The hell you don’t, I told myself. And the suspicion swiftly crossed my mind that the reason he did not want to know was that he, himself, was one of those genetic monsters and was well aware of it. I wondered dully why I had not thought of it before.
I kept at him. “Why should Cemetery care about the monsters? Why was it necessary to fabricate the wolves to hunt them down? I suppose that is what the wolves were used for.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thousands of them. Great packs of j them. They were programmed to hunt down monsters.” * “Not humans,” I said. “Only monsters.” “That is right. Only the monsters.” “I suppose there might have been times they made mistakes, when they hunted humans as well as monsters. It would be hard to program robots that only hunted monsters.”
“There were mistakes,” the census-taker said.
“And I don’t suppose,” said Cynthia, bitterly, “that Cemetery cared too much. When something of the sort did occur, they didn’t really mind.”.
“I would not know,” said the census-taker.
“What I don’t understand,” said Cynthia, “is why they should have done it. What difference did a few monsters make?”
“There were not a few of them.”
“Well, then, a lot of them.”
“I think,” said the census-taker, “that it might have been the Pilgrim business. Once Cemetery had gotten off to a solid start, the Pilgrim business grew until it represented a fair piece of revenue. And you could not have a pack of howling monsters come tearing down the land when Pilgrims were around. It would have scared them off. The word would have spread and there would have been fewer Pilgrims.”
“Oh, lovely,” Cynthia said. “A program of genocide. I suppose the monsters have been fairly well wiped out.”
“Yes,” said the census-taker, “fairly well disposed of.”
“With a few showing up,” I said, “only now and then.”
His cross-stitch eyes crinkled at me and I wished I hadn’t said it. I don’t know what was wrong with me. Here we were, depending on this little jerk to help us, and I was needling him.
I cut out the talking and went back to chewing jerky. It had softened up a bit and had a salty-smoky taste and even if it wasn’t supplying too much nourishment, it still gave me the impression that I was eating something.
We sat there chewing, the two of us, while the census-taker just sat, not doing anything.
I looked around at Cynthia. “How are you getting on?” I asked.
“I’ll do all right,” she said, a little sharply.
“I’m sorry it turned out this way,” I said. “It is not what I had in mind.”
“Of course it’s not,” she said. “You thought of it as a polite little jaunt to a romantic planet, made romantic by what you’d read of it and imagined of it and . . .”
“I came here to make a composition,” I said, considerably nettled at her, “not to play hide-and-seek with bomb-throwers and grave-robbers and a pack of robot wolves.”
“And you’re blaming me for it. If I hadn’t been along, if I hadn’t foisted myself off on you . . .”
“Hell, no,” I said. “I never thought of that.” “But even if you did,” she said, “it would be all right, for you’d be doing it for good old Thorney . . .”
“Cut it out,” I shouted at her, really burned up now. “What’s got into you? What’s this all about?”
Before she could answer the census-taker got to his feet (that is, if he had feet); at any rate, he rose.
“It is time to go again,” he said. “You’ve had rest and nourishment and now we must push on.”
The wind had become sharper and colder. As we moved out of the shelter of the nest of boulders and faced the barren ridgetop, it struck us like a knife and the first few drops of driven rain spattered in our faces.
We pushed ahead-pushing against the rain, leaning into, it. It was as if a great hand had been placed against us an.d tried to hold us back. It didn’t seem to bother the census-taker much; he skipped on ahead without any trouble. The funny thing about it was that the wind seemed to have no effect at all upon his robe; it didn’t flutter, it never even stirred, it stayed just the way it was, hanging to the ground.
I would have liked to call this to Cynthia’s attention, but when I tried to yell at her, the buffeting wind blew the words back into my mouth.
From below us came the moaning of the forest trees, bending in the gale. Birds tried to fly and were whipped
about the sky. The cloud cover seemed to become thicker by the minute, although as far as I could see, there were no moving clouds. The rain came in sudden gusts, icy cold, hard against the face.
We trudged on, miserably. I lost all track of everything. I kept my eyes on Cynthia’s plodding figure as she moved on ahead of me. Once she stumbled and without a word I helped her up. Without a word, she resumed the march.
Now the rain came down without a letup, driven by the wind. At intervals it turned to ice and rattled in the branches of the trees. Then it would turn to rain again and the rain, it seemed to me, was colder than the ice.
We walked forever and then I found that we were no longer on a ridge, but were slanting down a slope. We reached a creek and found a narrow place where we could jump across it and started clambering up the opposite slope. Suddenly the ground leveled off beneath my feet and I heard the census-taker saying, “This is far enough.”
As soon as I heard those words I let my legs buckle under me and sat down on solid rock. For a moment I paid no attention to where we were. It was quite enough that there was no longer any need to move. But gradually I became aware of what was going on.
We had stopped, I saw, on abroad, flat shelf of rock that extended out in front of a huge rock shelter. The roof of the shelter, some thirty feet or more above the shelf, flaned back to form a deep niche in the face of a jutting cliff. The slab of rock extending out from the cliff ran back into the shelter, forming a level floor of stone. A few feet downward from the shelf, the creek flowed down the valley, forming little pools and rapids, pinching down, then broadening out, a little mountain stream that was in a hurry, foaming in the rapids and then resting in the pools before it took another plunge. Beyond the stream the hill rose steeply to the ridgetop along which we’d come.
“Here we are,” said the census-taker in a happy, chirpy voice. “Snug against the night and weather. We will build a
fire and catch some trout out of the stream and wish the wolf ill luck in his trailing.”
“The wolf?” said Cynthia. “There were three wolves to start with. What happened to the other two?”
“I have intelligence,” said the census-taker, “that but one remains. It seems the others met with awkward accidents.”
Chapter 15
Beyond the shelter’s mouth the storm raged in the night. The fire gave light and warmth and our clothes at last were dry and there had been, as the census-taker had said, fish to be gotten in the brook, beautiful speckled trout that had made a welcome break from the gook we had been eating out of cans and a vast improvement over jerky.
We were not the first to use the shelter. Our fire had been built on a blackened circle on the stone, where the fires of earlier years (although how long ago there was no way of knowing) had chipped and flaked the surface of the rock. Along the broad expanse of stone were several other similarly blackened areas, half camouflaged by a scattering of blown autumn leaves.
In a pile of leaves, wedged and caught far back in the rocky cleft, where the roof plunged down to meet the floor, Cynthia had found another evidence of human occupancy-a metal rod some four feet long, an inch in diameter, and touched only here and there with rust.
I sat beside the fire, staring at the flames, thinking back along the trail and trying to figure out how such well-laid plans as ours could have gone so utterly astray. The answer was, of course, that Cemetery had been responsible, although perhaps not responsible for our meeting with the band of grave robbers. We had simply stumbled onto them.
I tried to figure exactly where we stood and it seemed, as I thought about it, we did not stand well at all. We had been harried from the settlement and we had been split up and Cynthia and I had fallen into the hands of an enigmatic being that might be little better than a madman.