"He's gone mad," yelled Mary. "He even grabbed the horn."
"I'll cave him in," screamed Jones, "if he damages that rifle."
Bucket bristled with tentacles. He seemed to be a metal body suspended from many tentacles, bearing some resemblance to a spider dangling in a sagging, broken web. Tentacles seemed to have issued from each of the holes that perforated his body.
Now the tentacles were pushing them along, herding them across the ledge, to where the path wound up from the gorge.
"He's got the right idea," said Gib. "Let's get out of here."
Down in the gorge there was a howling and screaming. Some of the women and children had either fallen or had scrambled down in the darkness, escaping from the ledge. The group of Old Ones who had been huddled against the wall were moving out, but very cautiously.
As Cornwall and the others came to the path, Bucket pushed them along. He handed the horn back to Mary, the ax to Gib, the bow to Hal, and the sword to Cornwall. Jones' rifle he hurled out into the center of the ledge.
"Why, goddamn you!" frothed Jones. "I'll bust you up for scrap. I'll dent you out of shape—"
"Move along," growled Cornwall. "He knows what he's doing."
Bucket snapped out a twirling tentacle, wrapped it around the bear roasting on the grill, holding it well up in the air. Drops of sizzling grease spattered on Cornwall's face.
"Now we get supper," said Oliver, licking his chops.
"And," said Sniveley with relief, "we'll not have to eat any demon meat"
36
"We're safe here," said Hal. "They can't try to follow us. They're no great shakes, I'd judge, at prowling in the dark. And they're scared purple of the gorge."
"You're sure this is the gorge they spoke of?" asked Cornwall.
Jones nodded. "It is the one I followed out of the university. I must have passed right by the Old Ones' camp and not even noticed it. And now, suppose you tell me about this robot of yours? If I had a sledge at hand, I'd do some hammering on him. Although I do admit he managed to get us out of a tight spot in a most efficient manner. I only wish he could have warned us a bit ahead of time."
"He couldn't warn us," said Hal. "He can't talk."
"That was a good gun," Jones mourned. "It set me back a heap. What made him do it, do you think?"
"I wouldn't try to answer that," said Cornwall. "He's not been with us very long, and I suppose he'd have to be with us for years before we began to understand him. Apparently he thought it was not a good idea for you to retain your weapon. I can't agree with him, of course, but he must have had a reason."
"Maybe it was because this thing you call a weapon was too far out of its time," said Sniveley. "Maybe he felt it had no right to be here. There's a name for something like that. Anachronism, I think, although that doesn't sound quite right."
"Much as I regret losing it," said Jones, "I must admit that I feel no great compulsion to go back to get it. If I never see an Old One again, it will be much too soon. And in any case it is probably out of kilter. This Tin Bucket of yours did not toss it easily. When it hit, it bounced."
After traveling for miles, stumbling down the gorge in the light of a sickly moon, they had finally stopped to build a fire in the shelter of a huge pile of tumbled boulders. They had feasted on the bear and then had settled down to talk.
"I'm dying to know what is going on," said Jones. "Perhaps now you'll tell me."
Lounging against a boulder, Cornwall told the story, with much help from the others, especially Sniveley.
"The rings of fire," said Jones. "Most intriguing. They sound very much like the flying saucers with which my world is both amused and plagued. You say they were destructive."
"Extremely so," said Cornwall. "They pulverized a castle."
"After the Chaos Beast was dead."
"We think it was dead," said Hal. "It seemed to most of us that we experienced abundant evidence it was. We are considerably unsure why the wheels of fire incident should have come about. By and large we are inclined to believe the attack was aimed at Bucket. They probably figured they would hit the castle about the time that he was hatched. As it chanced, we speeded up the hatching by a few hours' time."
"The Chaos Beast must have known the danger," said Jones. "That is why it ordered the people of the castle to haul Bucket out as soon as it was dead."
"Bucket probably knew as well," said Gib. "He was the one who insisted that we leave the castle."
Jones asked, "Have you had any chance to study this stormily born robot? Have you any data on him?"
Cornwall frowned. "If you mean by data, facts and observations laboriously arrived at, the answer is no. I would suspect your world is much more concerned with data than we are. We know only a few things—that he seems to be made of metal, that he has no eyes and yet can see, that he cannot talk nor does he eat, and still it seems to me…"
"He gave us warning to flee the castle," said Gib. "He turned himself into a packhorse for us, carrying more than his share when we crossed the Blasted Plain. He destroyed the magic of the demon trap and this night he extracted us from a situation that could have cost our lives."
"And he plays with Coon," said Mary. "Coon likes him. And I don't think we should be talking like this about him, with him just standing over there. He must know what we are saying, and it may embarrass him."
Bucket didn't look embarrassed. He didn't look like anything at all. He stood on the other side of the fire. All his tentacles were retracted with the exception of one that was half-extruded, the end of it shaped in an intricate, boxlike form, resting on what one might think of as his chest.
"That tentacle is a funny business," said Oliver. "I wonder if it has any meaning. Are we supposed to notice it and get some meaning from it?"
"It's ritual," said Sniveley. "Some silly ritualistic gesture, probably done for some satisfaction that its symbolism may afford him."
Jones squinted at him. "I think," he said, "he is not of this earth. I think the Chaos Beast was not of this earth, either, or the wheels of fire. I think that here we deal with alien beings from deep outer space. They all came from some distant star."
"How could that be?" asked Cornwall. "The stars are no more than celestial lights set by God's mercy in the firmament. From a magic world, perhaps, from some place hidden and forbidden to us, but not from the stars."
"I refuse," Jones said icily, "to conduct a seminar for you on what the astronomers of my world have discovered. It would waste my time. You are blind to everything but magic. Run up against something that you can't understand and out pops that all-inclusive concept."
"Then," Hal said, soothingly, "let us not discuss it. I agree there can be no meeting of the minds. Nor is it essential that there should be."
"We have told you our story," Mary said. "Now, why don't you tell us yours? We went seeking you, to ask if you would join us in our journey across the Blasted Plain, but we found you gone."
"It was Cornwall's doing," said Jones. "He dropped a hint about a university. He did not seem to place too much emphasis on it, but he was wonderfully intrigued. Although he did not say so, I had the impression that the university was in fact his goal. So, in my devious and unmoral way, I decided I'd steal a march on him."
"But how could you know the location of it?" asked Cornwall. "And how could you have gotten there?"
"The location," said Jones, grinning. "Mostly a guess. I studied a map."
"But there are no maps."