"I have been doing a lot of wondering about the wheels," said Cornwall, "and I'm inclined to agree with Sniveley that their target was either the Chaos Beast or Bucket. More likely the Chaos Beast, it seems to me, for they probably did not know, or those who sent them, did not know the Chaos Beast was dead. It would seem unlikely they would have known of Bucket."
"They could have," Sniveley objected. "Somehow they could have been able to calculate the time, if they knew about the Beast, when Bucket was about to hatch."
"Which brings us to the question," said Cornwall, "not only of what the wheels were, but what was the Chaos Beast, and what is Bucket? Is Bucket another Chaos Beast?"
"We don't know what the Chaos Beast looked like," said Gib. "Maybe Bucket is a young Chaos Beast and will change when he gets older."
"Perhaps," said Cornwall. "There is a man at Oxford, a very famous savant, who just recently announced that he had worked out the method by which, through some strange metamorphosis, a worm turns into a butterfly. It is unlikely, of course, that he is right. Most of his fellow savants do not agree with him. He has been the butt of much ridicule because of his announcement. But I suppose he could be right. There are many strange occurrences we do not understand. Maybe his principle is right, and it may be that Bucket is the worm that in time will metamorphose into a Chaos Beast."
"I wish," said Mary, "that you wouldn't talk that way in front of Bucket. As if he were just a thing and not a creature like the rest of us. Just a thing to talk about. He might be able to hear, he might understand what you are saying. If that is so, you must embarrass him."
"Look at Coon," said Oliver. "He is stalking Bucket."
Hal half rose from his sitting position, but Cornwall reached out and grabbed him by the arm. "Watch," he said.
"But Coon…"
"It's all right," said Cornwall. "It's a game they're playing."
The end of one of Bucket's arms had dropped onto the ground, was lying there, the tip of it quivering just a little. It was the quivering tip of the tentacle that Coon was stalking, not Bucket himself. Coon made a sudden rush; the arm tip, at the last moment, flicked out of his reach. Coon checked his rush and pivoted, reaching out with one forepaw, grasping at the tentacle. His paw closed about it and he went over on his back, grabbing with the second forepaw, wrestling the tentacle. Another tentacle extruded and tickled Coon's rump. Coon released his hold on the first tentacle, somersaulted to grab at the second one.
"Why, Bucket's playing with him," Mary gasped. "Just like you'd use a string to play with a kitten. He even let him catch the tentacle."
Hal sat down heavily. "Well, I'll be damned," he said.
"Bucket's human, after all," said Mary.
"Not human," said Cornwall. "A thing like that never could be human. But he has a response to the play instinct, and that does make him seem just a little human."
"Supper's ready," Mary said. "Eat up. We have breakfast left and that is all."
Coon and Bucket went on playing.
33
Tomorrow, Cornwall thought, they'd go on toward the mountains, where they'd seek out, or try to seek out, the Old Ones. And after they had found the Old Ones, or had failed to find them, what would they do then? Surely they would not want to turn about and come back across the Blasted Plain, without horses and more than likely with Hellhounds in wait for their return. One could not be sure, he knew, that the Hellhounds would be waiting, but the possibility that they might be was not something that could be ignored.
He sat on a sandy slope of ground that ran down to the stream, leaning back against a boulder. Off to his left the campfire gleamed through the dark, and he could see the silhouettes of the rest of the party sitting around it. He hoped that for a while they would not miss him and come looking for him. For some reason that he could not completely understand, he'd wanted to be off by himself. To think, perhaps, although he realized that the time for thinking was past. The thinking should have been done much earlier, before they had gone plunging off on this incredible adventure. If there had been some thought put to it, he knew, they might not have set out on it. It had all been done on the impulse of the moment. He had fled the university once he learned that his filching the page of manuscript was known. Although, come to think of it, there had been no real need to flee. There were a hundred places on the campus or in the town where he could have holed up and hidden out. The imagined need to flee had been no more than an excuse to go off on a hunt to find the Old Ones. And from that point onward the expedition had grown by a chain of unlikely circumstances and by the same emotional response to them as he, himself, had experienced—re- sponses that were illogical on the face of them. An unknowing fleeing perhaps, from the sameness of the ordinary life that Oliver and Hal had talked about just a few hours before.
At the sound of a soft rustling behind him, he leaped to his feet. It was Mary.
"I wondered where you were," she said. "I came looking for you. I hope you don't mind."
"I've been saving a place for you," he said. He reached out a hand to guide her to a seat against the boulder, then sat down beside her.
"What are you doing out here?" she asked.
"Thinking," he said. "Wondering. I wonder if we were right to come, what we should do now. Go on, of course, and try to find the Old Ones. But after that, what? And what if we don't find the Old Ones? Will we still go on, stumbling from adventure to adventure, simply going on for the sake of going, for the sake of new things found? A course like that could get us killed. We've been lucky so far."
"We'll be all right," she said. "You've never felt this way before. We will find the Old Ones, and Gib will give them the ax, and everything will work out the way it should."
"We're a long way from home," he said, "and maybe no way back. Or at least no easy way. For myself I don't mind so much. I never had a home except the university, and that wasn't really home. A university is never more than a stopping place. Although for Oliver, I suppose it might be. He lived up in the rafters of the library and had been there for years. But Gib had his marsh, and Hal and Coon had their hollow tree. Even Sniveley had his mine and metal-working shop. And you…"
"I had no home," she said, "after my foster parents died. It makes no difference to me now where I am."
"It was a thing of impulse," he said, "a sort of harebrained plan that rose out of nothing. I had been interested in the Old Ones— perhaps no more than an academic interest, but somehow it seemed very real. I can't tell you why. I don't know where their attraction lies. I had studied their language, or what purported to be their language. No one, in fact, seemed sure there were such things as Old Ones. Then I ran across the manuscript in which an ancient traveler…"
"And you had to go and see," said Mary. "I can't see there's so much wrong with that."
"Nothing wrong with it if only myself were involved. If only the
Hermit hadn't died and left the ax in Gib's keeping, if Gib had not saved me from the wolves, if Hal hadn't been a woodsman and a friend of Gib's, if Sniveley had not forged the magic sword—if these things hadn't happened, none of this would be happening now…»