The day was far gone, but we loaded up and left. There was none of us who wanted to stay in that camp for a minute longer than was necessary. We fled from it, glad to get away, to be free of the depressing walls of barren earth and the sense of ancient doom one could feel hanging over it. And there was, as well, a sense of urgency, a never-expressed, perhaps never-admitted feeling that we were running out of time.
FIFTEEN
Hoot stumbled on the centaurs the second day out.
We still were in the badlands. Heretofore any of them we had come to had been crossed in a few hours or a day at most. But this badlands area seemed to stretch on forever and we all looked forward to the end of it, if the end should ever come. Loaded down with heavy packs as Tuck and I were, it was rugged going, mostly up and down, with only short respites when the trail ran for short distances across more level land.
Hoot kept out ahead of us. We saw him only now and then and then only glimpses of him when he stood on some high point to look back and see how we were doing.
Shortly before noon I saw him sidewheeling rapidly down the trail above us. Glad of an excuse to rest, I dropped my pack and waited for him. So did Sara, but Tuck merely stopped when we stopped and did not drop his pack. He stood there, hunched over under the weight of it, staring at the ground. Since we’d left the camp where we had lost the hobbies, he had been more withdrawn than ever, fumbling along without paying attention to anything at all.
Hoot came slithering down the trail and stopped in front of us.
“Hobbies ahead,” he hooted at me. “Ten times ten of them. But without their rockers and with faces such as you.”
“Centaurs,” Sara said.
“Playing,” panted Hoot. “In depression in the hills. Playing at game. Knocking sphere about with sticks.”
“Centaurs playing polo,” Sara said, enchanted. “What could be more appropriate!”
She reached up to brush the truant lock of hair out of her eyes and watching her, I caught a glimpse again of the girl who had met me in the hallway of that old house back on Earth-as she had looked before the dust and wear of travel on this planet had blunted the sharp edge of her beauty.
“Understand do I,” said Hoot, “that you seek for them. Glad I be to find them.”
“Thank you, Hoot,” said Sara.
I reached down and picked up my pack and shrugged into the harness.
“Lead on, Hoot,” I said.
“Do you think,” asked Sara, “that the centaurs still might have the brain case? They might have lost it or broken it or used it up some way.”
“We’ll know,” I said, “when we talk with them.”
“What about his memory?” she asked. “If we get the case and put it into him, will the memory still be there? Will he remember as well as when it was taken out of him?”
“The memory won’t be lost,” I assured her. “Everthing he ever knew will still be there. It’s the way a robotic brain is made. They don’t forget like people.”
There was a chance, of course, that there’d be more than one tribe of centaurs on the planet, that there might be many tribes of them, and that this one up ahead, engaged in their polo playing, would not be the tribe that had Roscoe’s brain case. But I didn’t mention this to her.
There was a chance as well they’d not be interested in parting with it. Although I couldn’t imagine what earthly good a robotic brain case would be to anyone unless they had a robot.
When we neared the top of the hill beyond the one down which Hoot had scrambled to bring us word, he whispered to us that the centaurs were just beyond the bill.
I’m not sure why we did it, for no one passed the word to do it, but we all scrooched down when we neared the top of the hill and peeked over it.
Below us lay a wide flat area of sand and scrawny vegetation and beyond that little area the red and yellow of the desert lay, with the badlands formations finally petering out.
Hoot had been wrong in his counting of them. There were many more than ten times ten. The bulk of them were ranged solidly around a rectangular playing field, which was a playing field only by the virtue of a game being played upon it. It was a level chunk of desert, with two rows of white stones serving as goals. Upon the field a dozen centaurs were involved in furious action, long clubs clutched in their hands, fighting for the possession of a ball, whacking it back and forth-a rude and very elemental version of the noble game of polo.
Even as we watched, however, the, game came to an end. The players trotted off the field and the crowd began breaking up.
Beyond the polo field a few tents were set up, although one should not have called them tents. They were simply large squares of some sort of dirty fabric supported by poles thrust into the ground, designed perhaps for nothing more than shelter from the sun. Here and there among the shelters were piles of packs, probably containing the few possessions of the tribe.
The centaurs were milling about, with no seeming purpose, exactly as a crowd of people on an aimless holiday would mill around.
“What do we do now?” asked Sara. “Just walk down to them?”
Tuck came out of his trance. “Not all of us,” he said. “Just one.”
“And I suppose that’s you,” I said, half-kidding.
“Of course it’s me,” said Tuck. “If anyone is going to get killed, I’m the candidate.”
“I don’t think,” said Sara, “that they’d just up and kill someone.”
“That’s what you think,” I said.
“Let’s look at it logically,” said Tuck, in that dirty supercilious way of his that made you want to belt him. “Of all of us, I am the least likely to get killed. I am a humble-looking person, very inoffensive and with no bluster in me and probably not appearing quite right in the head. And I have this brown robe and I don’t wear shoes, but sandals. . .”
“Those babies down there,” I told him, “don’t know a thing about brown robes or sandals. And they could care less if you were bright or stupid. If they feel like killing someone. . .”
“But you can’t know that,” said Sara. “They might be friendly people.”
“Do they look friendly to you?”
“No, I guess they don’t,” she said, “although you can’t tell just by looking at them. But Tuck may have something going for him. Maybe they don’t know about brown robes and sandals, but maybe they could sense a simple soul. They might see right off he isn’t dangerous but is filled with kindly thoughts.”
And I was thinking all the time she was saying this that she must have someone else in mind, for it couldn’t be our Tuck.
“I’m the one to go, by God,” I said. “So let’s just cut out this jabbering and I’ll go on down there. They’d mop up the place with Tuck.”
“I don’t suppose they would with you,” she said. “You’re damned right they wouldn’t. I know how to handle. . .”
“Captain,” said Tuck, “why don’t you ever listen to reason? You just go popping off. You got to be the big shot. Consider just two things. What I said I meant. They might not clobber me because I’m a different kind of man than you are. There wouldn’t be the satisfaction of taking off on me there’d be in taking off on you. There isn’t too much fun in killing or in beating up someone who is pitiful and weak and if I only put my mind to it, I can look awful pitiful and weak. And the other thing is this-you’re needed more than I am. If something happened to me it wouldn’t make much difference, but it would make a lot of difference to this expedition if you went down there and got yourself knocked off.”
I stared at him, aghast that he had had the guts to say what he’d just said. “You mean all this foolishness?” I asked.