When Jack and Tappy became tired and slowed down or tried to halt, they were urged by gentle but firm hands to pick up the fast pace again. He had no idea how much time had passed.
He became thirsty and wished that these people would give him water. Then he thought of the myths and fairy tales where the intruder from Earth drank the liquid offered for refreshment and of what happened to the intruder after that. He was doomed to live out the rest of his life in the domain of faery and to never see Earth again. It was better that he refuse water, no matter how much he craved it. Or was he just seized with superstitious dread?
Nothing superstitious about this place, he thought. It did ex' 1st.
So did its citizens. Thus, he and Tappy were in a supernatural or intranatural world.
The numbness permeating him was good for one thing. It seemed to deaden the pain from the light and the pain of being united with his mother for a few seconds and then hurried off.
But he was not so inwardly frozen that he did not guess that he was being sent away for his own good.
Abruptly, the hands held them back. Since he had heard his mother, he had heard no voices.
Now the hands pressed on them, and Jack finally got the idea.
They wanted him to get down on all fours. He did so, feeling with one hand to make sure that Tappy was with him. For some time, he had feared that she had been left behind. But she was . with him and also on her hands and knees.
Hands pushed on his buttocks. Tappy stayed where she was.
For a moment, he thought of resisting. Then he thought that, if she were to remain here, she would not have been made to get down on all fours. He moved ahead until his head scraped against something hard. A hand pushed down on his neck. He got down lower and resumed crawling. The grass was gone. The floor seemed to be hard earth, then became mud. Presently, he had to go like a snake on his belly. If he tried to raise himself, his head bumped against stone or what seemed to be stone. That did not last long. All of a sudden, the floor dipped, and he was sliding downward on the soft mud. landing on hard earth.
Then that was behind him, Something struck the bottom of his shoes, and somebody gasped and then cried, "Jack!" He turned over and sat up. Though thick mud coated Tappy's face, it did not conceal her strange expression.
"Mother and Father were there."
JACK did not reply at once. He rose, feeling tired, and looked around. It had been night when they had plunged through the shadow. Now it was just past dawn. The sky was bright and cloudless, but the sun had not come up above the crater wall.
Tappy sat in the mud like a statue shaped from it. Even the Imaget, crouched on her shoulder, was a hunk of water-soaked earth.
He did not know where they were on the crater floor. The Gaol spaceship was not visible, and there was no grove of trees like those under the ship, nor was there any Gaol camp. He turned slowly while he looked at the great figures on the crater ring, dim objects in the gray light.
After his survey. two things caught his mind's focus. One was the faint shadow through which they had just exited. A fan-shaped pi 're of mud, drying at its edge, extended from the base of the shadow. Here had once been a huge boulder which a radiator beam had disintegrated, no telling how long ago. The crumbled rock was in a heap beneath the death-shadow, the outline of which could be barely seen. It was close to fading away entirely. When it did, Jack thought, that gateway to the "other" world, the world of blinding light, would be closed.
He noted that more than people could enter and then leave that light-filled world on the other side of the darkness. Mud could also pass through the dark gate.
They had gone into that world through the tree-shadow beneath the spaceship. And they had left it through this bou dershadow. They had been pushed back into the world to which they belonged. But they had reentered far from the point of entry.
Darkness implied light. There were no shadows without light, and the death-shadow was caused by the blinding light. At least, it seemed so to him.
This place was comparatively close to where he and Tappy had gone in. Probably, it was the first time that this had happened. He did not doubt that it had been no accident. Those people, the dead who were not really dead, had pushed them through this particular gate for a purpose. What the purpose was, he did not know.
But he wondered if the second object that had caught his attention was involved in the purpose.
That was a rose-red cut-quartz stone not sixty feet from where he stood. It was the model of the tiny stone Jack had seen centered in the model of the real crater-wall rings, the model he had seen on the table when he was in the underground complex. A seat and a back, a throne, had been carved out of the desk-sized quartz.
According to the Integrator, the first honkers to enter the crater had found it. Though they did not know who had made it, they assumed that it was the work of the Makers. But it was obviously designed for a honker or a human and not for a quadruped.
By then, Tappy had risen shakily from her sitting position.
Her tears were washing the mud from her face. Her hands were clasped just below her breasts. He did then what he would have done at once if he had not been so stunned. He went to her and held her while she wept. A few seconds later, he was weeping also.
"My mother ... she spoke to me! And my father did, tool They only said my name, but I recognized their voices!"
"My mother," Jack said. "She spoke only one word to me, but I felt her face. And ... you heard Malva, too!"
"What was that place?" she said.
"Some place where the dead live. Heaven, for all I know."
He had never believed that there was an afterlife. At times, he had hoped that there might be, but he had no faith that there was.
It was a fairy tale which rational people knew was a fairy tale.
But now ...
"How could we have gotten there?" she said. Her sobs were tapering off. "There's only one way to get there, and we didn't die."
"I don't know," he said. "I could guess. It's possible that the radiator was designed to be a weapon but it had some unforeseen side effects, unexpected by-products. One was that the shadows created by the radiator accidentally opened the way to ... what do I call it? Heaven? A parallel universe? I don't know what it is, but it exists.
"If the Makers made the radiators, they would have ignored the shadows after a few of them ventured into the shadows and didn't come back. Not to their knowledge, anyway. They would've had no idea they had serendipitously opened the gates of Heaven or whatever you want to call it. Anyway, what good would it have done them if they had known? Except maybe the certainty that death is not the end."
Even that, he thought, is not certain. What if the world into which we dived is just one that affects the minds of intruders? It's so alien to us that we can't comprehend it; its physical structure or whatever is beyond human understanding. So, the mind constructs something that can be understood, something it desires more than anything else. An afterlife. What the mind can't grasp, it interprets as something else.
If this was so, it would have to be an effect that a humans interpreted as the same. Otherwise, why would Tappy have shared his hallucinations, if they were such?
He was the ever-skeptical rationalist. Tappy, however, once over her tears, was certain that she had been, even if for a short time, in the place where the dead lived. Perhaps she was right. She might have a deeper rationality. Whatever "deeper rationality" meant. In any event, he was not going to try to invalidate her belief. She took great comfort in it, and she needed all she could get.