I shook my head, bewildered. “I remember none of it. You are sure Tuck said that we should stop?”
She nodded. “You hung onto the saddle and were terribly sick, but you answered when we spoke to you. And there was no place to stop, no good camping spot.”
“Where’s Hoot?”
“Out on guard. Prowling. He says he doesn’t need to sleep.”
I got up and stretched, like a dog will stretch after a good night’s sleep. I felt fine. God, how fine I felt!
“Is there any food?” I asked.
She got to her feet and laughed.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked.
“You,” she said.
“Me?”
“Because you are all right. I was worried. All of us were worried.”
“It was that damn Hoot,” I said. “He drained my blood.”
“I know,” she said. “He explained it to me. He had to. There was nothing else to do.”
I shivered, thinking of it. “It’s unbelievable,” I said.
“Hoot himself,” she said, “is unbelievable.”
“We’re lucky that we have him,” I told her. “And to think that I almost left him back there in the dunes. I wanted to leave him. We had trouble enough without reaching out for more.”
She led the way to the fire.
“Build it up,” she said. “I’ll fix some food for you.”
Beside the fire was a little pile of brush, twisted branches broken from some of the desert trees. I squatted down and fed some of them to the fire and the flame blazed up, licking at the wood.
“I’m sorry about the laser gun,” I said. “Without it, we stand sort of naked.”
“I still have my rifle,” she pointed out. “It has a lot of power. In good hands . . .
“Like yours,” I said.
“Like mine,” she said.
Beyond the fire the heap of blankets lay unmoving. I gestured toward them. “How is Tuck?” I asked. “Any sign of him snapping out of it?”
“You’re too hard on him,” she said. “You have no patience with him. He’s different. He’s not like the two of us. We are very much alike. Have you thought of that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have.”
She brought a pan and set it on the coals, squatting down beside me.
“The two of us will get through,” she said. “Tuck won’t. He’ll break up, somewhere along the way.”
And strangely I found myself thinking that perhaps Tuck now had less to live for-that since Smith had disappeared he had lost at least a part of his reason for continuing to live.
Had that been why, I wondered, he had appropriated the doll? Did he need to have something he could cling to, and make cling to him by offering it protection? Although, I recalled, he had grabbed hold of the doll before George had disappeared. But that might not apply at all, for he may have known, or at least suspected, that George would disappear. Certainly he had not been surprised when it had happened.
“There’s another thing,” said Sara, “you should know. It’s about the trees. You can see for yourself as soon as it is light. We’re camped just under the brow of a hill and from the hilltop you can see a lot of country and a lot of trees, twenty or thirty of them, perhaps. And they’re not just haphazard. They are planted. I am sure of that.”
“You mean like an orchard?”
“That is right,” she said. “Just like an orchard. Each tree so far from every other tree. Planted in a checkerboard sort of pattern. Someone, at some time, had an orchard here.”
ELEVEN
We went on-and on and on.
Day followed day and we traveled from dawn until the failing of the light. The weather held. There was no rain and very little wind. From the appearance of the country, rain came seldom here. The country changed at times. There were days when we struggled uphill and down in twisted badland terrain; there were other days on end when we traveled land so flat that we seemed to be in the center of a concave bowl-a shallow dish-with the horizons climbing upward on every hand. Ahead of us what at first had been a purple cloud lying low against the horizon became unmistakably a far-off mountain range, still purpled by the distance.
Now there was life, although not a great deal of it. There were honking things that ran along the hilltops when we crossed the badlands area and went streaking down the painted gulleys, gobbling their excitement. There were the ones we called the striders, seldom seen and always at a distance, so far off that even with our glasses we never got a good look at them, but from what we saw incredibly twisted life forms that seemed to be walking on stilts, lurching and striding along at a rapid rate, not seeming to move swiftly but covering a lot of ground. And out on the desiccated plains the whizzers-animals (if they were animals) the size of wolves that moved so fast we were unable to see what they really were or how they traveled. They were a blur coming toward us and a whish going past and another blur as they went away. But although they came close, they never bothered us. Nor did the honkers or the striders.
The vegetation changed, too, from one type of landscape to another. Out on some of the plains strange curly grasses grew and in some of the badlands areas distorted trees clung to the hillsides and huddled in the gullies. They looked more like palms than pines, although they were not palms. Their wood was incredibly tough and oily and when we passed through regions where they grew we collected as many of their fallen branches as the hobbies could carry to serve as wood for campfires.
And always there were the trees, the great monsters that towered miles into the sky. Now we knew, without any question, that they had been planted, that the land had been surveyed and they had been laid out in orchards, forming a geometric gridwork over the face of the land. We did not come closer than a mile or so to any one of them. The trail seemed to be engineered to avoid them. And while at times we saw them shooting out their seed pods, they never shot at us.
“It’s almost,” Sara said, “as if they’d learned a lesson. As if they knew what might happen to them if they fired at us.”
“Except it wouldn’t happen now,” I reminded her, blaming myself once again for having left the ship without going back to the control room to get the extra laser gun and the repair kit for it.
“They don’t know that, of course,” she said.
But I wasn’t quite as sure as she was.
At times, watching through glasses, we saw swarms of the little ratlike creatures scurry out of burrows some distance from the trees to collect the seeds from the thrown pods, carrying them to what undoubtedly were hidden pits to deposit them. We never tried to investigate the pits; they were too close to the trees. If the trees were willing to leave us alone, we were quite glad to reciprocate.
The trail kept on, at times growing faint, at other times broader and better marked, as if at some time in the past parts of it had been more heavily traveled than were other sections of it. But the travel in any event could not have been heavy. We did not meet a soul.
One day the trail was crossed by what at one time had been a paved road, with only a few of the paving blocks remaining. The few that did remain were either shattered or canted out of place, but standing at the point where it crossed the trail, almost at right angles, one could look for a long distance either way along the slash marked out by the road, running straight without a single curve.
We held a conference. The road somehow was attractive, in some ways seemed more important than the trail we had been following. In times past it would have linked points of some importance, while the trail went dawdling across the land in a most haphazard way. But the trail did bear some signs of ancient travel. The road bore none at all. It still existed only because enough time had not passed to erase it from the landscape. And the trail trended in a northerly direction and it was to the north that we understood we might find the centaurs. The road ran east and west. Another point. The trail undoubtedly was older than the road; it had an ancient look about it. In certain places where it was constricted by geographic features and thus not allowed to wander, it had been cut to a depth of three or four feet into the soil. The evidence was that it had been used for millennia, that it had been a route of travel in times beyond all telling.