Ghosts, I thought. The place was full of ghosts, the principal one of which was named O’Gillicuddy. Ghosts were here, I thought, and we were accepting them as if they were people or had been people, and that was madness. Under normal circumstance, a ghost was acceptable, but here, under these conditions, they became not only acceptable, but normal.
And, thinking of it, I became aghast at the abnormality of our condition, how awry it was from the quiet beauty of Alden, how distorted even from the mock majesty of Cemetery. For, in fact, those two places seemed abnormal now. We had become so firmly set in the reality of this mad adventure that the ordinary places we had known now seemed strange and far.
“You are not, I fear,” O’Gillicuddy was saying, “safely beyond the clutches of the ghouls. They still trail you with much blood thirstiness.”
“You mean,” I said, “they want our scalps for Cemetery.”
“You have plucked forth the naked truth,” said O’Gillicuddy.
“But why?” asked Cynthia. “Surely they are not friends of Cemetery.”
“No,” said O’Gillicuddy, “they are not, indeed. Upon this planet, Cemetery has no friends. And yet there is nb one here who would not do most willingly a favor for them, hoping a favor in return. Thus great power corrupts.”
“But there is nothing they would want from Cemetery,” 1 Cynthia pointed out.
“Not at the moment, perhaps. But a favor deferred is still a favor and one that can be collected later. One can pile up points.”
“You said no one would refuse a favor,” I said. “How | about yourself?”
“In our case,” said O’Gillicuddy, “there is a difference. Cemetery can do nothing for us, but what is perhaps of 1 more importance, it can do nothing to us. We hope no favor and we have no fear.”
“And you say we aren’t safe?” ; “They are hunting for you,” said O’Gillicuddy. “They 1 will keep on hunting. You handed them defeat this morn-1 ing and it lies bitter in their mouths. One the steel wolf; killed and another died . . .” “But they shot him themselves,” said Cynthia. “A bullet I meant for us. It was no fault of ours.”
“They still count it against you. There are two dead and there must be accountability. They do not accept the blame. They lay it all on you.”
“They’ll have a hard time finding us.” “Hard, perhaps,” said O’Gillicuddy, “But find you they I will. They are woodsmen of the finest. They range like i hunting dogs. They read the wilderness like a book. A turned stone, a disturbed leaf, a bruised blade of grass-it says volumes to them.”
“Our only hope,” said Cynthia, “is to find Elmer and I Bronco. If we were together . . .”
“We can tell you where they are,” said O’Gillicuddy, “but it’s a long, hard way and you would be turning back into the very arms of the raging ghouls. We tried most desperately to reveal ourselves to your two companions so that we could lead them back to you, but for all that we could do they remained unaware of us. It takes a sharper-tuned sensibility than a robot can possess to discover us.” “It all seems pretty hopeless to me,” said Cynthia, sounding considerably discouraged. “You can’t guide Elmer and Bronco to us and you say the ghouls are sure to find us.”
“And that isn’t all,” said O’Gillicuddy, seeming ghoulishly happy at what he had to tell us. “The Raveners are on the prowl.”
“The Raveners?” I asked. “Are there more than one of them?”
“There are two of them.”
“You mean war machines?”
“Is that what you call them?” . .
“That’s what Elmer thinks they are.”
“But that can’t mean anything to us,” protested Cynthia. “Surely the war machines are not tied in with Cemetery.”
“But they are,” said O’Gillicuddy.
“Why?” I asked. “What has Cemetery got they possible could want?”
“Lubricating oil,” said O’Gillicuddy.
I’m afraid I groaned at that. It was such a simple thing and yet so logical. It was something that anyone should have thought of. The machines would have built-in power, more than likely nuclear, although I’d never really known, and they would be self-repairing, but the one thing they would need, perhaps the only thing they would need and would not have, would be lubricants.
This would be something that Cemetery wouldn’t miss. Cemetery missed no bets at all. They passed up nothing that would make any other factor on the Earth in some way beholden to them.
“And the census-taker,” I said. “I suppose he is some way tied into it as well. And, by the way, where is the census-taker?”
“He disappeared,” said O’Gillicuddy. “He flitters here and there. He is not really part of us. He is not always with us. We don’t know where he is.”
“Nor what he is?”
“What he is? Why, he’s the census-taker.” “That’s not what I mean. Is he a human being? Perhaps a mutated human being. There would have been a lot of human mutation. Some good, mostly bad. Although I imagine that over the years a great part of the bad died out. The ghouls have telepathy and God knows what else and the settlers probably have something, too, although we don’t know what it is. Even you, for ghosts are not. . .” “Shades,” said O’Gillicuddy.
“All right, then, shades. Shades are not a normal human condition. Maybe there aren’t any shades any place except here on Earth. No one knows what happened during those years after the people fled into space. Earth is a different place today than it was then.”
“You got off the track,” said Cynthia. “You were asking if the census-taker was a Cemetery creature.”
“I am sure that he is not,” said O’Gillicuddy. “I don’t know what he is. I have always thought he was a sort of human being. He is a lot like humans. Not made the way they are, of course, and there is only one of him and …” “Look,” I said, “you didn’t come here just to bear us company. You came here for a purpose. You wouldn’t have come just to bring us bad news. What is it all about?” “There are many of us here,” said the shade. “We foregathered in some strength of numbers. We sent out a call for a gathering of the clan, for we feel great compassion and a strange comradeship with you. Not in all the history of the Earth has anyone before you tweaked the tail of Cemetery in such a hearty fashion.” “And you like that?” “We like it very much.” “And you’ve come to cheer us on.” “Not cheer,” said O’Gillicuddy, “although that we would also do and most willingly. But we feel that it is in our capacity to be of the slightest help.”
“We’re in the market,” said Cynthia, “for any help there is.
“It becomes a complicated matter to explain,” said O’Gillicuddy, “and in lack of adequate information, you must fill in with faith. Being the sort of things we are, we have no real contact with the corporeal universe. But it seems we do have some marginal powers to interact with time and space, which are neither in the corporeal universe nor quite out of it.”
“Now, wait a second there,” I said. “What you are talking of. . .”
“Believe me,” said O’Gillicuddy, “we have wracked our mental powers and can come up with nothing else It is little that we have to offer, but. . .”
“What you propose to do,” said Cynthia, “is to move us in time.”
“But by only the tiniest fraction,” said O’Gillicuddy. “A minute part of a second. Barely out of the present, but that would be quite enough.”
“It’s never been done,” Cynthia objected. “For hundreds of years it has been studied and investigated and absolutely nothing has ever come of it.”
“Have you ever done it?” I demanded.
“No, not actually,” said O’Gillicuddy. “But we have thought about it and speculated on it and we are rather sure …”
“But not entirely sure?”
“You are right,” said O’Gillicuddy. “Not entirely sure.”
“And once you’ve done it,” I asked, “how about our getting back? I would not want to live out my life a fractional part of a second behind all the universe.”
“We have worked that out, too,” the shade said blithely. “We would set a time-trap at the entrance of this cleft and by stepping into it. . .”
“But you’re not sure of that one, either.”
“Well, fairly certain,” said O’Gillicuddy.
It wasn’t very promising and, on top of that, I asked myself, how could we be sure that any of the rest of all he’d told was the truth? Maybe O’Gillicuddy and his gang of shades were doing no more than trying to push us into a situation where we’d serve willingly as subjects for an experiment they had cooked up. And, come to think of it, how could we be sure there were any shades at all? We had seen them, or seemed to see them, as they danced around the fire back at the settlement. But actually all we had to go on was what the census-taker had told us and this voice that said it was O’Gillicuddy.