“Forget it,” I said angrily. “I make it a rule never to make a pass at my employer.”
I expected her to be furious, but she wasn’t. She didn’t even wince.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” she said. “You know what I mean. This trip spoiled it for us. We found out too much about one another. Too many things to hate. I am sorry, Mike.”
“So am I,” I said.
In the morning she was gone.
TWENTY-TWO
I stormed at Hoot. “You were awake. You saw her go. You could have wakened me.”
“For why?” he asked. “What the use of waking? You would not have stopped her.”
“I’d beaten some sense into that stubborn skull of hers.”
“Stop her you would not,” Hoot maintained. “She but follow destiny and no one’s destiny another’s destiny and no interference please. George, his destiny his own. Tuck, his destiny his own. Sara, her destiny her own. My destiny my own.”
“The hell with destiny!” I yelled. “Look at what it got them. George and Tuck both disappeared and now I got to go and yank Sara out of. . .”
“No yank,” honked Hoot, puffing with anger. “That you must not do. Understanding you miss. It is of yours no business.”
“But she sneaked out on us.”
“She did not sneak,” said Hoot. “She tell me where she go. She take Paint to ride, but pledge to send him back. She left the rifle and what you call the ammo. She say you have need of it. She say she cannot bear to make farewell of you. She crying when she left.”
“She ran out on us,” I said.
“So did George run out. So did Tuck.”
“Tuck and George don’t count,” I said.
“My friend,” said Hoot. “My friend, I crying for you, too.”
“Cut out the goddamn sentiment,” I yelled at him. “You’ll have me bawling with you.”
“And that so bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad,” I said.
“I have hope to wait,” said Hoot.
“Wait for what?” I asked. “Wait for Sara? Not that you can notice. I am going back and...”
“Not for Sara. For myself. I have hope to wait, but I can wait no longer.”
“Hoot, stop talking riddles. What is going on?”
“I leave you now,” said Hoot. “Stay I can no longer. I in my second self for long, must go third self now.”
“Look,” I said, “you’ve been blubbering around about the different numbers of yourself ever since we met.”
“Three phases,” Hoot declared. “Start with first self, then second self, then third.”
“Wait a minute, there,” I told him. “You mean like a butterfly, First a caterpillar, then a chrysalis, then a. . .”
“I know not this butterfly.”
“But in your lifetime you are three things?”
“Second self a little longer, perhaps,” said Hoot, sadly, “if not flip momentarily into third self to see in rightness this Lawrence Knight of yours.”
“Hoot,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“For sorrow is no need,” said Hoot. “Third self is joyousness. To be much desired. Look forward to third self with overwhelming happiness.”
‘Well, hell,” I said, “if that is all it is go ahead into your third self. I won’t mind at all.”
“Third self is awayness,” Hoot told me. “Is not here. Is elsewhere. How to explain I do not know. I am sorrow for you, Mike. I sorrow for myself. I sorrow at our parting. You give me life. I give you life. We have a very closeness. Hard trails we travel side by side. We speak with more than words. I’d share this third life with you, but is not possible.”
I took a step forward and stumbled on my knees. I held out my hands toward him and his tentacle reached out and engulfed my hands and gripped them hard and in that moment that hands and tentacles closed together and held, I was one with this friend of mine. For an instant I probed into the blackness and the glory of his being and caught a glimpse- or many glimpses-of what he knew, what he remembered, what he hoped, what he dreamed, what ho was, the purpose of him (although I am not sure I really caught a purpose), the unreal, shocking, almost incomprehensive structure of his society and the faint, blurred, rainbowed edges of its mores. It flooded in upon my mind and overwhelmed it in a roaring storm of information, sense, emotion, outrage, happiness, and wonder.
For an instant only, then it was gone, and the hand grip and Hoot himself. I was kneeling, with my two hands held out and there was nothing there. My brain ached with coldness and I could feel the fine bead of sweat that had started on my forehead and I was as close to nothingness as I bad ever been, as I could ever be and still remain a human. I knew that I existed, perhaps with a sharper and a finer sense of existing than had ever been the case before, but I don’t believe I remembered where I was, for in that linking contact I had been in too many places to sort out any single place and I did not think-I simply hung there, my mind in neutral, crammed with so much that was new that all mentality was clogged.
How long it lasted, I don’t know, probably only for a moment, although it seemed much longer than a moment-and then, with a sharp suddenness, with the sort of jolt one experiences when hitting a hard surface after a long fall, I came back to myself and the high blue world and that stupid-looking robot standing rigidly beside the burned-out campfire.
I staggered to my feet and looked about me and tried to remember what had, until that instant, been crowded in my brain and it all was gone, all the details of it, covered over by the present and my humanity as a flash flood will cover the pebbles lying in the dry bottom of an ancient creek bed. It all was there, or at least some of it was there, for I could sense it lying there beneath the flash flood of my humanity. And I wondered, vaguely, as I stood there, if this burial of the matters transmitted by my friend might not be for my own protection, if my mind, in a protective reflex action, had covered it and blanked it out in a fight for sanity. And I wondered what it was my inner self might know that I no longer knew-surely there was nothing I could remember now which seemed so dangerous that I could not be allowed to know it.
I stumbled over to the fire and hunkered down beside it. Picking up a stick of firewood, I stirred the ashes and at their heart, buried deeply, I came upon a still glowing lump of fire. Carefully I fed tiny slivers to it and a pale ribbon of smoke curled up and in a moment a tiny flame began to flicker.
I crouched there, in the silence, watching and nourishing the flame, bringing the fire of the night before back to careful life. I could bring back the fire, I thought, but nothing else. Of the night before nothing now remained except myself and the hulking robot. It had come to this, I thought. Of four humans and an alien, there was but one human left. I wavered close to self-pity, but brought myself sharply back from it. Hell, I’d been in tight jams before. I’d been alone before-in fact, I usually was alone. So this was nothing new. George and Tuck were gone and no tears shed over them. Hoot was gone and there might be tears for him-no, not for him, but rather for myself, for he had changed somehow, in some way I could not understand, into a better form of life, to exist on a higher plane of sentience. The one who mattered, I knew, the only one who really mattered, was Sara and she, as well as Hoot, had gone where she’d wished to go.
With a sense of shock I realized that George and Tuck also had gone where they’d wished to go. Everyone had had a place to go-all except myself.
But what, I asked of myself, of Sara? I could go down into the valley and drag her out, kicking and screaming. Or I could sit around a while and wait for her to come to her senses and come back by herself (which, I told myself, would be a waste of time, for she never would). Or I could simply say the hell with it and go stumping down the trail, heading for the city.