Highway of Eternity (24 page)

Horseface asked Boone, “Anything else that you remember?”

“No, not really,” said Boone.

“Simple, then,” said Horseface. “I have been standing in this place, never moving, staring at the black hole, since I first arrived. So we have a point of reference. When you came upon me, was I standing with my back to you?”

“That is right,” Enid answered. “With your back to us.”

“Elementary, then,” said Horseface. “I will turn one hundred and eighty degrees, and we will go downhill from where we are.”

Boone shrugged. It seemed much too elementary. It took no note of other factors. But he could think of no other way that they could go.

“We might as well try it,” he said.

All three of them turned about and started down the hill. The going was easier. There was no surging current to buck. Boone still could not feel a solid surface when he put his feet down, and the stars still sang, but he paid no attention to any of it. They came down off the hill, and he kept on going. He was hurrying, eager to get out of this maze of illusion.

Behind him, Enid cried out suddenly. “The line,” she called. “Here is the line again!”

Boone turned around and saw the two of them standing still, as if stricken, and staring at the line. He looked to his left and there, also, was the line. He was on one side of it and they were on the other and it seemed to him quite apparent that he had walked through it without any notice of it.

He walked back to where they were standing and all three of them stood there, staring at the line.

“Now,” said Enid, “we can follow it back and come out where we started. How lucky that we found it.”

“It stands to reason that we would find it,” said Boone. “We were walking a straight line.”

Horseface snorted. “A straight line, you say. I told you and I told you …”

Boone did not listen to his tirade. Glancing up the hill, he saw again the flare of the nova, or perhaps the supernova, that Enid and he had seen going up the hill. Off to one side of it was a little yellow star.

He started up the hill again, heading for the yellow star.

“Where are you going?” Enid called to him.

“Come on up,” he said, without glancing back, his eyes steady on the little yellow star. “Come on up, and I'll show you the star with the X upon it.”

He was feeling foolish even as he said it, for it might not be the star with the X upon it. There were a lot of yellow stars. You saw them everywhere.

But there had been no need to worry. It was the star with the X inscribed upon it.

“Of some importance,” said Horseface, coming up to stand beside him. “Otherwise, why is it marked?”

“It's just like a million other stars of its class,” said Boone. “That's why it seems so strange. That's why I was sure my eyes were playing tricks on me. One of these stars is just like all the others.”

“Perhaps it is not the star that is important,” suggested Horseface. “Perhaps it may have a planet and the planet is important. But we can't see a planet.”

“Just a minute,” Enid said. “There may be a way …”

She lifted the black box that she carried and aimed it at the star. Immediately as she lifted it, she drew her breath in sharply.

“That was it,” she said. “There is a planet.”

Boone stepped up behind her and stared into the vision plate. As he did so, the planet that was being showed expanded to fill the plate. It went on expanding until they could see only part of the surface—and what was on that surface.

“A city,” Horseface said. “The planet has a city.”

Huge structures speared up at them.

“This is it,” said Horseface, his voice hushed but gleeful. “This is where we go. This is were the line led.”

“And when we get there?” asked Enid.

Horseface answered with another question, “How is one to know?”

And that was right, thought Boone—how was one to know short of going there?

Enid lowered the televisor and the plate went blank.

“Back we gallop,” said Horseface, “tracing close upon the line. Then we get upon the net …”

“Wait a second,” Boone cautioned. “This is something we want to talk about. We should give it thought.”

Horseface, however, did not stay to listen. He was galloping off, following close upon the line.

Boone looked at Enid. “You are right,” she said. “We'll have to talk it over.”

“Then let's get out of here,” said Boone.

They went more slowly than Horseface, but, even so, they hurried. Both of them were anxious to win free of the chart.

Ahead of them they made out faintly the grayness of the land they had left behind them. Then they caught the loom of the cube and the tables surrounded by the chairs. And just beyond the tables and the chairs, the outline of Wolf, with the flat-headed robot standing side by side with him.

When Boone finally felt the impact of the surface beneath his feet, he knew that he had left the chart behind him. He walked a few paces forward and said to Wolf, “How are you, boy? What is going on?” Wolf was sitting on his haunches. The Hat, still limp and mauled, lay in front of him.

There was no sign of Horseface, but the trolley, Boone saw, was coming down the tracks; and someone was sitting on the forward seat.

10

Timothy

The door unfolded outward and became a ramp. Horace walked through the door, but stopped with his feet only one step out.

Behind him, Emma shrilled, “Where are we?”

“I wouldn't know,” said Horace. “There is no one here to ask.”

Although, he realized,
when
might have been the better question.

He should have known better, he scolded himself. Sure, they had been in a crisis situation, but there still would have been time to set the course. There had been no time, of course, to think it through, to give his action the consideration that he would like to have given it. But too hasty a rush to escape the ravening monster that was snapping at their heels was inexcusable.

It was not that he had been frightened, he assured himself. It had been no more than solid good sense to get out of there as quickly as he could. There were many things, Horace told himself, that could be said of him: pompous, probably, for at times he might seem a pompous man; stubborn, but in most cases stubbornness was a virtue, not a fault; and fuddy-duddy, maybe, for he was in all things a very careful man. The one thing that could not be said of him was that he was a coward.

After all, he thought, everything had been fine until the two from the twentieth century had burst upon the scene. More than likely, though, the fault had been Martin's. Martin should have known what was going on. But it was apparent that he had not known, had no inkling of it until Corcoran had tipped him off by telling him that someone was snooping around in London, asking about a place called Hopkins Acre. And what had he done then? He had bolted, he and Stella. Thinking this, Horace felt better. He had found someone on whom he could fasten all the blame. He, himself, now was entirely innocent of any blame at all.

He took a few more steps down the ramp, but still stayed on it just in case a quick retreat was called for.

The traveler lay on the slope of a hill, just below the crest. Below was a small valley in which stood a sprawling black building, only one storey high, but with many angles and extensions, as if after its construction a number of haphazard additions had been tacked onto the original structure.

Looking at it, with something of a shock, Horace realized it was one of the many monasteries that had been built by the Infinites. They might not, in fact, have been monasteries in the strictest sense, but people had called them that because the Infinites had looked considerably like little, hobbling monks.

Nothing stirred in the valley. It was an empty place. Patches of grass grew here and there, and some thickets of small growth; but there were no trees, although there were some rotting stumps where there had been trees at one time.

The sun had been behind a heavy bank of clouds. Now, as he watched, the clouds parted for a moment and the sun shone through. All along the crest of the circling hills, reaching far into the sky, was a sparkle and a twinkling, as if someone had hung the sky with glittery tinsel.

Behind him, Timothy spoke quietly, almost matter-of-factly. “There you see,” he said, “what is left of millions of our race. Each of those little sparkles is an incorporeal human, put in place and waiting through all eternity.”

“You can't be sure of that,” said Horace, fighting against the horror and the beauty of it. “You have never seen an incorporeal being.”

“I have seen our brother Henry,” said Timothy. “He is a cluster of those sparkles, a human who didn't make it to the final phase of his incorporeality. Had he done so, he would have been one sparkle only and not the many that he is.”

Timothy was right, Horace told himself. Timothy was always, and irritatingly, right.

“If I read the dial correctly,” said Timothy, “we are far into the future, some fifty thousand years beyond that time when we fled into the past.”

“So the Infinites won,” said Horace. “So this is the end of it. We humans didn't stop them.”

Emma spoke to them from the doorway. “You two down there get out of the way. Spike is coming out. There isn't room for all of you.”

Horace looked quickly over his shoulder. Spike, looking more than ever like a revolving porcupine, already was rolling down the ramp. Horace stepped quickly to the ground and over to one side of the ramp, Timothy moving with him. Spike started rolling down the hill.

“He'll get down there and stir up trouble,” said Horace. “He always was a troublemaker. The Infinites in the monastery haven't seen us yet.”

“We don't know if they have or not,” said Timothy. “There may be no Infinites. From the evidence up there on the hill they have done their job and left. This probably is only one array of the incorporeals. Throughout the world there may be many others.”

Emma came down the ramp to join them. “We waited too long,” she said. “We should have left before. Then we could have picked our time and place and not gone off so frantically, not knowing where we'd end.”

“I am going back,” said Timothy, “as soon as I am able. I made a mistake in coming along with you. There are all my books and notes and …”

“I notice,” Horace told him, coldly, “that you didn't linger in your going. You damn near ran over me. You were scared out of your britches.”

“Not really. Perhaps only slightly apprehensive. An automatic defensive mechanism, that is all it was.”

“We never did get around to burying Gahan,” said Emma. “That's a shameful thing. We just left him lying there, all wrapped up in canvas on his bier and the grave still open.”

Spike had reached the foot of the hill and was rolling steadily across the plain toward the monastery.

A few fleecy clouds had moved over the sun. The brilliant glitter of the crystal latticework that crowned the hills and soared into the sky glimmered less brightly.

Timothy looked up at them speculatively. “Just motes of thought,” he said. “Dust-size philosophers. Tiny theoreticians generating dreams of greatness. No physical functions to consider, only the fine-tuned workings of the human mind …”

“Oh, shut up!” yelled Horace.

Something crunched on the hill above them and a loosened pebble went bouncing down the slope. All three turned toward the direction of the disturbance. A robot was coming down the hill toward them. His metal body shone dully in the weak sunlight, and he had an axe slung across one shoulder.

He raised a hand in salute to them. “Welcome, human ones,” he said in a deep voice. “It has been long since we have seen one of you.”

“We?” asked Horace. “Then you are not alone.”

The robot came down the slope to a position where he was slightly downhill from them and swung around to face them.

“There are many of us,” the robot told them. “Word is spread of you and there are others coming, thankful for the sight of you.”

“Then there are no humans here?”

“A few, but only a few,” the robot said. “Scattered very widely, hiding out. A small band here, another there, not too many of them. There are too many of us now. Very few of us have humans we can serve.”

“So how do you pass your time?” asked Horace.

“We chop down trees,” the robot told him. “We chop down all we can. But there are too many trees; we cannot chop them all.”

“I do not understand,” said Timothy. “Once you chop them down, what do you do with them?”

“We roll them all together and set fire to them once they are dry enough to burn. We destroy them.”

Another robot came clumping down the hill and ranged himself alongside the first. He took his axe off his shoulder and, placing its head upon the ground, leaned upon the handle.

He started off as if it had been he, and not the first robot, who had finished talking. “The labor is arduous,” he said, “because we have none of the marvelous labor-saving mechanisms you humans once devised. At one time, there were robots with technical knowledge, but now they all are gone. Once the humans retreated to the simple life to cultivate their minds, there was no need of them. All the humans needed then were very simple robots—gardeners, cooks, and others of that ilk. Those were the ones who were left, as the humans began to disappear.”

Other robots were streaming down the slope, each one carrying a tool. They came singly and in twos and threes, and all of them grouped themselves behind the two who stood facing the humans.

“But tell me,” said Timothy, “why this selfless devotion to the destruction of trees? You make no use of them once you cut them down. Surely you have no reasonable quarrel with trees.”

“They are the enemy,” said the first robot. “We fight against them for our rights.”