It was good just to sit there, doing nothing, thinking nothing, saying nothing, nose to nose with Ivan. It was enough that we were together, that we were not alone. It may seem strange to say that two ungainly, ugly machines got to be friends, but you must remember that while we might be machines, we still were human beings. At that time we were not single minds. We were five minds and four minds, nine minds all together, and all of us were intelligent and well-educated men and there was a lot to talk about.
“But finally both of us began to see how footless and how pointless it was just to stay sitting there. We began to wonder if there might be people in the world that we could help. If man was going to recover from what the war had left, he would need all the help that he could get. Among the nine of us we had a lot of savvy, of a kind that man might need, and each of us was a source of power and energy if ways could be found for man to make use of that power and energy.
“Ivan said there was no use going west. Asia was finished, he said, and he’d roamed through enough of Europe to know it was finished, too. No social organization of any kind was left there. There might be scattered bands of men already sunk in savagery, but not enough of them to form any sort of economic base. So we headed east, for America, and there, in places, we found little scattered settlements-not too many, but a few-where man was slowly getting on his feet, at a point where he could use the kind of help we had to offer. But so far we have been of no help at all. The little settlements will not listen to us. They run screaming for the woods whenever we show up and no matter how we try to tell them we’re only there to help they will not respond in any way at all. You two are the first humans who would talk with us.”
“The trouble with that,” I told him, “is that talking to us will do little good. We aren’t of this time. We are from the future.”
“I remember now,” said Joe. “You said that you knew Elmer from the future. Where is Elmer now?”
“As of right now, he is somewhere among the stars.”
“The stars? How could old Elmer . . .”
“Listen to me,” I said. “Let me try to tell you. Once it became apparent what was^bout to happen to the Earth, a lot of people went out to the stars. One shipload of them would colonize one planet and another shipload another. After some ten thousand years of this, there are an awful lot of humans living on an awful lot of planets. The people who were recruited for the star-trips were the educated, the skilled, the technological people, the kind of people who would be needed to establish a colony in space. What were left were the uneducated, the untrained, the unskilled. That is why, even in this time, the settlements you have been trying to help need the help so badly. That probably is why they refuse your help. What is left is the equivalent of the peasants, the ne’er-do-wells . . .”
“But old Elmer, he wasn’t really people . . .”
“He was a good mechanic. A new colony would need folks like him. So he went along.”
“This matter of Elmer in the future and of people fleeing into space,” said Joe, “is a most intriguing thing. But how come you are here? You said that you would tell us. Why don’t you just settle back and tell us now?”
It was just like old-home week. It was all so good and friendly. Joe was a nice guy and Ivan wasn’t bad. For the first time since we had hit the planet, it was really nice.
So we settled back and between the two of us, first me, then Cynthia, and then me again, we told our story to them.
“This Cemetery business still must be in the future,” said Joe. “There is no sign of Cemetery yet”
“It will come,” I said. “I wish I could recall the date when it was started. Perhaps I never knew.”
Cynthia shook her head. “I don’t know, either.”
“There’s one thing I am glad to know about,” said Joe. “This matter of a lubricant. It was something we were a bit concerned about. We know that in time we’ll need it and we had hoped we could contact some people who would be able to supply us with it. If they could get their hands on the crude and supply it to us, we could manage to refine it to a point where it could be used. There wouldn’t have to be a lot of it. But we haven’t been having too much luck with people.”
“You’ll get it, all refined and ready, according to your specifications, from Cemetery,” I told him. “But don’t pay the price they ask.”
“We’ll pay no price,” said Joe. “They sound like top-grade lice.”
“They are all of that,” I said. “And now we have to go.”
“To keep your appointment with the future.”
“That is right,” I said. “And if it happens as we hope it will, it would be nice to find you there and waiting for us. Do you think you could manage that?”
“Give us the date,” said Joe, so I gave him the date.
“We’ll be there,” he said.
As we started down the ladder, he said, “Look, if it doesn’t work. If there’s no time-trap there. Well, if that should happen, there’s no need to go back to that shack. Horrible job, you know, cleaning it up, dead man and all of that. Why not come and live with us? It’s nothing very fancy, but we’ll be glad to have you. We could go south for winter and . . .”
“Thanks, we will,” said Cynthia. “It would be very nice.”
We went on down the ladder and started walking up the hollow. The cleft in the cliff lay just ahead and before we reached it, we turned around to look back at our friends. They had switched around so that they were facing us and we raised our hands to them, then went toward the cleft.
We were almost in the cleft when the surging wave that wasn’t water hit us, and as it receded, we stood shaken and in dismay.
For we stood, not in the hollow as we remembered it, but in the Cemetery.
Chapter 20
The cliff was still there, with the twisted cedars growing on its face, and the hills were there and the valley that ran between them. But it was wilderness no longer. The stream had been confined between walls of lain rock, done most •:j tastefully, and the greensward, clipped to carpet 1 smoothness, ran from the foot of the cliff out to the rock-work channel. Monuments stood in staggered rows and there were clumps of evergreen and yew.
I felt Cynthia close against me, but I didn’t look at her. Right then I didn’t want to look at her. I tried to keep my voice steady. “The shades have messed it up again,” I said.
I tried to compute how long it might take for the cemetery to stretch from its boundary as we’d found it to this place and the answer had to be many centuries-perhaps as far into the future as we had been sent sjjtoto the past.
“They couldn’t be this bad at it,” said Cynthia. “They Simply couldn’t be. Once maybe, but not twice in a row.”
“They sold us out,” I said.
“But they could have sold us out,” she said, “when they sent us so far back into the past. Why should we be sold out twice? If they simply wanted to get rid of us, they could have left us where we were. In such a case, there would have been no time-trap. Fletch, it makes no sense at all.”
She was right, of course. I hadn’t thought of that. It did simply make no sense.
“It must be,” I said, “just their slab-sidedness.”
I looked around the sweep of Cemetery.
“We might have been better off,” I said, “if we had stayed with Joe and Ivan. We’d have had a place where we could have lived and a way to travel. We could have gone with them everywhere they went. They would have been good company, I don’t know what we have here.”
“I won’t cry,” said Cynthia. “I’ll be damned if I will cry. But I feel like it.”
I wanted to take her in my arms, but I didn’t. If I had touched her, she would have busted out in tears.
“We could see if the census-taker’s place is where it was,” I said. “I don’t think it will be, but we can have a look. If I know Cemetery they will have evicted him.”