“You keep out of this!” I yelled at him. I had enough to keep an eye on without having to bandy words with a stupid hobby.
I couldn’t get them all, of course, but I’d get the most of them. I’d burn them by the thousands into smoking crisps of flesh and I might discourage them. They were brave and confident; they’d never faced a laser gun. They’d go up in puffs of smoke; they’d flare and not be there. Whenever they might take a mind to charge they would pay for it.
But I knew there were too many of them. They were all around us and when they began to move, they’d move on every side.
“Captain Ross,” said Roscoe, “I think I finally have it.”
“Well, good for you,” I said.
Sara moved over close beside me. Her rifle was slung across one shoulder and she had that silly doll clutched against her breast, the way Tuck always carried it.
“Sara,” I said, saying what I hadn’t meant to say, hadn’t planned to say, had scarcely known I wanted to say, my breath catching in my throat like any awkward schoolboy. “Sara, if we get out of this, can you and I start over? Can we start as if I were just coming through that door back on Earth and you waiting in the hall? You were wearing a green dress...”
“And you fell in love with me,” said Sara, “and then you insulted me and mocked me and I lashed back at you and the entire thing went haywire...”
“We fight so well together,” I said, “it would be a shame if anything should stop it.”
“You’re a bully,” Sara told me, “and I hated you. There were times I hated you so hard I could have beat your head in. But thinking back, I guess I loved every minute of it.”
“When they come at us,” I said, “crouch down out of the line of fire. I’ll be shooting in all directions as fast as I...”
“There is another way,” said Sara. “Tuck used it. The doll. An old race made the doll. A race that understood...”
“It’s all hogwash!” I yelled. “Tuck was nothing but a freak...”
“Tuck understood,” she yelled back at me. “He knew how to use the doll. George knew some of it, even with no doll. Hoot would have understood.”
Hoot, I thought. Barrel-shaped, pattering, many-legged little scurrier, with a face full of tentacles and three lives to live, now gone forever into his third phase, a part of me and that part gone and if he were here he’d know...
Even as I thought it, he was there, welling up inside my brain, as I had known him in that instant when hands and tentacles had clasped and held and we had been as one. It all was there again-all that I had known and felt, all that I had tried to recapture since and could not find again. All the glory and the wonder and some terror, too, for in understanding there must be certain terror. And out of the welter of all the wonder and the knowing, certain facts separated themselves from the mass of it and stood out crystal clear. And, I stood there, half myself, half Hoot-and not only Hoot, but all the rest of them there with me, and they there only because of what Hoot had given me, the ability to reach out and grasp and merge with the minds of others, as if for an instant it were not many minds, but a single mind. And myself as well, the forgotten edges of myself, the unplumbed depths of self.
Sara’s intuition, the symbolism of the doll coming clear, the philosophic gropings of a hobby flat on his back for centuries, the meaning of the equations Roscoe had been scratching on the ground. And that moment of myself when, half dead, half alive, I’ had seen the strata in the badlands earthen cliff and bad sensed the chronology of them, glimpsing the time and the happenings of this planet that lay exposed within the strata.
Now, quite suddenly, there was a different strata. I saw it as clearly as I had seen the other strata-not myself alone, of course, but myself plus Hoot, plus all the rest of them there with me. There were many universes and many sentient levels and at certain time-space intervals they became apparent and each of them was real, as real as the many geologic levels that a geologist could count. Except that this was not a matter of counting; it was seeing and sensing and knowing they were there.
The old ones of this planet had known before they had been swept away by the orchardists, had known or sensed imperfectly and had carved upon the face of the doll the wonder and the shock and some of the terror of the knowing. George Smith had known, perhaps far better than any of the rest and Tuck, in his dream-haunted mentality, had struck very close to truth before he’d ever found the doll. Roscoe had been beaten into knowing, without recognizing what he knew, by the mallets of the centaurs.
And now, within my brain, it all came together.
The ring of monstrous beasts were charging in upon us in a thunderous rush, their pounding hoofs throwing up a blinding cloud of dust. But they mattered no longer, for they were of another world, of another time and place, and all we had to do was to take one tiny step-not so much to be away from them as to attain a better place, to find a better world.
Not knowing how, but filled with mystic faith, we all took the step out into the infinite unknowing and were there.
It was a place that had a feel of tapestry about it, a feel of unreality and yet a very friendly unreality. It seemed as if it should be a place of silence and of peace, of immobility, that the people who inhabited it were folks who never spoke and that the boat upon the water would never move upon the water-that the village and the river, the trees, the sky, the clouds, the people and the little dogs all were elements of a set piece, woven centuries ago and untouched by time, the colored threads put in place and kept In place for all eternity, frozen and at rest. The sky had a yellowishness about it that was reflected by the water and the humble homes were all brown and brickish-red, the green of the trees not the kind of green one ordinarily would expect, but the very composition one would expect of a hanging on a wall. And yet one could sense in it all a human warmness and an easy welcome and one had the feeling that if he walked down into it he could never leave, but would be bound into its very fabric, blending into the tapestry of it, and such a possibility was good to think upon.
We stood on a rise of ground above the village and the river and all of us were there-all of us except the doll. Sara no longer held the doll. The doll had been left behind, perhaps for someone else to find. The doll and the weapons. Sara no longer had the rifle, nor I the laser gun. There were rules, I thought. There were certain things, certain attitudes of mind perhaps, that could not be brought into this land.
“Mike,” said Sara, softly, “this was the place we hunted. This is the place that Knight was hunting. But he never found it because he never found the doll. Or there was something else he missed. There must be many things that could have led him here.”
I put out an arm and held her close against me and she lifted up her face and I kissed her and her eyes were bright with gladness.
“We won’t go back,” she said. “We’ll never think of Earth.”
“We can’t go back,” I said. “There is no way to go.”
Although there never would be a need of going. We had left it all behind, all we had ever known before, as a child will leave behind a toy he has outgrown.
The village and the river lay below us and fields and woods stretched away to the far horizons. And I knew, somehow, that this was a world without an end and that it was, as well, the end of time, a place that was everlasting and unchanging, with room for everyone.
Somewhere in this land were Smith and Tuck and maybe even Hoot, but we’d probably never find them for we’d not seek for them. The distances were far and there’d be no urge to travel.
The unreality was gone, although the tapestry still remained. And the boat did move upon the water with a flashing of the oars. Boys and girls and dogs, yelling and barking, were running up the hill to greet us and the people in the village all had turned around to stare up at us and some of them were waving.