat's teeth sank into the blob and lifted; and the cat began to move away, taking its time, turning its back on the man beside the fire.

Corcoran watched, unable to move a muscle. The cat broke into an effortless trot. It held its head high so that its dangling prey would clear the ground. But even so, one leg fell down and dragged, and the cat stumbled once or twice when one of its front paws tripped over the dragging leg. It went along the base of the bluff, around an extending spur that ran off the butte into the plain, and disappeared.

Not until it was gone did Corcoran move. He crouched down before the fire and fed wood into it. The wood caught quickly and flames leaped high. Still crouching, he swung around to see that the traveler still lay where it had landed. Thirty feet or more beyond the fire lay the shotgun. He had not noticed the gun before. It had been too dark, and, in any case, he had been so occupied with watching the cat he had seen nothing else. He did not move to pick it up. The paralysis of fear still held him.

Slowly the enormity of what had happened struck him full force. Killed by a sabertooth! Killed and eaten by a sabertooth. Killed, not in anger or defense, nor yet in thoughtless killing fury, but killed for the sake of the meat upon the bone.

David was dead. David who? Shocked, Corcoran realized he'd never known the family name. The folk at Hopkins Acre had never mentioned it, and he had never asked. He called the roll: David, Enid, Timothy, Emma, and Horace. Although that wasn't right; Horace's family name would have been different.

David had not called him, had let him sleep. If he had called me, Corcoran thought, it might have been me instead of him.

He tried, in his imagination, to lay out how the death might have happened. David might have heard something out beyond the fire in the predawn darkness and have stepped out to investigate. He might have been taken by surprise or he might have seen the cat. Whatever the situation, he had not fired the gun.

If it had been me, Corcoran thought, I would have fired. If I had walked out from the fire and run into a sabertooth, I would have used the gun. A shotgun would not be the weapon of choice to use against a sabertooth, but at close range, while it might fail to kill, a shotgun certainly would dampen the killing urge of even so large an animal. David had not used the gun, perhaps because he had never fired it, perhaps because he was too civilized to use it, even if he'd had the chance. To him the gun was not a weapon—it had been a walking stick.

The poor damn fool, Corcoran told himself.

He left the fire and walked out to the gun. It had two shells in the breech; it had not been fired. He cradled it in the crook of his arm and walked out farther. A boot lay on the ground and inside the boot, a foot. The bones were shattered, broken by the crunching teeth of a feeding animal. A little further on he picked up a torn jacket. Around it were scattered other shotgun shells, lying where they had fallen. Corcoran gathered them up, put them in his pocket. There seemed nothing else left of David. He walked back to the boot with the foot enclosed and stood there, staring at it. He did not stoop to touch it. It would be, he told himself, messy to pick up and he shied away from it.

He turned back to the fire and hunkered down. He should eat something, he knew, but he had no urge for food. His mouth tasted sour and foul.

Now what should he do?

He was certain that he could operate the traveler. He knew where David kept the logbook; he had watched David program the control panel for the jump to this place.

But where to go? Back to his own twentieth century, washing his hands of this whole affair? He thought about that. The idea had some attraction, but he felt an uneasiness about it. Thinking of it, he felt like a deserter. Boone was somewhere in this crazy quilt of time, and he should not leave until he was certain he could be of no help to his friend.

He thought about the sabertooth and being alone in this forsaken place, and it was a thought that did not please him. But he weighed it all against the need to be here if Boone should return from wherever he had gone. And Henry, too, perhaps, although Henry had no need of a traveler to move through all of time and space. Henry, he decided, had no need at all of him.

He considered the sabertooth and saw that the cat was an incidental problem, not to be taken account of in any decision he might make. The cat might not return. Even if it did, there now was a weapon in the hands of someone who knew the use of it. With the gun in hand, he told himself, he would not be as vulnerable as David. At night he could sleep in the traveler, with the door closed tight against maraudering carnivores. There was food to last for a time and water in the seep-hole. He could stay, he knew, as long as he might wish.

Full dawn had come and he bestirred himself. He went to the seep-hole for a pail of water; he went to the traveler for food. He squatted by the fire to bake a pan of cornbread, boil coffee, and fry bacon. Hell, he told himself, it's just a camping trip.

He tried to feel sorry for David, but could dredge up little sorrow. The horror of the death—or, rather, the horror of the circumstances of the death—sent a shiver through him, but he forced himself not to dwell on it. The quicker he could wipe it from his mind, the better it would be.

There was a titter in his mind. It came from somewhere outside of him. Heh-heh-heh, it laughed.

Anger flared within him.

“Bug off,” he told the monster.

Heh-heh-heh, the monster tittered. Your friend is dead and I am still alive.

“You'll wish a million times that you were dead before this is all over.”

You'll be dead yourself, the monster chortled, long before I am. You'll be bone and dust.

Corcoran did not answer. A whisper of suspicion came to him. Was it possible the monster could have lured the killer cat to David?

It was silly on the face of it. He was paranoid, he thought, for even thinking of it. He ate breakfast, then washed and dried the pots and plates, using his jerked-out shirttail to do the drying. On second thought, he went to the traveler and found a shovel. Digging a hole, he buried the boot with the foot inside it. For sanitary reasons, he explained to himself; the action was not intended to be ceremonial.

Wrapping a chunk of cornbread in a handkerchief, he put it in his pocket. In the traveler he rooted through the flung-in supplies, looking for a canteen and finding none. In lieu of a canteen, he filled the pail half full of water. It was an awkward thing to carry, but the best that he could do.

Packing the shotgun and the water pail, he walked out onto the plain. A few miles out he turned to his left and began to walk a circle route, with the butte as the center of the circle. He kept a sharp lookout for any sign that Boone had passed that way.

Twice Corcoran found what he thought might be a human trail. He followed each and could not be sure. Both trails finally petered out. It was useless, he told himself. He had known all along that it would be useless—but even convinced of the uselessness, still he had to try. He and Boone had gone through a lot together. They had, at times, stuck out their necks for one another. Boone was the closest thing to a friend he'd ever had. He'd not had many friends.

At times he came on wolves that grudgingly moved out of his way, sitting down to watch him once he'd passed. A deerlike animal sprang out of a clump of bushes and dashed away. He passed within a mile of a small herd of bison. In the distance he glimpsed what looked like mastodons, although they were too distant for him to be certain. There could be mastodons here, he told himself; it was the proper time for them.

When the sun stood directly overhead, he halted and squatted in the shade of a tree. He munched cornbread and drank lukewarm water from the pail.

Probably he should go back to the butte. He had set out with the intention of describing a circle around it. He already had completed the western sweep of the circle. To the east lay nothing, just the plain stretching vast, flat, and empty, finally to merge with the sky. If Boone had gone anywhere, he would have gone west, where other buttes loomed up; he would not have gone into the nothingness of the east. Corcoran pondered the matter. Perhaps what he should do was backtrack himself, covering virtually the same ground, keeping a sharper lookout for a clue he might have missed before.