“Not as many as there were. And there always is a chance. With each new one there’s a chance.”
“A chance of what?”
“A chance he may have an answer for us.”
“We can always run away.”
“To be caught and brought back? To die out in the swamp? That, Alden, is no answer.”
She rocked her body back and forth. “I suppose there is no answer.”
But she still held hope, he knew. In the face of all of it, she had kept a hope alive.
Eric once had been a huge man, but now he had shrunken in upon himself. The strength of him was there as it had always been, but the stamina was gone. You could see that, Alden told himself, just by looking at him.
Eric sat with his back against a tree. One hand lay in his lap and the other grubbed idly, with blunt and dirty fingers, at the short ground.
“So you’re bent on getting out?” he asked.
“He talked of nothing else,” said Kitty.
“You been here how long?”
“They brought me here last night. I was out on my feet. I don’t remember it.”
“You don’t know what it’s like.”
Alden shook his head. “I don’t intend to find out, either. I figure if I’m going, I’d best be going now before this place wears me down.”
“Let me tell you,” Eric said. “Let me tell you how it is. The swamp is big and we’re in the center of it. Doc came in from the north. He found out, some way, the location of this place, and he got hold of some old maps. Geologic survey maps that had been made years ago. He studied them and figured out the best way for getting in. He made it, partly because he was strong and healthy…but mostly it was luck. A dozen other men could try it, just as strong as he was, and all of them might be lost because they weren’t lucky. There are quicksand and alligators. There are moccasins and rattlesnakes. There is the killing heat. There are the insects and no water fit to drink.
“Maybe if you knew exactly the way to go you might manage it, but you’d have to hunt for the way to go. You’d have to work your way through the swamp and time after time you’d run into something that you couldn’t get through or over and have to turn back and hunt another way. You’d lose a lot of time and time would work against you.”
“How about food?”
“If you weren’t fussy, food would be no trouble. You could find food along the way. Not the right kind. Your belly might not like it. You’d probably have dysentery. But you wouldn’t starve.”
“This swamp,” asked Alden, “where is it?”
“Part in Mataloosa county. Part in Fairview. It’s a local Limbo. They all are local Limbos. There aren’t any big ones. Just a lot of little ones.”
Alden shook his head. “I can see this swamp from the windows of my house. I never heard of a Limbo being in it.”
“It’s not advertised,” said Eric. “It’s not put on maps. It’s not something you’d hear of.”
“How many miles? How far to the edge of it?”
“Straight line, maybe thirty, maybe forty. You’d not be traveling a straight line.”
“And the perimeter is guarded.”
“Patrols flying overhead. Watching for people in the swamp. They might not spot you. You’d do your best to stay under cover. But chances are they would. And they’d be waiting for you when you reached the edge.”
“And even if they weren’t,” Kitty said, “where would you go? A monitor would catch you. Or someone would spot you and report. No one would dare to help a refugee from Limbo.”
The tree beneath which Eric sat was a short distance from the collection of huddled huts that served as shelter for the inhabitants of Limbo.
Someone, Alden saw, had built up the community cooking fire and a bent and ragged man was coming up from the water’s edge, carrying a morning’s catch of fish. A man was lying in the shade of one of the huts, stretched out on a pallet. Others, both men and women, sat in listless groups.
The sun had climbed only part way up the eastern sky, but the heat was stifling. Insects buzzed shrilly in the air and high in the light blue sky birds were swinging in great and lazy circles.
“Doc would let us see his maps?”
“Maybe,” Eric said. “You could ask him.”
“I spoke to him last night,” said Alden. “He said it was insane.”
“He is right,” said Eric.
“Doc has funny notions,” Kitty said. “He doesn’t blame the robots. He says they’re just doing a job that men have set for them. It was men who made the laws. The robots do no more than carry out the laws.”
And Doc, thought Alden, once again was right.
Although it was hard to puzzle out the road by which man had finally come to his present situation. It was overemphasis again, perhaps, and that peculiar social blindness which came as the result of overemphasis.
Certainly, when one thought of it, it made no particular sense. A man had a right to be ill. It was his own hard luck if he happened to be ill. It was no one’s business but his own. And yet it had been twisted into an action that was on a par with murder. As a result of a well-intentioned health crusade which had gotten out of hand, what at one time had been misfortune had now become a crime.
Eric glanced at Alden. “Why are you so anxious to get out? It’ll do no good. Someone will find you, someone will turn you in. You’ll be brought back again.”
“Maybe a gesture of defiance,” Kitty said. “Sometimes a man will do a lot to prove he isn’t licked. To show he can’t be licked.”
“How old are you?” asked Eric.
“Fifty four,” said Alden.
“Too old,” said Eric. “I am only forty and I wouldn’t want to try it.”
“Is it defiance?” Kitty asked.
“No,” Alden told her, “not that. I wish it was. But it’s not as brave as that. There is something that’s unfinished.”
“All of us,” said Eric, “left some unfinished things behind us.”
The water was black as ink and seemed more like oil than water. It was lifeless; there was no sparkle in it and no glint; it soaked up the sunlight rather than reflecting it. And yet one felt that life must lurk beneath it, that it was no more than a mask to hide the life beneath it.
It was no solid sheet of water, but an infiltrating water that snaked its way around the hummocks and the little grassy islands and the water-defying trees that stood knee-deep in it. And when one glanced into the swamp, seeking to find some pattern to it, trying to determine what kind of beast it was, the distance turned to a cruel and ugly greenness and the water, too, took on that tint of fatal green.
Alden crouched at the water’s edge and stared into the swamp, fascinated by the rawness of the green.
Forty miles of it, he thought. How could a man face forty miles of it? But it would be more than forty miles. For, as Eric had said, a man would run into dead-ends and would be forced to retrace his steps to find another way.
Twenty-four hours ago, he thought, he had not been here. Twenty four hours ago or a little more he had left the house and gone down into the village to buy some groceries. And when he neared the bank corner he had remembered that he had not brushed his teeth—for how long had it been?—and that he had not bathed for days. He should have taken a bath and brushed his teeth and done all the other things that were needful before he had come downtown, as he always had before—or almost every time before, for there had been a time or two as he passed the bank that the hidden monitor had come to sudden life and bawled in metallic tones that echoed up and down the street: “Alden Street did not brush his teeth today! Shame on Alden Street, he did not brush his teeth (or take a bath, or clean his fingernails, or wash his hands and face, or whatever it might be.)” Keeping up the clatter and the clamor, with the ringing of alarm bells and the sound of booming rockets interspersed between each shaming accusation, until one ran off home in shame to do the things he’d failed.