I looked where the friar was pointing and I caught the shimmer. But that was all it was. There was nothing one could really see. Out there, at the base of the city wall, something seemed to be moving, an elusive flow and sparkle.
Sara was looking through her glasses and now she slipped the strap over her shoulder and handed them to me.
“What do you think, captain?”
I put the glasses to my eyes and moved them slowly until I caught the movement. At first it was no more than a moving blur, but slowly it grew in size and separated. Horses? I wondered. It didn’t make much sense that there’d be horses here, but that was what they looked like. White horses running toward us-if there were horses, of course they would be white! But very funny horses and, it seemed, with very funny feet, not running the way a normal horse would run, but with a crazy gait, rocking as they ran.
As they came closer I could make out further detail. They were horses, all right. Formalized horses-pert upright ears, flaring nostrils, arched necks, manes that rose as if the wind were blowing through them, but manes that never moved. Like wild running horses some crummy artist would draw for a calendar, but keeping the set pose the artist had given them, never changing it. And their feet? Not feet, I saw. Not any feet at all, but rockers. Two pair of rockers, front and rear, with the front ones narrower so there’d be no interference as the horses ran-reaching forward with the rear pair and, as they touched the ground, rocking forward on them, with the front pair lifted and reaching out to touch the ground and rock in turn.
Shaken, I lowered the glasses and handed them to Sara.
“This,” I said, “is one you won’t believe.”
She put the glasses up and I watched the horses coming on. There were eight of them and they all were white and one was so like the other there was no telling them apart.
Sara took down the glasses.
“Merry-go-round,” she said.
“Merry-go-round?”
“Sure. Those mechanical contraptions they have at fairs and carnivals and amusement parks.”
I shook my head, bewildered. “I never went to an amusement park,” I told her. “Not that kind of amusement park. But when I was a kid I had a hobbyhorse.”
The eight came rushing in, sliding to a halt. Once they halted, they stood rocking gently back and forth.
The foremost of them spoke to us, employing that universal space argot that man had found already in existence when he’d gone into space more than twenty centuries before, a language composed of terms and phrases and words from a hundred different tongues, forged into a bastard lingo by which many diverse creatures could converse with one another.
“We be hobbies,” said the horse. “My name is Dobbin and we have come to take you in.”
No part of him moved. He simply stood there, rocking gently, with his ears still perked, his carven nostrils flaring, with the nonexistent breeze blowing at his mane. I got the impression, somehow, that the words he spoke came out of his ears.
“I think they’re cute,” Sara cried, delighted. And that was typical; she would think that they were cute.
Dobbin paid her no attention. “We urge upon you haste,” he said. “There is a mount for each of you and four to take the luggage. We have but a small amount of time.”
I didn’t like the way that it was going; I didn’t like a thing about it. I’m afraid I snapped at him.
“We don’t like being hurried,” I told him. “If you have no time, we can spend the night on the ship and come in tomorrow morning.”
“No! No!” the hobby protested frantically. “That is impossible. There exists great danger with the setting of the sun. You must be undercover by the time the sun is set.”
“Why don’t we do the way he says,” suggested Tuck, pulling his robe tight around himself. “I don’t like it out here. If there is no time now, we could come back and pick up the luggage later.”
Said Dobbin, “We’ll take the luggage now. There’ll be no time in the morning.”
“It seems to me,” I said to Dobbin, “you’re greatly pressed for time. If that’s the case, why don’t you simply turn around and go back where you came from. We can take care of ourselves.”
“Captain Ross,” said Sara Foster, firmly, “I’m not going to walk all that way if there’s a chance to ride. I think you’re being foolish.”
“That may well be,” I said, angrily, “but I don’t like snotty robots ordering me around.”
“We be hobbies,” Dobbin said. “We not be any robots.”
“You be human hobbies?”
“I do not know your meaning.”
“Human beings made you. Creatures very much like us.”
“I do not know,” said Dobbin.
“The hell you don’t,” I said. I turned to Smith. “George,” I said.
The blind man turned his puffy face toward me. The look of ecstasy still was pasted on it.
“What is it, captain?”
“In your talk back and forth with this friend of yours, did you ever mention hobbies?”
“Hobbies? Oh, you mean stamp collecting and...”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I mean hobbyhorses. Did you ever mention hobbyhorses?”
“Until this moment,” said the blind man, “I never heard of them.”
“But you had toys when you were ‘a child.”
The blind man sighed. “Not the kind you are thinking of. I was born blind. I have never seen. The kind of toys other children had were not...”
“Captain,” Sara said, angrily, “you are ridiculous. Why all this suspicion?”
“I’ll tell you that,” I said, just as angrily, “and it’s an easy answer...”
“I know,” she said. “I know. Suspicion, time and time again, has saved that neck of yours.”
“Gracious lady,” Dobbin said, “please believe there is great danger once the sun has set. I plead with you, I implore you, I urge you to come with us and most speedily at that.”
“Tuck,” said Sara, “get up that ladder and start getting down the stuff!” She swung belligerently toward me. “Have you objections, captain?”
“Miss Foster,” I told her, “it’s your ship and it’s your money. You’re paying for the show.”
“You’re laughing at me,” she stormed. “You’ve laughed all the way. You never really believed in anything I told you. You don’t believe at all-not in anything.”
“I got you here,” I told her, grimly, “and I’ll get you back. That’s the deal we made. All I ask is that you try not to make the job any harder than it has to be.”
And immediately that I said it, I was sorry that I had. We were on an alien planet and very far from home and we should stick together and not start off with bickering. More than likely, I admitted to myself, she had been quite right; I might have been ridiculous. But right away, I amended that. Ridiculous on the surface, maybe, but not in principle. When you hit an alien planet, you are on your own and you have to keep your senses and your hunches sharp. I’d been on a lot of alien planets and had always managed and so, of course, had Sara, but she’d always hit them with a good-sized expeditionary force and I’d been on my own.
Tuck, at the first word from her, had gone swarming up the ladder, with his robe tucked up underneath his belt so he wouldn’t trip, and now was handing down the duffle bags and the other plunder to Sara, who was halfway up the ladder, taking the stuff from him and dropping it as gently as she could at the ladder’s base. There was one thing you had to say about the gal-she never shirked the work. She was al. ways in there, doing ‘her fair share and perhaps a good deal more.
“All right,” I said to Dobbin, “run your packhorses over here. How do you handle this?”
“I regret,” said Dobbin, “that we haven’t any arms. But with the situation as it is, you’ll be forced to do the packing. Just heap the luggage on top the hobbies’ backs and when the load is completed, metal cinches will extrude from the belly and strap the load securely.”