The gnome was picking himself up slowly from the tangle of barrels and boxes and baskets where I had thrown him and I could see, just by looking at him, he had no fight left in him. Neither had the hobbies.
“Tuck,” I said, “get moving. Get the stuff together. As soon as we can get the hobbies loaded, we are moving out.”
FIVE
The city pressed close. It towered on every side. Its walls were straight up into the sky and where they stopped (if they did stop, for down at their base one had the feeling he could not be sure) there existed only a narrow strip of blue, sky so far and faint that it faded out almost to the whiteness of the walls. The narrow street did not run straight; it jogged and twisted, a trickle of a street that ran between the boulders that were buildings. The buildings all were the same. There was slight difference among them. There was no such a concept as architecture, unless one could call straight lines and massiveness a kind of architecture.
Everything was white, even the floor of the street we followed-and the floor could not be thought of as paving; it was, instead, a floor, a slab that extended between the buildings as if it were a part of them, and a slab that seemed to run on forever and forever, without a single joint or seam. There seemed no end to it, nor to the city either. One had the feeling that he would never leave the city, that he was caught and trapped and that there was no way out.
“Captain,” said Sara, walking along beside me, “I’m not entirely sure I approve of the manner in which you handle things.”
I didn’t bother to answer her. I knew that dissatisfaction with me had been nibbling at her for days-on board the ship and after we had landed. Sooner or later, it was certain that she would get around to chewing on me about it and there was nothing I could have said that would have made a difference.
I threw a glance over my shoulder and saw that the others were coming along behind us-Smith and Tuck riding two of the-hobbies and the rest of them loaded with our supplies and tins of water. Behind the hobbies came Hoot, like a dog hazing a flock of sheep, and at times sidewheeling along the way a dog will run. His body was built low to the ground and on each side of it he had a couple of dozen stubby legs, like a centipede, and I knew that so long as he was back there behind them, the hobbies would try no monkey business. They were scared pink of him.
“You are heavy handed,” Sara said when I didn’t answer her. “You simply bull ahead. You have absolutely no finesse and I think in time that can lead to trouble.”
“You are talking about the gnome,” I said.
“You could have reasoned with him.”
“Reasoned with him and he about to steal us blind?”
“He said he would have gotten us out of that other world,” she said, “and I’m inclined to have believed him. There have been other parties here and he must have pulled them back out of the worlds he put them in and let them go ahead.”
“In such a case,” I said, “please account for all that loot he had the storeroom jammed with.”
“He maybe stole some of it,” admitted Sara, “or he ran a bluff and got some of it before they started out or some of the expeditions failed and he went out and picked up the stuff after they had failed.”
It was possible, I knew, any one of the alternatives she suggested could be possible. But somehow I didn’t think so. The gnome had said that we had been the first to get out of one of the other worlds without any help from him, but that could have been a lie, perhaps calculated to make us feel good about being so smart we had gotten out of it. And we really hadn’t gotten out of it. We’d been thrown out of it, and there was a good chance that some of the other parties that had landed here had been thrown out as well. The residents of those other worlds must by now be tired of having someone keep on dumping aliens in on them.
But not all of the people dumped into those other worlds would have been thrown out and that would have meant that the gnome and his pals, the hobbies, would have had good pickings. Although what good all that stuff was doing them was hard to figure out. They couldn’t begin to use all of it and on a planet such as this, with a built-in trap for any who might land on it, there’d be little chance of trading with someone out in space. The gnome apparently did a little local trading, for he’d sold Roscoe’s braincase to a centaur tribe, but the local trading couldn’t amount to so very much.
“Speaking of the gnome,” said Sara. “At first you threatened you’d bring him along with us and then you didn’t bring him. Personally, since we’re running this kind of show, I’d feel better if we had him where we could keep an eye on him.”
“1 couldn’t stand his whining and his bawling,” I told her, shortly. “And, besides, once it became apparent we weren’t hauling him along, he got so happy about it that he let us take the other things we needed without any argument. Including what is left of Roscoe and all that water and the maps.”
We walked in silence for a moment, but she still wasn’t satisfied. She was sore at me. She didn’t like the way I operated and she meant to tell me so, very forcefully, and she wasn’t having much success.
“I don’t like this Hoot of yours,” she said. “He’s a crawly sort of creature.”
“He saved our necks when the hobbies went for us,” I said. “I suppose you’re all knotted up because you don’t understand what he used to hit the hobbies. Me, I don’t care what he used, just so he still has it and can use it again if we get into a jam. And I don’t care how crawly he may seem, just so he stays with us. We need a guy like him.”
She flared at me. “That’s a crack at the rest of us. You don’t like George and you don’t like Tuck and you’re barely civil to me. And you call everybody Buster, I don’t like people who call other people Buster.”
I took a long, deep breath and began to count to ten, but I didn’t wait till ten.
“Miss Foster,” I told her, “you undoubtedly recall all that money you transferred to my account on Earth. All I’m trying to do now is to earn all that lovely money. And I’m going to earn it no matter what you do or say. You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to approve of anything I do. But you’re signed onto this harebrained scheme just like all the rest of us and I’m in charge of it because you put me in charge of it and I’m going to stay in charge of it and you haven’t a damned thing to say about it until we’re back on Earth again-if we are ever back.”
I didn’t know what she might do. I didn’t care too much.
This business had been building up for a long time now, since shortly after we had taken off from Earth and there had to be an end to it or we’d all go down the drain. Although, to tell the truth, I figured we were part-way down the drain already. There was something about the planet that made a man uneasy-something furtively vicious, a hard coldness like the coldness of a squinted eye, a thing a man couldn’t put a finger on and perhaps was afraid to put a finger on because of what he’d find. And how were we to get off the planet with our ship sealed shut?
I thought maybe she’d stop right there in the street and throw a tantrum at me. I thought maybe she might try to brain me with her rifle or maybe try to shoot me.
She did nothing of the sort. She just kept walking along beside me. She never broke her stride. Then quietly, almost conversationally, she said, “What a sleazy son-of-a-bitch you turned out to be.”
And it was all right. I probably deserved it. I’d been rough on her, but I’d had to be. She had to understand and, anyhow, I’d been called lot worse things than that.
We kept walking along and I wondered what time it was.
My watch said we’d been walking down the street for a bit better than six hours, but that didn’t mean a thing, for I hadn’t the least idea of how long this planet’s day might be.