"He can smell it out," said Meg, triumphantly. "I told you he would be an asset on our travels."
The Shivering Snake stayed with them now around the clock, circling Rollo and, at various times, Meg. She took kindly to it.
"It's so cute, she said.
And now, out in the loneliness, they were joined by something else—gray-purple shadows that slunk along behind them and on either side. At first they could not be sure if they were really shadows or only their imagination, born of the emptiness they traveled. But, finally, there could be no question of their actuality. They had no form or shape. Never for an instant could one gain a solid glimpse of them. It was as if a tiny cloud had passed across the sun to give rise to a fleeting shadow. But there were no clouds in the sky; the sun beat down mercilessly on them out of the brassy bowl that arced above their heads.
None of them spoke of it until one evening by a campfire located in a tiny glade, with a slowly trickling stream of reluctant water running along a pebbled creek bed, a small clump of plum bushes, heavy with ripened fruit, standing close beside the water.
"They're still with us," said Meg. "You can see them out there, just beyond the firelight."
"What are you talking about?" asked Cushing.
"The shadows, laddie boy. Don't pretend you haven't seen them. They've been stalking us for the last two days."
Meg appealed to Rollo. "You have seen them, too. More than likely, you know what they are. You've traveled up and down this land."
Rollo shrugged. "They're something no one can put a finger on. They follow people, that's all."
"But what are they?"
"Followers," said Rollo.
"It seems to me," said Cushing, "that on this trip we have had more than our share of strangenesses. A living rock, Shivering Snake and, now, the Followers."
"You could have passed that rock a dozen times," said Meg, "and not known what it was. It would have been just another rock to you. Andy sensed it first, then I
"Yes, I know," said Cushing. "I could have missed the rock, hut not the snake, nor the Followers."
"This is lonesome land," said Rollo. "It gives rise to many strangenesses.
"Everywhere in the West?" asked Cushing, "or this particular area?"
"Mostly here," said Rollo. "There are many stories told."
"Would it have something to do," asked Cushing, "with the Place of Going to the Stars?"
"I don't know," the robot said. "I know nothing about this Place of Going to the Stars. I only told you what I heard."
"It seems to me, Sir Robot," said Meg, "that you are full of evasiveness. Can you tell us further of the Followers?"
"They eat you," Rollo said.
"Eat us?"
"That is right. Not the flesh of you, for they have no need of flesh. The soul and mind of you.
"Well, that is fine," said Meg. "So we are to he eaten, the soul and mind of us, and yet you tell us nothing of it. Not until this minute."
"You'll not he harmed," said Rollo. "You'll still have mind and soul intact. They do not take them from you. They only savor of them."
"You have tried to sense them, Meg?" asked Cushing.
She nodded. "Confusing. Hard to come to grips with. As if there were more of them than there really are, although one never knows how many of them there really are, for you cannot count them. As if there were a crowd of them. As if there were a crowd of people, very many people."
"That is right," said Rollo. "Very many of them. All the people they have savored and made a part of them. For to start with, they are empty. They have nothing of their own. They're nobody and nothing. To become somebody, perhaps many somebodies—"
"Rollo," said Cushing, "do you know this for a fact, or are you only saying what you've heard from others?"
"Only what I have heard from others. As I told you, of evenings filled with loneliness, I'd creep up to a campfire and listen to all the talk that went back and forth."
"Yes, I know," said Cushing. "Tall tales, yarns.
Later that night, when Rollo had gone out for a scout-around, Meg said to Cushing, "Laddie buck, I am afraid."
"Don't let Rollo worry you," he said. "He's a sponge. He soaks up everything he hears. He makes no attempt to sort it out. He does not evaluate it. Truth, fiction—it is all the same to him."
"But there are so many strange things."
"And you, a witch. A frightened witch."
"I told you, remember, that my powers are feeble. A sensing power, a small reading of what goes through the mind. It was an act, I tell you. A way to be safe. To pretend to greater powers than I really had. A way to make the city tribes afraid to lay a hand upon me. A way to live, to be safe, to get gifts and food. A way of survival."
As they moved on, the land grew even more bleak. The horizons were far away. The sky stayed a steely blue. Strong winds blew from the north or west and they were dry winds, sucking up every drop of moisture, so that they moved through a blistering dryness. At times they ran short of water and then either Rollo would find it or Andy would sniff it from afar and they could drink again.
Increasingly, they came to feel they were trapped in the middle of an arid, empty loneliness from which there was no hope they ever would escape. There was an everlasting sameness: the cactus beds were the same; the sun-dried grass, the same; the little animal and bird life they encountered, unchanging.
"There are no bear," Rollo complained one night.
"Is that what you are doing all the time, running off?" asked Meg. "Looking for bear?"
"I need grease," he said. "My supply is running low. This is grizzly country."
"You'll find bear," said Cushing, "when we get across the Missouri."
"If we ever find the Missouri," said Meg.
And that was it, thought Cushing. In this place the feeling came upon you that everything you had ever known had somehow become displaced and moved; that nothing was where you had thought it was and that it probably never had been; that the one reality was this utter, everlasting emptiness that would go on forever and forever. They had walked out of old familiar Earth and, by some strange twist of fate or of circumstance, had entered this place that was not of Earth but was, perhaps, one of those far alien planets that at one time man may have visited.
Shivering Snake had formed itself into a sparkling halo that revolved sedately in the air just above Rollo's head, and at the edge of the farthest reach of firelight were flitting deeper shadows that were the Followers. Somewhere out there, he remembered, there was a place that he was seeking—not a place, perhaps, but a legend; and this place they traveled, as well, could be a legend. They—he and a witch and a robot, perhaps the last robot that was left; not the last left alive—for there were many of them that were still alive-but the last that was mobile, that could move about and work, the last that could see and hear and talk. And he and Meg, he thought— perhaps the only ones who knew the others were alive, imprisoned in the soundless dark. A strange crew: a woods runner; a witch who might be a bogus witch, a woman who could be frightened, who had never voiced complaint at the hardship of the journey; an anachronism, a symbol of that other day when life might have been easier but had growing at its core a cancer that ate away at it until the easier life was no longer worth the living.
Now that the other, easier, cancer-ridden life was gone, he wondered, what about the present life? For almost fifteen centuries men had fumbled through a senseless and brutal barbarism and still wallowed in the barbarism. The worst of it, he told himself, was that there seemed to be no attempt to advance beyond the barbarism. As if man, failing in the course that he had taken, no longer had the heart nor the mind, perhaps not even the wish, to try to build another life. Or was it that the human race had had its chance and had muffed it, and there would not be another chance?