SEVEN
Just before dawn she shook me awake.
“George is gone!” she shouted at me. “He was there just a minute ago. Then when I looked again, he wasn’t there.”
I came to my feet. I was still half asleep, but there was an alarming urgency in her voice and I forced myself into something like alertness.
The place was dark. She had let the fire burn low and the light from it extended out for only a little distance. George was gone. The place where he had been propped against the wall was empty. The shell of Roscoe still leaned grotesquely and a heap of supplies were piled to one side.
“Maybe he woke up,” I said, “and had to go...”
“No,” she screamed at me. “You forget. The man is blind. He’d called for Tuck to lead him. And he didn’t call. He didn’t move, either. I would have heard him. I was sitting right here, by the fire, looking toward the door. It had been only a moment before that I had looked at George and he was there and when I looked back he wasn’t and. . .”
“Now, just a second,” I said. There was hysteria in her voice and I was afraid that if she went on, she’d become more and more unstuck. “Let’s just hold up a minute. Where is Tuck?”
“He’s over there. Asleep.” She pointed and I saw the huddle of the man at the firelight’s edge. Beyond him were the humped shapes of the hobbies. They probably weren’t sleeping, I told myself, rather stupidly; they undoubtedly never slept. They just stood there, watching.
There was no sign of Hoot.
What she had said was right. If Smith had awakened from his coma and had wanted something-a drink of water or to go to the can or something of that sort-he’d have done nothing by himself. He would have set up a squall for Tuck, his every-watchful, ever-loving Tuck. And she would have heard him if he’d made any movement, for the place was silent with that booming quietness that fills an empty building when everyone had left. A dropped pin, the scratching of a match, the hiss and rustle of clothing rubbing against stone-any of these could have been heard with alarming clarity.
“All right, then.” I said. “He’s gone. You didn’t hear him. He didn’t call for Tuck. We’ll look for him. We’ll keep our heads. We won’t go charging off.”
I felt cold and all knotted up. I didn’t give a damn for Smith. If he were gone, all right; if we never found him that would be all right, too. He was a goddamned nuisance. But I still was cold with a terrible kind of cold, a cold that began inside of me and worked out to the surface, and I found myself holding myself tight and rigid so I wouldn’t shiver with the cold.
“I’m frightened, Mike,” she said.
I stepped away from the fire and walked the few strides to where Tuck lay sleeping.
Bending over him, I saw that he slept like no honest man. He was curled up in a fetal position, with his brown robe wrapped snugly about him and in the huddling place formed by his knees and chest, and with his arms clutching it, was that silly doll. Sleeping with the thing like a three-year-old might sleep with a Teddy Bear or a Raggedy Ann in the fenced-in security of the crib.
I put out my hand to shake him, then hesitated. It seemed a shame to wake that huddled thing, safe in the depths of sleep, to the nightmare coldness of this emptied building on an alien planet that made no sort of sense.
Behind me Sara asked, “What’s the matter, captain?”
“Not a thing,” I said.
I gripped Tuck’s scrawny shoulder and shook him awake.
He came up out of sleep drugged and slow. With one hand he rubbed at his eyes, with the other he clutched that hideous doll more closely to him.
“Smith is gone,” I said. “We’ll have to hunt for him.”
He sat up slowly. He still was rubbing at his eyes. He didn’t seem to understand what I had told him.
“Don’t you understand?” I asked. “Smith is gone.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that he is gone,” he said. “I think he has been taken.”
“Taken!” I yelled. “Who the hell would take him? What would want him?”
He looked at me, a condescending look for which I gladly could have strangled hint. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You have never understood. You’ll never understand. You don’t feel it, do you? With it all around us, you don’t feel a thing. You’re too crass and materialistic. Brute force and bombast are the only things that mean anything to you. Even here. . .”
I grabbed his robe and twisted it to pull it tight around him and then rose to my feet, dragging him along with me. The doll fell from his grasp as he raised his hands to try to loosen my hold upon the robe. I kicked it to one side, clattering, out into the darkness.
“Now,” I yelled, “what is all of this? What is going on that I don’t see or feel, that I don’t understand?”
I shook him so hard that his hands flopped away and hung down at his side; his head bobbed back and forth and his teeth chattered.
Sara was at my side, tugging at my arm.
“Leave him alone,” she screamed at me.
I let loose of him and he staggered a bit before he got his feet well under him.
“What did he do?” Sara demanded. “What did he say to you?”
“You heard,” I said. “You must have heard. He said Smith had been taken. Taken by what is what I want to know. Taken where? And why?”
“So would I,” said Sara.
And, so help me, for once she was on my side. And just a while before she had called me Mike instead of captain.
He backed away from us, whimpering. Then suddenly he made a break, scuttling out into the darkness.
“Hey, there!” 1 shouted, starting after him.
But before I could reach him, he stopped and stooped, scooping up that ridiculous doll of his.
I turned about, disgusted, and went stalking back to the fire. I took a stick of wood off the stack of fuel and pushed the burning embers together, found three or four small sticks of wood and laid them upon the coals. Flames immediately began to lick up about them.
Squatting by the fire, I watched Sara and Tuck walking back toward me. I waited for them to come up and stayed there, squatting, looking up at them.
They stopped and stood there, looking at me. Finally Sara spoke.
“Are we going to look for George?”
“Where do we look?” I asked.
“Why, here,” she said, with a wave of her arm indicating the dark interior of the building.
“You didn’t hear him leave,” I said. “You saw him, just as he had been all night, then a moment later when you looked back, he wasn’t there. You didn’t hear him move. If he had moved, you would have heard him. He couldn’t just get up and tiptoe away. He didn’t have the time to do it and he was blind and he couldn’t have known where he was. If he had awakened, he would have been confused and called out.”
I said to Tuck, “What do you know about this? What was it you tried to tell me?”
He shook his head, like a sulky child.
“You must believe me,” Sara said. “I didn’t go to sleep. I didn’t doze. After you woke me to get some sleep yourself, I kept faithful watch. It was exactly as I told you.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I never doubted you. That leaves it up to Tuck. If he knows something, let us hear it now before we go rushing off.”
Neither Sara nor I said a word. We waited for him and finally he spoke. “You know about the voice. The voice of the person George thought of as a friend. And here he found his friend. Right here. In this very place.”
“And you think,” I said, “he was taken by this friend of his?”
Tuck nodded. “I don’t know how,” he said, “but I hope that I am right. George deserved it. He had something good coming after all the years. You never liked him. There were a lot of people who never liked him. He grated on them. But he had a beautiful soul. He was a gentle sort of person.”
Christ, yes, I thought, a gentle sort of person. Lord save me from all these gentle, whining people.