The sun had set and outside the doors lay a dusk that was not quite so thick as the dusk inside the building. The ratlike creatures still were pouring out the door and pouring back again, harvesting the seeds.
“The firing has slacked off,” said Sara, “but it picks up again as soon as you stick out your head.”
“I suppose you did,” I said.
She nodded. “There wasn’t any danger. I ducked back in again, real fast. I’m a terrible coward when it comes to things like that. But the tree can see us. I am sure it can.”
I dumped my armload of wood. Tuck had unpacked some pots and pans and a coffee pot stood ready.
“Just about here?” I asked. “Close to the door so the smoke has a chance of getting out”
Sara nodded. “I’m beat out, captain,” she said. “Fire and food will be good for all of us. What about Hoot? Can he...”
“He isn’t doing any eating or any drinking,” I explained. “He’s in his second state, but let’s not talk about it.”
She caught my meaning and nodded.
Tuck came up beside me and squatted down. “That looks to be good wood,” he said. “Where did you find it?”
“There’s a heap of junk back there. All sorts of stuff.”
I squatted down and took out my knife. Picking up one of the smaller sticks, I began to whittle off some shavings. I pushed them in a pile, then reached for the piece of wood that had the fiber tied to it. I was about to rip some of the fiber loose when Tuck put out a hand to stop me.
“Just a second, captain.”
He took the piece of wood out of my hands and turned it so that it caught some of the feeble light still coming from the doorway. And now, for the first time, I saw what it was that I had picked up. Until that moment it had been nothing more than a stick of wood with some straw or grass tied to it. “A doll,” said Sara, in surprise.
“Not a doll,” said Tuck. His hands were shaking and he was clutching the doll hard, probably in an attempt to keep his hands from shaking. “Not a doll. Not an idol. Look at its face!”
In the twilight the face was surprisingly plain to see. It was barely human. Primate, perhaps, although I couldn’t be sure it was even that. But as I looked at it, I felt a sense of shock; human or not, it was an expressive face, and never had I seen a face with so much sadness in it or so much resignation to the sadness. It was no fancy carving. The face, in fact, was crude, it had been simply hacked out of a block of wood.
The whole thing had about it the look of a primitive corncob doll. But the knowing hands that had carved the face, driven by God knows what sadness of their own, had caught within its planes a misery of existence that wrenched one’s heart to see.
Tuck slowly raised the doll in both his hands and clutched it tight against his breast. He looked from one to the other of us.
“Don’t you see?” he cried at us. “Don’t you understand!”
SIX
Night had fallen. The fire carved a magic circle of light out of the darkness that pressed in all about us. Back of me I could hear the gentle creak as the hobbies rocked gently back and forth. Smith still sprawled limp against the wall. We had tried to rouse him to give him food, but there was no such thing as rousing him. He was simply a sack, still with us in body, but certainly not in mind; his mind was somewhere else. Beside him leaned the metallic body of the mindless robot, Roscoe. And off a little ways sat Tuck with that doll of his clutched tight against his breast, not moving, with his eyes staring out into the darkness.
We were off to a damn poor start, I thought. Already the expedition had started to fall apart.
“Where is Hoot?” asked Sara.
“Off somewhere,” I said. “Prowling. He’s a restless sort of being. Hadn’t you ought to try to get some sleep?”
“And you’ll sit up and watch?”
“I’m not Launcelot,” I told her. “if that’s what you’re getting at. You can depend on it-I’ll rout you out later on so I can get some sack time.”
“In a little while,” she said. “Did you happen to notice this place is built of stone?”
“I suppose I had,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Not like the buildings in the city,” she said. “This one is made of honest stone. I’m not up on stone. Looks like granite, maybe. You have any idea what the city might be made of?”
“Not stone,” I said. “That stuff was never quarried from the ground. Some sort of fabricated material, most likely. Chemical, perhaps. The atoms bonded more tightly than anything we know. Nothing in God’s world, more than likely, could pull that stuff apart. When I fired the laser bolt into the landing field, the field wasn’t even scorched.”
“You know chemistry, captain?”
I shook my head. “Not so you would notice.”
“The people who built this building didn’t build the city. A more ancient people. . .”
“We can’t know that,” I said. “There is no way of knowing how long the city’s stood. It would take millions of years for it to show any wear or erosion-if it would ever show it.”
We sat in silence for a moment. I picked up a stick of wood and poked the sticks in the fire together. The fire blazed up.
“Come morning, captain?” she asked.
“What do you mean come morning?”
“What do we do’ then?”
“We go on if the tree will let us. We have some footloose centaurs to find, to see if they have a braincase and if we can get the braincase. . .”
She nodded her head in Smith’s direction. “What of him?” she asked.
“Maybe he’ll come to by then. If not we sling him on a hobby. And if Tuck doesn’t snap out of his trance by then, I’ll kick him back to life.”
“But George was looking for something, too. And he has found what he was looking for.”
“Look,” I said, “who was it that bought the, ship and paid the bill? Who brought Smith to this place? Don’t tell me that you are ready to cave in and stop short of what you are looking for because a creep like Smith goes all of a sudden limp on us.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for him...”
“All right, then.” I said. “Let’s just leave him here. If that is what he wants. If he’s gotten to the place he was aiming for...”
“Captain!” ‘she gasped. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that!”
“What makes you think I wouldn’t?”
“There must be some humanity in you. You wouldn’t turn your back...”
“He’s the one who is turning his back on us. He has what he wants. . .”
“How do you know he has?”
That’s the trouble with women. No logic. She had told me that this silly Smith had gotten where he was going. But when I said the same thing, she was set to argue.
“I don’t know anything,” I said. “Not for certain.”
“But you’ll go ahead and make decisions.”
“Sure,” I said. “Because if I don’t we could sit here forever. And we’re in no situation to be sitting still. We may have a long way to go and we’ve got to keep on moving.”
I got up and walked over to the door and stood there, looking out. There was no moon and the night was dark and there were no stars. A whiteness of the city was distinguishable in the darkness. A hazy and uncertain horizon led off beyond the city. There was nothing else that could be seen.
The tree had stopped its bombing and with all the seeds duly gathered in, the ratlike creatures had gone back to wherever they had come from.
Maybe, I thought, if we sneaked out right now we might be able to make it past the tree. But I somehow doubted it. I didn’t think darkness made that much difference to the tree. It certainly didn’t see us, for since when did trees have eyes. It must sense us in some other way. It had stopped the bombing, perhaps, because it figured it had us pinned down, knowing that it could start up again if we so much as tried to move, maybe even knowing somehow we’d not be apt to move at night.