We walked down the hollow and the walking was easy. It was like walking on a carpet. There was no uneven ground, no boulders that we had to dodge around. There were just the monuments and the clumps of evergreen and yew.
I glanced at some of the dates on the monuments and there was no way of telling, of course, how recent they might have been, but the dates I saw were evidence that we were at least thirty centuries beyond the time we’d hoped to reach. For some reason, Cynthia paid no attention to the dates, and I didn’t mention them. Although, come to think of it, perhaps she did and made no mention of them, either.
We reached the river and it seemed much the same as it had before, except that the trees that had grown along its banks were gone to give way to the monuments and landscaping that marked the Cemetery.
I was looking at the river, thinking of how, in spite of all events, some things manage to endure. The river still flowed on, tumbling down the land between the hills, and there was no one who could stay its hurry or reduce its force.
Cynthia caught my arm.
She was excited. “Fletch, isn’t that where we found the census-taker’s house?” She was pointing toward the bluffs and when I looked where she was pointing, I gasped at what I saw. Not that ; there was anything about it that should have made me gasp. Except, perhaps, the utter beauty of it. What took my breath away, I am sure, was how the entire scene had changed. We had seen the place (in our own time bracket) only hours before. Then it had been a wilderness-thick woods running down to the river, with the roof of the house in which the dead man lay barely showing through the trees, and with the bare, knob-like blufftops shouldering the sky. Now it was all neat and green and very civilized, and atop the bluff where had stood the little weather-beaten house where we had enjoyed lunch with a charming gentleman now stood a building that came out of a dream. It was all white stone, but with a fragile air about it that seemed to rule out the use of stone. It lay low against the blufftop and its front had three porches supported by fairy pillars that, from this distance, seemed to be pencil-thin and narrow, rainbow-flashing windows all along its length. A flight of long stairs ran down to the river.
“Do you think …” she asked, stopping in mid-sentence.
“Not the census-taker,” I said. “He’d never build a place like that.”
For the census-taker was a lurker, a hider, a scurrier. He scurried all about, trying very hard to make sure that no one saw him, and snatched from beneath their noses those little artifacts (not yet artifacts, but artifacts at some time in the future) that would tell the story of those he was hiding from.
“But it is where his house was.”
“So it is,” I said, at a loss for anything else that I might say.
We walked along the river, not hurrying but looking at the place atop the bluff, finally coming to the place where the stairs came down to the river, ending on the riverbank with a plaza paved with great blocks of stone, with room made here and there, for plantings of-what else?-yew and evergreen.
We stood side by side, like a couple of frightened children confronted by a thing of special wonder, looking up the flight of stairs to the gleaming wonder that stood atop the bluff.
“Know what this reminds me of,” said Cynthia. “The stairway up to Heaven.”
“How could it? You’ve never seen the stairway up to Heaven.”
“Well, it looks the way the old ones wrote about it. Except there should be trumpets sounding.”
“Do you think that you can make it without the trumpets sounding?”
“I think,” she said, “it is likely that I can.”
I wondered what it was that was making her so lighthearted. Myself, I was too puzzled and upset to be the least lighthearted. The entire thing was pretty, if you cared for prettiness, but I didn’t like particularly the placement of the building where the census-taker’s house had been. That there must be some connection between the two of them seemed a reasonable conclusion and I found myself hard put to arrive at that connection.
The stairway was a long one and rather steep and we took our time. We had the stairway to ourselves, for there was no one else about, although a short time earlier there had been three or four people standing on one of the porches of the building.
The stairs at the blufftop ended in another plaza, much larger than the one at the river’s edge, and we walked across this toward the central porch. Up close, the building was even more beautiful than it had been at a distance. The stone was snowy white, the arthitectural lines were refined and delicate, and there was about the whole of it a sort of reverential aura. No lettering was sculptured anywhere to tell one what it was and I found myself wondering, in a dumb, benumbed sort of way, exactly what it was.
The porch opened into a foyer, frozen in that hushed dimness that one associates with museums or with picture
galleries. A glassed-in case stood in the center of the room, with a light playing on the object standing in the case. Two guards were standing by the door that led off the foyer-or I supposed that they were guards, for they wore uniforms. Echoing from deep inside the building could be heard the muffled sound of footfalls and of voices.
We came up to the case and there, sitting in it, was that very jug that we had been shown at lunch. It had to be the same, I told myself. No other warrior could have leaned so dejectedly upon his shield, no other broken spear trail quite so defeated on the ground.
Cynthia had leaned down to stare into the case and now she rose. “The potter’s mark is the same,” she said. “I am sure of that.”
“How can you be so sure? You can’t read Greek. You said you couldn’t.”
“That’s true, but you can make out the name. Nicos-thenes. It must say Nicosthenes made me.” 1 “He might have made a lot of them,” I said. I don’t know why I argued. I don’t know why I fought against the almost certain knowledge that here was the very piece that had stood on the sideboard in the census-taker’s house.
“I am sure he did,” she said. “He must have been a famous potter. This must have been a masterpiece for the census-taker to have selected it. And no potter, once he’d made one, would duplicate a masterpiece. It probably was made for some great man of the time . . .”
“Perhaps for the census-taker.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right. Perhaps for the census-taker.”
I was so interested in the jug that I did not notice one of the guards had moved over toward me until he spoke.
“You, I think,” he said, “must be Fletcher Carson. Is that true?”
I straightened up to face him. “Yes,” I said, “I am, but how did you . . .”
“And the lady with you is Miss Lansing?”
“Yes, she is.”
“I wonder if the two of you would be so kind as to come with me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why should we go with you?”
“There is an old friend who would like to speak with you.”
“That is absurd,” said Cynthia. “We have no friends at all. Not here, we haven’t.”
“I should hate to insist,” said the guard, speaking very gently.
“Perhaps it’s the census-taker,” Cynthia said.
I asked the guard, “A little guy with a rag-doll face and a prissy mouth?”
“No,” said the guard. “Not like that at all.”
He waited for us and we stepped around the display case and went along with him.
He led us down a long corridor that was lined with other display cases and tables where many items were neatly arranged and labeled, but we moved along so smartly that I had no chance to make out any of them. Some distance down the corridor, the guard stopped at a door and knocked. A voice told him to come in.
He opened the door to let us through, then closed the door behind us, not entering himself. We stood just inside the door and looked at the thing-not a man, but a thing-that sat behind a desk.
“So here you are,” said the thing. “You took your time in coming. I had begun to fear that you would not come, that the plan had gone awry.”
The voice came out of what seemed to be the mechanical equivalent of a human head, attached to what might be roughly described as the equivalent of a human body. A robot, but not like any robot I had ever seen-not like Elmer, not like any honest robot. A frankly mechanical contraption that made no real concession to the human form.