Highway of Eternity (35 page)

The sky was dark, the kind of darkness that would come with an approaching storm, although here there was no storm nor any hint of one.

The end of the world, he wondered, the beginning of the end, with a dying, now unstable sun undergoing the first stages of a red giant sequence?

The tree down the ridge cast no shadow. And for the first time in his life, Henry experienced utter silence. No bird was crying in the sky, no insect chirping from the ground, and there was no soughing of a wind. Everything stood still.

Then a voice spoke within him: You are a stranger here?

If he had still possessed a body, his surprise would have made him gulp. But there was no way that he could now. He answered, calm and clear: Yes, I am a stranger. I have only now arrived. Who is it that speaks to me?

The inner voice said, I am the tree. Why don't you come to me and rest within my shade?

But you have no shade, said Henry. This bloated sun casts no shadow.

I speak from olden habit, said the tree, harking back to that time when I did have shade to offer. It has been so long since I have bespoken another that I now forget. I am inclined at times to stand here in my loneliness and make loud and senseless declamations. I am simply talking to myself, since there is no one else to speak to.

I do not need your shade, said Henry, which is well, since you have no shade. But your company I need and your information, if you will favor me with it.

Saying which, he floated to a position close to the lonely tree.

What information do you wish? the tree asked of him. My store of it may not be ample for you, but I'll give you what little I may have.

You are a sentient tree, said Henry, and you bolster a belief some ancient humans had. My long-lost sister, I recall, believed quite firmly—and the others of us thought unrealistically—that trees would follow man. Now, meeting you, it occurs to me that she could have been correct. She was a most perceptive person.

Does it happen you are human? asked the tree.

A partial human, Henry told him. A fragmented one. A beaten-up human at the best. Which leads me to another question. What has happened to the clustered sparkles that at one time were stationed in the sky? Once there were many of them.

I recall them faintly, said the tree. Searching far back in memory I bring them to my consciousness. There were many lights in the sky. Some of them were stars and some of them were what you term the sparkles. There still are stars, and in a little time we'll see them. When the sun sinks to just above the horizon in the west, they'll begin appearing in the east. The sparkles you will not see; they have been gone for long. They drifted off. They became less and less. I'm sure they did not die; they only drifted off, as if they were going elsewhere. Can you tell me what humans were? Were they all like you?

Not at all like me, said Henry. I am, you must understand, a freak. I started out to be a sparkle, but it didn't take. It's a long story. If we have the time, I'll tell you.

We have all the time there is.

But the sun?

I'll be withered up and dead, all trace of me vanished, before the sun is any actual danger. In time to come, it will kill the planet, which is close to dead already. Not for some little time.

That's good to hear, said Henry. You asked me what a human was. I take it there are no humans now.

Once, very long ago, there were creatures that were formed of metal. Some said they were not humans, but copies of humans.

Robots, Henry said.

They were not known by that name. I can't be certain they existed. There are many stories told. One was that the metal creatures tried to eliminate the trees by cutting them down. There was no explanation of why they should have tried, or evidence that they did.

The robots now are gone?

Even metal, said the tree, does not live forever. But you and I are here, and we are talking. Perhaps we could be friends.

If you wish it, Henry said. I have not had a friend for far too long.

Then let it be so, said the tree. Let us settle down and talk. You said that some thought trees would follow man. Does that mean take the place of man?

That is what it meant. Even then, an untold time ago, there was a well-founded perception that the human race would end and that something else must take its place.

Why must something else take its place?

I cannot tell you that. There is no solid rationale for it, but the belief seemed to be that there must be a dominant race upon this planet. Before men were the dinosaurs and before the dinosaurs were the trilobites.

I have never heard of either dinosaurs or trilobites.

They didn't amount to much, said Henry. The dinosaurs were big and perhaps there were not too many of them. The trilobites were small and there were a lot of them. The point is that all the trilobites and the dinosaurs died out.

And man took the place of dinosaurs?

Not immediately. Not all at once. It took a little time.

And now myself, a tree? I am dominant?

I think perhaps you are.

The strange thing, said the tree, is that I never thought of myself as dominant. Perhaps at this late date, dominance is of slight importance. Was it different with the trilobites, the dinosaurs and men?

I don't know about the trilobites, said Henry. They were a stupid lot. The dinosaurs were a stupid tribe as well, but they had a hunger in them. They ate everything in sight. The humans had a hunger, too; they controlled everything.

We had no hunger, said the tree. We got our living from the soil and air. We interfered with no one, had no enemies, and were enemies to no one. You must be mistaken; if it takes great hunger to be dominant, we were never dominant.

Yet you can think and talk.

Oh, yes, we did a lot of that. Time was, when there were many of us, we raised a storm of chatter all across the world. We were the wisest things in all the world, but we did not use our wisdom. We had no way to use our wisdom.

Can you tell me, perhaps, asked Henry, some of that wisdom?

You come too late, the tree told him sadly. I grow old and senile. I am swamped with forgetfulness. Perhaps it required a community of effort and of thought and chatter to hold the wisdom intact. Now there is no community. You come too late, my newfound friend; there is nothing I can give you.

I am sorry, said Henry.

Another failure, he told himself. The trilobites, the dinosaurs, and men, at least upon this world, had failed. And the trees as well. Even if the trees had persisted and gone on, they'd still have been a failure. Wisdom of itself was useless. If there were no way to act upon it, it had no value.

You are troubled, said the tree.

Yes, troubled, Henry told him, although I don't know why I should be; I should have known the end.

16

The Family

Timothy leaned back in his chair and thrust his long legs out in front of him.

“Finally, after months,” he said, “I'm beginning to catch on to what is going on here. I'm learning the basic galactic language. Hugo has been a help to me from the very start, of course. He has guided me, counseled me, and seen that I met other beings who have been of help to me.”

“Don't be taken in by all of this,” Emma told Enid. “He still follows his old habits. He stays in his study for days at a time, not even coming down for meals. Some of Hugo's people had to carry them up to him, and now that silly robot that came with you carries them up to him and …”

“The robot has been a great help ever since he arrived,” said Hugo. “My people worked very hard to run the kitchen and do other chores around the place, but the robot moved immediately to take over. He is a wizard at cooking and he seems to have the knack.”

Horace grumbled from the far side of the room. “He still doesn't know how to turn out a good saddle of mutton.”

“Do you have to complain all the time?” Emma asked tartly. “If it isn't the cooking, then it is something else. You remember, don't you, what Timothy told you when he agreed to bring us here. Don't make any trouble, he asked. That's all he asked of you.”

“He also told me,” yelled Horace, “to keep my mouth shut. All I ask of you, he said, is to keep your big mouth shut.”

“I must say,” said Timothy, “that you've not done too well at it.”

“Except for complaining all the time,” said Emma, “he's not done too badly. He's not set a foot off the property and he's not quarreled with any of your ridiculous neighbors. I don't see how you put up with them.”

“So far as I am concerned,” said Enid, “I cannot see any need to step off the property. This place is simply perfect. Except for the mountains, I don't see much difference between it and Hopkins Acre.”

“You are right,” said Corcoran. “It is as pleasant a place as I have ever seen. It reminds me much of Hopkins Acre. Boone and I, of course, were only there for a short time, but …”

Boone said to Horseface, “I can't imagine how you knew that the star with an X marked on it would lead you here.”

“I told you,” Horseface rumbled. “The X made me to think it must be a special place, so I headed for it.”

“But you were the one who suggested that the X could have been meant as a warning,” said Corcoran.

“It could have been,” Horseface agreed. “But sometimes I like to take big chances.”

“For my part,” said Timothy, “I am glad you took the chance. It was lonely here, among all the aliens, considerate as they may have been. Now the family, what is left of it, is together again.”

“Have you had any word at all of Henry?” Enid asked.

Horace answered, “No word at all. Henry you could never tell about. Despite what the rest of you may say, he was a spook. Always slipping in and out.”

“There goes that big mouth again,” said Emma. “You never did like Henry. You were always saying terrible things of him. I would think you would be different now. Henry may be dead.”

“Henry dead!” Horace roared. “He'll never die. There never was a thing that could get to him.”

“The last I saw of him,” said Corcoran, “he told me he was leaving to find you people who were in Martin's traveler.”

“Well,” said Horace, sourly, “he never found us. He probably found something else that interested him.”

They sat in the drawing room, taking their ease at talk following a splendid lunch. From the dining room came the subdued clatter of the staff clearing away the china and the silver.

Timothy waved at the bar. “Anyone who wants a refill, help yourselves.”

Horace heaved himself up and stalked to the bar for more brandy. He was the only one.

Corcoran said to Timothy, “You seem contented here.”

“I am well content,” Timothy told him. “There is an old familiarity to the house and grounds. And I have work again. Why don't you stay here with us? I am sure Center would, without difficulty, find a place for you.”

Corcoran shook his head. “My home is back in the twentieth century. I have a business there and I find myself anxious to get back to it.”

“You have decided, then,” said Boone.

“Horseface has agreed to take me. You won't be going with us?”

“No. I think I shall stay here.”

“And you, Horseface?” asked Enid. “Will you be coming back to us?”

“Perhaps on visits, if you are willing to have me. But there are many things to see, light years to travel, and far places to poke into.”

“Before you go, there's one thing you must tell me.”

“Please ask.”

“What really happened to Martin? You said he fell through the net. I think you shoved him off.”

“I never laid a hand on him,” protested Horseface. “I only told the net.”

“You told the net to throw him off?”

“You make it sound so heartless.”

“Well, it was heartless, wasn't it? You dumped him into space.”

“That I did not do,” said Horseface. “I told the net to dump him into another place and time. On Earth, in the twenty-third century.”

“Why there?”

“I wish the man no harm. I just wanted to get rid of him, to put him where he cannot leave and start trouble. He will have no traveler, so once there, he has to stay.”

“One thing still puzzles me,” said Corcoran. “Who the hell was Martin? I had been under the impression that he somehow was connected with Hopkins Acre and the others in your group—the Pleistocene and Athens. Some sort of outpost man. But when he learned that someone was asking about a then nonexistent place—Hopkins Acres—he took it on the lam. The next we saw him, he was working for the Infinites, carting them around in a stolen traveler.”

“Not stolen,” objected Horseface. “He claims he paid for it.”

“Still it was stolen,” said Boone. “It had been stolen from Enid. Probably not by Martin, but by someone else.”

“As I recall it,” said Horace, nastily, “it was you, Corcoran, who told him someone was inquiring about Hopkins Acre.”

“He had hired me,” said Corcoran. “I did a job for him, that's all. He paid me handsomely for what I did. I have been wondering since how he got that money. Not from you folks, certainly. My impression is that you had nowhere near that kind of money.”

“Are you sure it was real money?” Horace asked.

“It could have been,” Enid said. “He had two travelers—the big one and the one Stella took. When you can travel through time, it isn't hard to locate treasure, to win lotteries, or use some such means to get money. That's how David got the small amounts he needed to pay for the supplies he brought back to us from his trips.”

Timothy nodded. “I doubt we'll ever know who Martin was. Undoubtedly, a very devious man. I must tell you that we had full confidence in him, although we never liked him. David met him in New York and took him in dislike. Not a nice man. Very far from being nice.”