Annie doesn't live here any more.
Silly, said Jenkins to himself. Silly that some absurdity of an all-but-vanished race should rise to haunt me now. Silly.
Annie doesn't live here any more.
Who killed Cock.Robin? I, said the sparrow He closed the door behind him and walked across the room.
Dust– covered furniture stood waiting for the man who had not returned. Dust-covered tools and gadgets lay on the table tops. Dust covered the titles of the rows of books that filled the massive bookcase.
They are gone, said Jenkins, talking to himself. And no one knew the hour or the reason of their going. Nor even where they went. They slipped off in the night and told no one they were leaving. And sometimes, no doubt, they think back and chuckle – chuckle at the thought of our thinking that they still are here, chuckle at the watch we keep against their coming out.
There were other doors and Jenkins strode to one. With his hand upon the latch he told himself the futility of opening it, the futility of searching any further. If this one room was old and empty, so would be all the other rooms.
His thumb came down and the door came open and there was a blast of heat, but there was no room. There was desert – a gold and yellow desert stretching to a horizon that was dim and burnished in the heat of a great blue sun.
A green and purple thing that might have been a lizard, but wasn't, skittered like a flash across the sand, its tiny feet making the sound of eerie whistling.
Jenkins slammed the door shut, stood numbed in mind and body.
A desert. A desert and a thing that skittered. Not another room, not a hall, nor yet a porch – but a desert.
And the sun was blue – blue and blazing hot.
Slowly, cautiously, he opened the door again, at first a crack and then a little wider.
The desert still was there.
Jenkins slammed the door and leaned with his back against it, as if he needed the strength of his metal body to hold out the desert, to hold out the implication of the door and desert.
They were smart, he told himself. Smart and fast on their mental feet. Too fast and too smart for ordinary men. We never knew just how smart they were. But now I know they were smarter than we thought.
This room is just an anteroom to many other worlds, a key that reaches across unguessable space to other planets that swing around unknown suns. A way to leave this earth without ever leaving it – a way to cross the void by stepping through a door.
There were other doors and Jenkins stared at them, stared and shook his head.
Slowly he walked across the room to the entrance door.
Quietly, unwilling to break the hush of the dust-filled room, he lifted the latch and let himself out and the familiar world was there. The world of moon and stars, of river fog drifting up between the hills, of treetops talking to one another across the notches of the hills.
The mice still ran along their grassy burrows with happy mouse thoughts that were scarcely thoughts. An owl sat brooding in the tree and his thoughts were murder.
So close, thought Jenkins. So close to the surface still, the old blood-hunger, the old bone-hate. But we're giving them a better start than Man had – although probably it would have made no difference what kind of a start mankind might have had.
And here it is again, the old blood-lust of Man, the craving to be different and to be stronger, to impose his will by things of his devising – things that make his arm stronger than any other arm or paw, to make his teeth sink deeper than any natural fang, to reach and hurt across distances that are beyond his own arm's reach.
I thought I could get help. That is why I came here. And there is no help.
No help at all. For the Mutants were the only ones who might have helped and they have gone away.
It's up to you, Jenkins told himself, walking down the stairs. Mankind's up to you. You've got to stop them, somehow. You've got to change them somehow. You can't let them mess up the thing the Dogs are doing. You can't let them turn the world again into a bow and arrow world.
He walked through the leafy darkness of the hollow and knew the scent of mouldy leaves from the autumn's harvest beneath the new green of growing things and that was something, he told himself, he'd never known before.
His old body had no sense of smell.
Smell and better vision and a sense of knowing, of knowing what a thing was thinking, to read the thoughts of raccoons, to guess the thoughts of mice, to know the murder in the brains of owls and weasels.
And something more – a faint and wind-blown hatred, an alien scream of terror.
It flicked across his brain and stopped him in his tracks, then sent him running, plunging up the hillside, not as a man might run in darkness, but as a robot runs, seeing in the dark and with the strength of metal that has no gasping lungs or panting breath.
Hatred – and there could be one hatred only that could be like that.
The sense grew deeper and sharper as he went up the path in leaping strides and his mind moaned with the fear that sat upon it – the fear of what he'd find.
He plunged around a clump of bushes and skidded to a halt.
The man was walking forward, with his hands clenched at his side and on the grass lay the broken bow. The wolf's grey body lay half in the moonlight, half in shadow and backing away from it was a shadowy thing that was half-light, half-shadow, almost seen but never surely, like a phantom creature that moves within one's dream.
"Peter!" cried Jenkins; but the words were soundless in his mouth.
For he sensed the frenzy in the brain of the half-seen creature, a frenzy of cowering terror that cut through the hatred of the man who walked forward towards the drooling, spitting blob of shadow. Cowering terror and frantic necessity – a necessity of finding, of remembering.
The man was almost on it, walking straight and upright – a man with puny body and ridiculous fists – and courage. Courage, thought Jenkins, courage to take on hell itself. Courage to go down into the pit and rip up the quaking flagstones and shout a lurid, obscene jest at the keeper of the damned.
Then the creature had it – had the thing it had been groping for, knew the thing to do. Jenkins sensed the flood of relief, that flashed across its being, heard the thing, part word, part symbol, part thought, that it performed. Like a piece of mumbo-jumbo, like a spoken charm, like an incantation, but not entirely that. A mental exercise, a thought that took command of the body – that must be nearer to the truth.
For it worked.
The creature vanished. Vanished and was gone – gone out of the world.
There was no sign of it, no single vibration of its being. As if it had never been.
And the thing it had said, the thing that it had thought? It went like this. Like this Jenkins jerked himself up short. It was printed on his brain and he knew it, knew the word and thought and the right inflection – but he must not use it, he must forget about it, be must keep it hidden.
For it had worked on the cobbly. And it would work on him. He knew that it would work.
The man had swung around and now he stood limp, hands dangling at his side, staring at Jenkins.