“But they could have heard...”
“I didn’t tell a soul,” she said. “It was-what would you call it? Perhaps no more than a hobby. Maybe an obsession. Bits and pieces picked up here and there, with never any hope of fitting them together. It was such a fascinating legend...”
“And that is all it is,” I said. “A legend. Built up through the years by accomplished, but nonmalicious, liars. One tiny fact is taken and twisted and interwoven with other tiny facts until all these interwoven tiny facts, forced into fictitious relationships with one another, become so complicated that there is not a shred of hope of knowing which is solid fact and which is inspired fiction.”
“But letters? And specifications for a special kind of robot?”
“That would be something else again. If they were authentic.”
“There is no question about their authenticity. I’ve made sure of that.”
“And what do these letters say?”
“That he was looking for something.”
“I’ve told you they all were looking for something. Every one of them. Some of them believed the things they were looking for are there. Some of them simply hypnotized themselves into believing it. That’s the way it was in the old days, that’s the way it is right now. These kind of people need some excuse for their eternal wandering. They need to graft some purpose to a purposeless existence. They’re in love with space and all those new unknown worlds which lie out beyond the next horizon. There is no reason in the world why they should be batting around out there and they know this, so they concoct their reasons and...”
“Captain, you don’t believe a word of it?”
“Not a word,” I said.
It was all right with me if she let these two adventurers lead her on a wild-goose chase, but I was not about to be a party to it. Although, remembering that ship standing out there on the landing field, I admit that I was tempted. But it was impossible, I knew. Earth was sanctuary and needed sanctuary.
“You do not like me,” Friar Tuck paid to me. “And I don’t like you, either. But let me tell you, honestly, that I brought my blind companion to Miss Foster with no thought of monetary gain. I am past all need of monetary gain. All I seek is truth.”
I didn’t answer him. Of what use would be an answer? I’d ‘known his breed before.
“I cannot see,” said Smith, speaking not to us, not even to himself, but to some unknown person that no one knew about. “I have never seen. I know no shape except the shapes that my hands can tell me. I can envision objects in my imagination, but the vision must be wrong, for I do not know of colors, although I am told there is such a thing as color. Red means something to you, but it is meaningless to me. There is no way one can describe a color to a man who cannot see. The feel of texture, yes, but no way in the world to really know of texture. Water to drink, but what does water look like? Whiskey in a glass with ice, but what does whiskey look like? Ice is hard and smooth and has a feel I’m told is cold. It is water that has turned to crystals and I understand it’s white, but what is crystal, what is white?
“I have nothing of this world except the space it gives me and the thoughts of other people, but how am I to know that my interpretations of these thoughts are right? Or that, I can marshal facts correctly? I have little of this world, but I have another world.” He lifted his hand and with his fingers tapped his skull. “Another world,” he said, “here inside my head. Not an imagined world, but another world that’s given me by another being. I do not know where this other being is, although I’ve been made to know he is very distant from us. That is all I know for certain-the great distance that he lies and the direction of that distance.”
“So that is it,” I said, looking at Sara. “He’s to be the compass. We set out in the direction that he tells us and we keep on going...”
‘That is it,” she said. “That was the way it was with Roscoe.”
“Knight’s robot?”
“Knight’s robot. That’s what the letters say. Knight had it himself-just a little of it. Just enough to know there was someone out there. So he had the robot fabricated.”
“A made-to-order robot? A telepathic robot?” She nodded.
It was hard to swallow. It was impossible. There was something going on here beyond all belief.
“There is truth out there,” said Tuck. “A truth we cannot even guess. I’m willing to bet my life to go out and see.”
“And that,” I said, “is exactly what you would be doing. Even if you found the truth...”
“If it’s out there,” Sara said, “someone, some time, will find it. Why can’t it be us?”
I looked around the room. The heads glared down at us, fantastic and ferocious creatures from many distant planets, and some of them I’d seen before and others I had only heard about and there were a number of them that I’d never heard about, not even in the alcoholic tales told by lonely, space-worn men when they gathered with their fellows in obscure bars on planets of which perhaps not more than a thousand people knew the names.
The walls are full, I thought. There is no more room for other heads. And the glamor of hunting and of bringing home more heads may be fading, too. Perhaps not alone for Sara Foster, big game huntress, but for those other people in whose eyes. her adventures on distant planets spelled out a certain kind of status. So what more logical than to hunt another kind of game, to bring home another kind of head, to embark upon a new and more marvelous adventure?
“No one,” said Sara Foster, “would ever know you’d gone into space, that you had left the Earth. You’d come here someday and a man would leave again. He’d look exactly like you, but he would not be you. He’d live here on Earth in your stead and you’d go into space.”
“You have money enough to buy a deal like this?” I asked. “To buy the loyalty of such a man?”
She shrugged. “I have money enough to buy anything at all. And once we were well out in space what difference would it make if he were unmasked?”
“None at all,” I said, “except I’d like to come back with the ship-if the ship comes back.”
“That could be arranged,” she said. “That could be taken care of.”
“The man who would be me here on Earth,” I asked, “might meet with a fatal accident?”
“Not that,” she said. “We could never get away with that. There are too many ways to identify a man.”
I got the impression she was just a little sorry so simple a solution was not possible.
I shied away from it, from the entire deal. I didn’t like the people and I didn’t like the project. But there was the itch to get my hands upon that ship and be out in space again. A man could die on Earth, I thought; he could suffocate. I’d seen but little of the Earth and the little I had seen I’d liked. But it was the kind of thing a man might like for a little time and then slowly grow to hate. Space was in my blood. I got restless when I was out of it too long. There was something out there that got beneath one’s skin, became a part of one. The star-strewn loneliness, the silence, the sense of being anchored nowhere, of being free to go wherever one might wish and to leave whenever one might wish-this was all a part of it, but not all of it. There was something else that no man had ever found a way to put a name to. Perhaps a sense of truth, corny as it sounded.
“Think of price,” said Sara Foster, “then double it. There’ll be no quibbling.”
“But why?” I asked. “Does money have no meaning for you?”
“Of course it has,” she said, “but having it also has taught me that you must pay for what you get. And we need you, Captain Ross. You’ve never traveled the safe spaceways, all marked out and posted. You’ve been out there ahead of all the others, hunting for your planets. We can use a man like you.”