“I wish,” said Roscoe, striding along beside me, “that I could understand, in fullness, the concept of multiple-realities. I am certain I have it all in mind, if I could only see it. It’s like a puzzle with a million pieces and all you have to do is put the pieces all together and there it is, so simple that you wonder why you didn’t see it all to start with.”
It would have been better, I thought, if he went back to mumbling. It would be less disturbing that way. I wouldn’t have to listen to his mumbling because I’d know it made no sense. But I had to keep on listening to his chattering because there might be something in whatever he was saying.
“It is a new ability,” ‘said Roscoe, “and it is most confusing. Environmental-sensing, I suppose, would be the proper term for it. No matter where you go you sense, and know, the environmental factors.”
I didn’t pay too much attention to him, for I had a lot of thinking to be done. I wasn’t even sure we should be heading out again. The logical thing to have done would have been to close the hatch and take off and be shut of the planet. Although if I had wanted to cash in later we should have picked up a pocketful of the seeds so they could be tested to see if they really carried knowledge. We could have left, I told myself, with clear consciences. All accounts were settled. The purpose of the voyage had been accomplished and everyone had gotten what they wanted.
Half a dozen times I was ready to turn back, but each time kept on going. It was as if someone had a broad hand against my back and was shoving me along.
When we had left the city there had been no sign of the monstrous beasts which had chased us into it. I had half expected they might be waiting for us and I almost wished they had been. With the laser rifle they would have been no sweat. But they weren’t there and we went on, past the great red building dreaming in the sunlight, past the mighty tree trunk prone upon the ground for miles and the noisome pit centering on the jagged stump.
The way seemed shorter than it had on the first trip out. We drove ourselves, as if there were some great urgency. And at night around the campfire Roscoe smoothed out a patch of ground and worked on endless equations, mumbling at his work, half to me, half to himself.
Night after night, as he wrote and mumbled, I sat with him in the flare of the campfire light and tried to figure out why we were here and not many millions of miles in space, heading back toward the galaxy. And it came clearly to me that it was not Paint alone, although Paint was a part of it. It was more than Paint; it was Sara who was dragging me back across the empty miles. I saw her face in the firelight, across the blaze from me, with the lock of hair forever falling in her eyes, with the streak of travel smudge smeared across one cheek, with her eyes looking at me steadily.
At times I pulled the doll from the jacket pocket and sat staring at its face-at that terrible, tortured face-perhaps to cancel out that other face across the fire from me, perhaps in the irrational hope that those wooden lips would part and speak, giving me an answer. For, again irrationally, the doll was a part of it as well, a part of all that was happening as many great imponderables seemed to be closing upon collision courses.
At last, after many days, we climbed a ridge and saw before us the beginning of that last badlands area-where the hobbies had deserted us and we’d found the pile of bones and Paint.
The trail led down the rise and across a flat and climbed, twisting, up into the badlands.
Far up the trail, just this side of the point where it plunged to disappear into the badlands, something was moving, a tiny point of light flashing in the sun. I watched it, puzzled for a moment, and then it moved into a position on the trail where it was outlined against the darker ground behind it. And there was no mistaking it-the rocking, bobbing lope.
Roscoe spoke quietly beside me. “It is Paint,” he said.
“But Paint wouldn’t come back without. . .”
And then I was running down the slope, waving my arms and shouting, with Roscoe close upon my heels.
From far off she saw us and waved back at us, a little gesturing doll upon the loping Paint.
Paint was coming like the wind. He fairly skimmed the ground. We met out on the flat, Paint skidding to a stop. Before I could reach her, Sara slid off Paint. She was raging at me. It was like old times.
“You did it again!” she yelled at me. “I couldn’t stay. You loused it up for me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forget what you and Hoot had told me. You knew it would be like that. You had it figured out. You were so sure of it you left Paint to bring me back.”
“Sara,” I protested, “for the love of God, be reasonable.”
“No,” she cried, “you listen. You spoiled everything for me. You took away the magic and you. . .”
She stopped talking in mid-sentence and her face was twisted up as if she were trying not to weep.
“No, that’s not it,” she said. “It wasn’t only you. It was all of us... With our petty bickering and. . .”
I took two quick steps and had her in my arms. She clung to me. Hating me, perhaps, but clinging to me because I was the one last thing that she had to cling to.
“Mike,” she said, her voice muffled against my chest, “we aren’t going to snake it, it is simply no use. They won’t let us make it.”
“But that’s all wrong,” I told her. “The ship is clear. Roscoe found the way. We’re going back to Earth.”
“If generous, hopeful human will only take a look,” said Paint, “he’ll perceive what she be talking of. They follow all the way. They dog our hurrying footprints. They get more all the time.”
I jerked up my head and there they were, crowding together along the rugged skyline of the badlands-a mighty herd of the massive beasts that bad left their bones in a wind-row in the gully.
They crept forward, pushing and shoving, and some of them were forced down the distant slopes to make way for those who crowded in behind them. There were hundreds of them, more likely thousands of them. They didn’t seem to move; they flowed, spilling off the slopes, spreading out on either flank.
“They’re behind us, too,” said Roscoe, speaking far too quietly, making too much of an effort to stifle rising panic.
I twisted my head around and there, on the crest of the ridge we had just crossed, they were surging into view.
“You found the doll,” said Sara.
“What doll?” I asked. At a time like this, of all crazy things...
“Tuck’s doll,” she said. She reached out and tugged it from the pocket. “Do you know, all the time Tuck had it, I never really saw it.”
I pushed her away from me and lifted the laser rifle. Roscoe grabbed my arm.
“There are too many of them,” he said.
I pulled my arm savagely away from him. “What do you want me to do?” I shouted at him. “Stand here and let them run us down?”
There were more of them than ever and in any direction one might look. We were surrounded by them. They came surging up on every side. There was just one big herd of them and we were in the center of it and they all were facing us. They were taking it easy. They were not in any hurry. They had us pegged and they could take us any time they wanted.
Roscoe dropped to his knees and smoothed out a patch of ground with an outstretched palm.
“What the hell!” I yelled.
Surrounded by man-eating monsters and there was Sara, standing transfixed, staring at a doll, and here that bumbling, mumbling idiot down upon his knees, fiddling with equations.
“The world at times makes little sense,” said Paint, “but with you and I on guard...”