My watch had stopped, not that it made much difference. It had been fairly useless ever since leaving Alden. On board the funeral ship, which operated on galactic time, it had been impossible. And Earth time, it had turned out, was not the same as Alden time, although with a little mathematical calculation one could get along. I had inquired about the time at the settlement where we’d waited for the hoedown, but no one seemed to know or care. So far as I could learn, there was only one clock in the settlement, a rather crude, homemade affair, made mostly out of carved wood, that more than half the time stood dead and silent because no one ever seemed to think to wind it. So I’d set ray watch by the sun, but had missed the moment when it stood directly overhead and had been compelled to estimate how long since it had started its decline to the west. Now it had stopped and I could not get it started. Why I bothered I don’t know; I was as well off without it. The census-taker clumped on ahead, with Cynthia behind him and myself bringing up the rear. We had covered a lot of ground since dawn, although how long we had been walking I had no way of knowing. The sun was covered by the clouds and my watch had stopped and there was no way to know the time of day.
There was no sign of the ghosts, although I had the queasy feeling they were not far away. And the census-taker troubled me as much as the invisible ghosts, for in the daylight he was a most disturbing thing. Seen face to face, he was not human unless one could regard a rag doll as being human. For his face was a rag-doll face, with a pinched mouth that was slightly askew, eyes that gave the impression of a cross-stitch and no nose or chin at all. His face ran straight down into his neck with no intervening jaw, and the cowl and robe that I had taken for clothing, when one had a close look at him, seemed a part of his grotesque body. If it had not seemed so improbable, one would have been convinced that they were his body. Whether he had feet I didn’t know, for the robe (or body) came down so close to the ground that his feet were covered. He moved as if he had feeti but there was no sign of them and I found myself wondering, if he had no feet, how he managed to move along so well. Move he did. He set a brisk pace, hobbling along ahead of us. It was all that we could do to keep up with him.
He had not spoken since we had started, but had simply led the way, with the two of us following and neither of us speaking, either, for at the pace that we were going we didn’t have the breath to speak.
The way was wild, an unbroken wilderness with no sign that it ever had been occupied by man, as it surely must have been at one time. We followed the ridgetops for miles, at times descending from them to cross a small valley, then climb a series of hills again to follow other ridgetops. From the ridges we could see vast stretches of the countryside, but nowhere was there a clearing. We found no ruins, saw no crumbling chimneys, ran across no ancient fence rows. Down in the valleys the woods stood thick and heavy; on the ridgetops the trees thinned out to some extent. It was a rocky land; huge boulders lay strewn all about and great gray outcroppings of rock jutted from the hillsides. There was a little life. A few birds flew chirping among the trees and occasionally there were small life forms I recognized as rabbits and squirrels, but they were not plentiful.
We had stopped briefly to drink from shallow streams that ran through the valleys we had crossed, but the stops had been only momentary, long enough to lie flat upon our bellies and gulp a few mouthfuls of water, while the census-taker (who did not seem to need to drink) waited impatiently, and then we hurried on.
Now, for the first time since we had set out, we halted. The ridge we had been traveling rose to a high point and then sloped down for a distance and on this high point lay a scattered jumble of barn-size rocks, grouped together in a rather haphazard fashion, as if some ancient giant had held a fistful of them and had been playing with them, as a boy will play with marbles, but having gotten tired of them, had dropped them here, where they had remained. Stunted pine trees grew among them, clutching for desperate footholds with twisted, groping roots.
The census-taker, who was a few yards ahead of us, I scrambled up a path when he reached the jumble of rocks*4f disappearing into them. We followed where he’d gone amp found him crouched in a pocket formed by missive stones^:! It was a place protected from the bitter wind, but opeft in the direction we had come so that we could see back along our trail.
He motioned for us to join him.
“We shall rest for a little time,” he said. “Perhaps you’d like to eat. But no fire. Perhaps a fire tonight. We’ll
see.”
I didn’t want to eat. I simply wanted to sit down and never move again. “Maybe we should keep on,” said Cynthia.
“They may be after us.” She didn’t look as if she wanted to keep on. She looked wore down to a nubbin.
The prissy little mouth in the rag-doll face said, “They have not returned to the cave as yet.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“The shades,” he said. “They would let me know. I haven’t heard from them.”
“Maybe they’ve run out on us,” I said.
He shook his head. “They would not do that,” he said. “Where is there to run to?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine where a ghost might run to.
Cynthia sat down wearily and leaned back against the side of a massive boulder that towered far above her. “In that case,” she said, “we can afford a rest.”
She had slid her pack off her shoulder before sitting down. Now she pulled it over to her, unstrapped it and rummaged around inside of it. She took something out of it and handed it to me. There were three or four strips of hard and brittle stuff, red shading into black.
“What is this junk?” I asked.
“That junk,” she said, “is jerky. Dessicated meat. You break off a chunk of it and put it in your mouth and chew it. It is very nourishing.”
She offered a few sticks to the census-taker, but he pushed it away. “I ingest food very sparingly,” he said.
I unshipped my pack and sat down beside her. I broke off a chunk of jerky and put it in my mouth. It felt like a piece of cardboard, only harder and perhaps not quite as tasty.
I sat there and chewed very gingerly and stared back along the way we’d come and thought what a far cry Earth was from our gentle world of Alden. I don’t think that in that moment I quite regretted leaving Alden, but I was not too far from it. I recalled that I had read of Earth and dreamed of it and yearned for it, and so help me, here it was. I admitted to myself that I was no woodsman and that while I could appreciate a piece of woodland beauty as well as any man, I was not equipped, either physically or temperamentally, to take on the sort of primitive world Earth had turned out to be. This was not the sort of thing I’d bargained for and I didn’t like it, but under the circumstances there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Cynthia was busy chewing, too, but now she stopped to ask a question. “Are we heading toward the Ohio?”
“Oh, yes, indeed,” said the census-taker, “but we’re still some distance from it.” “And the immortal hermit?”
“I know naught,” said the census-taker, “of an immortal hermit. Except some stories of him. And there are many stories.”
“Monster stories?” I asked. “I do not understand.”
“You said that once there were monsters and implied the wolves were used against them. I have wondered ever since.”
“It was long ago.”
“But they once were here.” ” ) “Yes, once.” “Genetic monsters?” “This word you use . . .”
“Look,” 1 said, “ten thousand years ago this planet was a radioactive hell. Many life forms died. Many of those that lived had genetic damage.” “I do not know,” he said.