I stopped and stared at it, unable to say a word. Of all the goddamned foolishness I had ever seen, this was the worst. During all the time I had been sweating out my heart, running through the worlds, this silly robot had been hunting through the city to pick up all kinds of forgotten and discarded junk and had been lugging it out here and setting up this thing.
He had squatted down before what I imagine he imagined to be a control panel and was reaching out his hands to the knobs and switches on it.
“Now, captain,” he said, “if the mathematics should be right.”
He did something to the panel and here and there tubes flickered briefly and there was a sound like the sound of breaking glass and a shower of glasslike fragments were peeling off the ship and crashing to the ground and the ship stood free of the milk-white glaze the buglike machine had squirted over it.
I stood frozen. I couldn’t move. The fool machine had worked and the ship stood free and ready and I couldn’t move. It was incomprehensive. I could not believe it. Roscoe couldn’t do this. Not the fumbling, mumbling Roscoe I had known. I was only dreaming it.
Roscoe stood up and came over to me. He put out both his hands and gripped me by the shoulders, standing facing me.
“It is done,” he said. “Both for it and I. When I freed the ship, I freed myself as well. I am whole and well again. I am my olden self.”
And indeed he seemed so, although I’d not known his olden self. He had no difficulty talking and he stood and moved more naturally, more like a man, less like a clanking robot.
“I was confused,” he said, “by all that happened to me, by the changes in my brain, changes that I could not comprehend and did not know how to use. But now, having used them and proved that they are useful, I am quite myself once more.”
I found that the paralysis which had gripped me now was gone and I tried to turn so that I could run toward the ship, but he clung tightly to my shoulders and would not let me go.
“Hoot talked to you of destiny,” he said. “This is my destiny. This and more. The movers of the universe, whatever they may be, work in many ways to achieve each individual destiny. How other can one explain why the hammering of crude mallets on my brain could have so changed and short-circuited and altered the pattern of my brain as to have brought about an understanding I did not have before.”
I shook myself free of him.
“Captain,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You do not believe it even yet. You still think I am an oaf. And I may have been an oaf. But I am no longer.”
“No,” I said, “I guess you’re not. There is no way to thank you.”
“We are friends,” he said. “There is no need of thanks. You freed me of the centaurs. I free you of this planet. That should make us friends. We have sat by many campfires. That should make us friends...”
“Shut up!” I yelled at him. “Cut out the goddamned sentiment. You are worse than Hoot.”
I went around his ridiculous contraption and climbed the ladder of the ship, Roscoe climbing close behind me.
In the pilot chair I reached out and patted the panel.
This was it at last. We could take off any time we wanted. We could leave the planet and carry with us the secret of the planet’s treasure. Just how a man could turn a treasure such as that into a cash transaction I had no idea at the moment, but I knew I’d find a way. Whenever a man had a commodity to sell, he’d find a way to sell it.
And was this what it all had come to, I asked myself-that I should have something I could sell? Not another planet (although I suppose I could have sold the planet, too) but the knowledge and the information that was stored upon the planet in the form of seeds, knowledge collected by trees that were thought receivers, storing the knowledge they collected in the seeds they scattered and, that scattered, were collected by colonies of little rodents and not eaten, but deposited in great pits and granaries against the day of harvest.
But there was more to it than that, I told myself. More to the planet than a great white city and knowledge-grabbing trees. It also was a planet where a man might simply disappear (or fade away, as Tuck faded) and when they faded or they disappeared, where did they go? Did they move into another reality, into another life, as Hoot had moved into another life? There had been another culture, an earlier culture than the one that had built the city. This earlier culture had built the now-empty red-stone building at the outskirts of the city and had carved the doll that sagged out of the pocket of my jacket. Could that culture, if it had survived, have been able to tell the secret of how a man might fade away?
Roscoe had spoken of a many-layered reality and was that what it was all about? And if this were the case, did such a segmented reality exist only on this planet or might it exist as well on other planets?
I had thought of it as gibberish and perhaps it still was gibberish, but Roscoe had been right about the mathematics (or whatever one might call them) which had freed the ship. Might he not be right about the reality as well?
But all of this, I told myself, had nothing to do with me. I had wondered what I’d wanted back there on the trail and it had not been what Sara or Tuck or George, or even Hoot, had wanted. All I’d wanted was to get off the planet and now I had the means of getting off. All of us, at last, had found the thing we wanted. All that remained for me was to seal the hatch and activate the motors.
It was a simple thing and yet I hesitated. I stayed sitting in the pilot’s chair staring at the panel. Why, I asked myself, this reluctance to get started?
Could it be the others? There had been four of us to start with; did I shrink from only one returning?
I sat there and tried to be honest with myself and found that it was difficult to be honest with myself.
Tuck and George were out of reach and so was Hoot. There was no sense hunting them to bring them back. But there was Sara still. She could be reached and I could bring her back, somehow I still could manage that.
I sat and tried to fight it all out once again and there was a funny smarting in my eyes and with something close to horror I realized that tears were running down my cheeks.
Sara, I said to myself. Sara, for the love of Christ, why did you have to go and find what you were looking for? Why can’t you come back and go home with me? Why can’t I go and get you?
I remembered that last night as we’d sat beside the campfire and she had said it could have been so good between us-so good between us if we’d not gone charging out to chase a legend. And why did the stupid legend have to turn out to be true and spoil it all for us?
And I remembered, too, that first day when she’d met me in the hall of that house back on Earth and we’d walked down the hall together, arm in arm, to the room where Tuck and George had waited.
Not Tuck or George or Hoot, for they were out of reach. Not Sara, because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. But there was someone else.
I heaved out of the chair and went to the cabinet at the back of the cabin. From it I took the spare laser gun.
“We’re going back,” I said to Roscoe.
“Going back,” said Roscoe, “for Miss Foster?”
“No,” I said. “For Paint.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was insane, of course, Paint was nothing but a hobby. He’d still be in the gulley, flat upon his back, if it hadn’t been for me. How long did I have to keep flying to his rescue? He’d said he wanted to go to Earth and what did he know of Earth? He had never been there. He had even had to ask me what I meant by Earth. He hadn’t wanted to go until I’d told him what it was. And yet I could not shake the memory of him going so slowly down the trail so he’d still be in hearing distance if I should call him back. And I remembered, too, how he’d carried me so bravely in the battle with the centaur. Although, come to think of it, neither he nor I could claim any credit there. The credit all was Sara’s.