“There is no point in looking for him anymore,” said Sara. “If he had been here, we would have found him. If he had been present, he would have answered us.”
“You don’t think that he is present?” I asked, thinking that ft was a strange way of saying he was not around.
She shook her head. “He found what he was looking for. Just the way George found what he was looking for.”
“That doll of his,” I said.
“A symbol,” Sara said. “A point of concentration. Like a crystal ball in which one can lose himself. A madonna or some ancient and effective religious belief. A talisman...”
“A madonna,” I said. “You mentioned that before.”
“Tuck was sensitive,” said Sara, “down to his fingertips. In tune, somehow, with something outside our space-time reference. An offensive sort of man-yes, I’ll admit that now-an offensive, sort of man, and different in a very special way. Not entirely of this world.”
“You told me once he wouldn’t make it,” I said, “that somewhere along the way he would break up.”
“I know I did. I thought that be was weak, but he wasn’t. He was strong.”
Standing there, I wondered where be had gone. Or was he gone at all? Had his grayness progressed to a point where he simply disappeared? Was he still with us, unseen and unsuspected, stumbling along at the edge of a twilight world into which we could not see? Was he out there even now, calling to us or plucking at our sleeves to let us know that he still was with us, and we unable to hear him or to feel the plucking? But that, I told myself, could not be the case. Tuck would not pluck or call. He wouldn’t care; he wouldn’t give a damn. He would not care if we knew he was there or did not know. All he needed was the doll to clutch against his chest and the lonely thought that jangled in his skull. Perhaps his disappearance had not been so much a disappearance as a growing grayness, as his utter and absolute rejection of us.
“You now be only two,” said Hoot, “but strong allies travel with you. The other three of us still stand fast with you.”
I had forgotten Hoot and the other two and for a moment it had seemed, in truth, there were only two of us, two of the four who had come storming up out of the galaxy to seek in its outland fringes a thing we could not know-and even now did not know.
“Hoot,” I said, “you sensed George leaving us. You knew when he left. This time. . .”
“I did not hear him go,” said Hoot. “He gone long back, days back. He fade away so easily there be no sense of leaving. He just grow less and less.”
And that was the answer, of course. He’d just got less and less. I wondered if there had ever been a time when he’d been wholly with us.
Sara was standing close behind me, with her head held high, as if she might somehow be defiant of something out there in the gathering dark-the thing, perhaps, or the condition, or the interlocking of circumstances which had taken Tuck from us. Although it was hard to believe that there was any single thing or any specific set of circumstances involved. The answer must lie inside of Tuck and the kind of mind he had.
In the light of the campfire I saw that tears were running down her cheeks, weeping silently, with her head held high against whatever might be out there in the dark. I reached out a tentative hand and put it on her shoulder and at the touch she turned toward me and I had her in, my arms-without planning to, surprised that it should happen-with her head buried in my shoulder and now sobs were shaking her while I held her close and fast against myself.
Out by the campfire stood Roscoe, stolid, unmoving, and in the silences punctuated by Sara’s sobbing, I heard his whispered mumbling: “Thing, bring, cling, sting, wing, fling...”
EIGHTEEN
We arrived the second morning after Tuck bad disappeared-arrived and knew that we were there, that we had reached the place we had struggled to reach all the endless days that stretched behind us. There was no great elation in us when we topped a little rise of ground and saw against a swale the gateway where the trail plunged downward between two great cliffs and recognized that here was the gateway to the place we had set out to reach.
Beyond us the mountains climbed up into the sky-those mountains which back at the city had first appeared as a purple smudge which could be seen fleetingly on the northern horizon. And the purple still remained, reflecting a dusk upon the blue land through which we had been traveling. It all felt so exactly right-the mountains, the gate, the feeling of having arrived-that I seemed to sense a wrongness in it, but try as I might I could not tell why there was a wrongness.
“Hoot,” I said, but he did not answer. He was standing there beside us, as motionless and quiet as we were. To him it must have seemed entirely right as well.
“Shall we go?” asked Sara, and we went, stepping down the trail toward the great stone portals which opened on the mountains.
When we reached the gate formed by the towering cliffs between which the trail went on, we found the sign. It was made of metal, affixed to one of the cliff walls, and there were a dozen or more paneled legends that apparently carried identical information in different languages. One was in the bastard script that went with space patois and it said:
All Biological Creatures Welcome, Mechanicals, Synthetic Forms, Elementals of Any Persuasions Whatsoever Cannot Be Allowed to Enter. Nor May Any Tools or Weapons, of Even the Simplest Sort, Be Allowed Beyond This Point.
“I care not,” said Paint. “I keep goodly company of great lumbering mumbler of rhyming words. And I watch most assiduously over rifle, sword, and shield. I pray you not be long, for following extended sojourn upon my back I shiver from apprehension at absence of biologic persons. There be strange comfort in the actual protoplasm.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. “We’ll be walking naked down that path.”
“This,” Sara reminded me, “is what we started out to find. We can’t quibble at a simple regulation. And it’ll be safe in there. I can feel it. Can’t you feel the safety, Mike?’
“Sure I can feel it,” I told her, “but I still don’t like it. The way you feel is no sure thing to go on. We don’t know what we’ll find. We don’t know what is waiting for us. What say we pay no attention to the sign and. . .”
“BEEP,” said the sign, or the cliff, or whatever.
I swung around and there, on the panel where the regulations had been posted, was another message:
The Management Will Not Be Responsible for the Consequences of Willful Disregarding of Regulations.
“All right, Buster,” I asked, “what kind of consequences do you have in mind?”
The panel didn’t deign to answer; the message just stayed put.
“I don’t care what you do,” said Sara. “I am going on. And I’m doing what they say. I didn’t come all this way to turn back now.”
“Who said anything about turning back?” I asked.
BEEP, said the panel and there was another message:
Don’t Try It, Buster!
Sara leaned the rifle against the wall of the cliff underneath the, sign, unfastened the cartridge belt and dropped it at the rifle’s butt.
“Come on, Hoot,” she said.
BEEP, and the panel said:
The Many-Legged One? Is It a True Biologic?
Hoot honked with anger. “Know it you do, Buster. I be honest hatched!” .
BEEP!
But You Are More Than One.