“You destroyed all those creatures,” he said. “The ones living in the tree. Think of it, captain! What a magnificent achievement! A whole community wiped out!”
“I didn’t know about them” I said. I could have added that even if I had, it would have made no difference. But I didn’t say it.
“Well,” he demanded, “have you nothing more to say about it?”
I shrugged. “It’s their tough luck,” I said.
Sara said, “Lay off him, Tuck. How could he have known?”
“He pushes everyone,” said Tuck. “He pushes everyone around.”
“Most of all himself,” said Sara. “He didn’t push you, Tuck, when he took your place. You were fumbling around.”
“A man can’t take on a planet,” Tuck declared. “He has to go along with ft. He has to adapt. He can’t bull his way through.”
I was ready to let it go at that. He had done his grousing. He’d got it off his chest. He had had his say. It must have been humiliating, even for a jerk like Tuck, when I took over from him and he had something coming. He had a right to take it out on me if it helped him any.
I struggled off the boulder to my feet.
“Tuck,” I said, “I wonder if you’ll take over now. I need to ride a while.”
He got down off Dobbin and as I moved up to mount we came face to face. The hatred still was there, a more terrible hatred, it seemed to me, than had been in his face before. His thin lips scarcely moved and he said, almost in a whisper, “I’ll outlast you, Ross. I’ll be alive when you’re long dead. This planet will give you what you’ve been asking for all your entire life.”
I didn’t have too much strength left, but I had enough to grab him by an arm and fling him out, sprawling, into the dusty trail. He dropped the doll and groveled, on his hands and knees, picking it up.
I hung onto the saddle to keep from falling down. “Now lead out,” I told him. “And, so help me Christ, you do one more stupid thing and I’ll get down and beat you to a pulp.”
TEN
The trail wound across the arid land, crossing flats of sand and little pools of cracked, dried mud where weeks or months, or maybe even years before, rainwater had collected. It climbed broken, shattered ridges, angling around grotesque land formations. It wended its way around dome-shaped buttes. The land stayed red and yellow and sometimes black where ledges of glassy volcanic stone cropped out. Far ahead, sometimes seen, sometimes fading in the horizon blueness, lay a smudge of purple that I thought were mountains, but could not be sure.
The vegetation continued sparse-little bushes that crouched close against the ground, the sprawling thorn that ran along the surface. The sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky, but it was not hot, just pleasantly warm. The sun, I was sure, was smaller and fainter than the sun of Earth-either that, or the planet lay a greater distance from it.
On some of the higher ridges were little, cone-shaped houses of stone, or at least structures that looked like houses. As if someone or something had needed temporary shelter or protection and had gathered up flat slabs of stone, which lay about the ridges, and had constructed a flimsy barrier. The stones were laid up dry, with no mortar, piled one atop another. Some of the structures still stood much as their builders must have left them, in many of the others stones had fallen out of place, and in still others the entire structure had collapsed and lay in fallen heaps.
And there were the trees. They loomed in all directions, each one standing alone and lordly in its loneliness and each of them several miles from any other. We came close to none of them.
There was no life, or none that showed itself. The land ran on and on, motionless and set. There was no wind.
I used both hands to hang onto the saddle and continually I fought against falling down into the darkness that stole upon me every time I forgot to fight it back.
“You all right?” asked Sara.
I don’t remember answering her. I was busy hanging on to the saddle and fighting back the darkness.
We stopped at noon. I don’t remember eating, although I suppose I did. I do remember one thing. We had stopped in a rugged badlands area below one of the ridges and I was propped up against a wall of earth, so that I was looking at another wall of earth and the wall, I saw, was distinctly stratified with various strata of different thicknesses, some of them no more than a few inches deep while others would have been four or five feet, and each of them a distinctive color. As I looked at the strata I began to sense the time which each one represented. I tried to turn it off, for with this recognition was associated a most unrestful feeling, as if I were stretching all my faculties to a straining point, as if I were using all my energy and strength to drive deeper into this sense of time which the wall of earth invoked. But there was no way to turn it off; for some reason I was committed and must keep on and could only hope that at some point along the way I would reach a stopping point-either a point where I could go no further or a point where I had learned or sensed all there was to learn or sense.
Time became real to me in a way I can’t express in words. Instead of a concept, it became a material thing that I could distinguish (although it was not seeing and it was not feeling) and could understand. The years and eons did not roll back for me. Rather, they stood revealed. It was as if a chronological chart had become alive and solid. Through the wavering lines of the time structure as if the structure might have been a pane of glass made inexpertly, I could faintly glimpse the planet as it had been in those ages past-ages which were no longer in the past but now stood in the present, as if I were outside of time and independent of time and could see and evaluate it exactly as I could have seen and evaluated some material structure that coexisted with me on my own time level.
The next thing I remember was waking up and for a moment it seemed to me that I was waking from that interval when I saw time spread out before me, but in a little while I realized that could not be so, for the badlands now were gone and it was night and I was stretched out on my back with blankets under me and another covering me. I looked straight up at the sky and it was a different sky than I had ever seen. For a moment I was puzzled and lay quietly, trying to work out the puzzle. Then, as if someone had told me (although no one did), I knew that I was looking at the galaxy, all spread out before me. Almost directly overhead was the brilliant glow of the central area and spread out all around it, like a gauzy whirlpool, were the arms and outlying sectors.
I turned my head to one side and here and there, just above the horizon, were brilliant stars and I realized that I was seeing a few of the globular clusters, or more unlikely, other nearby stars, fellows with the star about which the planet I was on revolved-those outlaw members of the galactic system which in ages past had fled the system and now lay in the outer dark at the edge of galactic space.
A fire was burning-almost burned down-just a few feet from me and a hunched and blanketed figure lay close beside the fire. Just beyond the fire were the hunched-up hobbies, gently rocking back and forth, with the dim firelight reflecting from their polished hides.
A hand touched my shoulder and I twisted around to face in that direction. Sara knelt beside me.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“I feel fine,” I said, and that was the truth. Somehow I felt new and whole and my head and thoughts were clear with an echoing, frightening clarity-as if I were the first human waking to the first day of a brand-new world, as if time had been turned back to the first hour that ever was.
I sat up and the covering blanket fell off me.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“A day’s journey from the city,” she told me. “Tuck wanted to stop. He said you were in no condition to be traveling, but I insisted we keep on. I thought you’d want it that way.”