“I didn’t know,” said Cynthia, “that Bronco was a sentient thing or that he could talk. Professor Thorndyke didn’t tell me that.”
“He is sentient,” said Elmer, “but of low intellect. He is no mental giant.”
He said to Bronco, “You come through all right?”
“I am fine,” said Bronco.
“We’ll have to get a pinch bar to open up those crates,” I said.
“There is no need,” said Elmer. He balled a fist and smashed it down on one corner of the crate. The wood crumpled and splintered and he reached his fingers into the resultant hole and tore loose a board.
“This is easy,” he grunted. “I wasn’t sure I could bust out of my crate. There wasn’t too much room and little leverage. But when I heard what was going on . . .”
“Is Fletch here?” asked Bronco.
“Fletch takes care of himself real good,” said Elmer. “He is here and he’s picked up himself a girl.”
He went on ripping boards off the crate.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.
We got to work, the two of us. Bronco was a complicated thing and not easy to assemble. There were a lot of parts and all of them had to be phased together with little tolerance. But the two of us had worked with Bronco for almost two years and we knew him inside out. At First we’d used a manual, but now there was no need of one. We’d thrown away the manual when it had become so tattered it was of little use, and when Bronco, himself, refined and redesigned and tinkered here and there, had become a contraption that bore but small resemblance to the model of the manual. The two of us, working together, knew every piece by heart. We could have field-stripped Bronco and put him back together in the dark. There was no waste motion and no need of conference or direction. Elmer and I worked together like two machines. Inside of an hour we had Bronco put together.
Assembled, he was a crazy thing to look at. He had eight jointed legs that had an insect look about them. Each of them could be positioned at almost any angle. There were claws he could unsheathe to get a better grip. He could go anywhere, on any kind of ground. He could damn near climb a wall. His barrel-like body, equipped with a saddle, ; afforded good protection to the delicate instruments that it ; contained. It carried a series of rings that allowed the strap-[ ping of loads upon his back. He had a retractable tail that was made up of a hundred different sensors and his head I was crowned with another weird sensor assembly.
“I feel good,” he said. “Are we leaving now?”
Cynthia had unloaded the supplies from the car.
“Camping stuff,” she said. “Concentrated food, blankets, rain gear, stuff like that. Nothing fancy. I didn’t have the money to buy fancy stuff.”
Elmer began heaving the boxes and crates on Bronco’s back, cinching them in place.
“You think you can ride him?” I asked Cynthia. “Sure I can. But what about yourself?”
“He’s riding me,” said Elmer. “No, I’m not,” I said.
“Be sensible,” said Elmer. “We may have to run for it to get out of here. They may be laying for us.”
Cynthia went to the door and looked out. “There’s no one in sight,” she said.
“How do we get out of here?” asked Elmer. “The quickest way out of the Cemetery.”
“You take the road west,” she told him. “Past the administration building. Twenty-five miles or so and the Cemetery ends.”
Elmer finished packing the supplies on Bronco. He took a final look around. “I guess that’s all,” he said. “Now, miss, up on Bronco.”
He helped her up. “Hang on tight,” he cautioned her. “Bronco’s not the smoothest thing to ride on.”
“I’ll hang on,” she said. She looked scared.
“Now you,” Elmer said to me. I started to protest, but didn’t because I knew it would do no good. And, besides, riding Elmer made a lot of sense. If we should have to run for it, he could go ten times faster than I could. Those long metal legs of his could really eat up ground.
He lifted me and put me on his shoulders, straddle of his neck. “You hang onto my head to balance yourself,” he said. “I’ll hold onto your legs. I’ll see you don’t fall off.”
I nodded, not too happy. It was damned undignified.
We didn’t have to run for it. There was no one around except one plodding figure far to the north walking down an aisle between the stones. There must have been people watching us; I could almost feel their eyes. We must have made a strange sight-Cynthia riding that grasshopper of a Bronco, with bales and boxes tied all over him, and myself up there, jiggling and swaying atop the eight-foot Elmer.
We didn’t run or even hurry, but we made good time. Bronco and Elmer were good travelers. Even at their normal walking pace, a man would have had to run to keep up with them.
We went clattering and lurching up the road, past the administration building and out into the main part of the Cemetery. The road was empty and the land was peaceful. Occasionally, far off, I would sight a little village, nestled in a cove-a slender finger of a steeple pointing at the sky and a blur of color that was the rooftops of the houses. I imagined those little villages were the homes of workers employed by the Cemetery.
As I rode along, bouncing and swaying to Elmer’s swinging strides, I saw that the Cemetery, for all its vaunted beauty, was in reality a dismal, brooding place. There was a sameness to it and an endless order that was monotonous, and over all of it hung a sense of death and great Finality.
I hadn’t had time to worry before, but now I began to worry. What worried me the most, strangely enough, was that Cemetery, after a fairly feeble effort, had made no real attempt to stop us. Although, I told myself, if Elmer had not been able to burst out of his crate, Reilly and his men would have stopped me cold. But as it was, it almost seemed that Bell figured he could let us go, knowing that any time he wished he could reach out and grab us. I didn’t try to fool myself about Maxwell Peter Bell.
I wondered, too, if any further attempts would be made upon us. Perhaps there didn’t have to be; more than likely Bell and Cemetery might be no longer too much concerned with us. We could go wherever we wished and it would make no difference. For no matter where we went or what we did, there was no chance of leaving Earth without Cemetery’s help.
I had made a mess of it, I told myself. I had gone in and played smart-aleck to Bell’s pompousness and had thrown away any chance I had of any sort of working relationship with Bell or Cemetery. Although, I realized, it might have made no difference no matter what I’d done. I should have realized that on Earth you played along with Cemetery or you did not play at all. The whole damn venture had been doomed from the very start.
It hadn’t seemed so long to me, although it may have been quite a while-I had been so sunk in worry I’d lost all track of time-but finally the road climbed up a hill and there came to an end, and the end of the Cemetery as well.
I stared at the valley below us and the hills that climbed in seried ranks above it, sucking in my breath in astonishment at the sight of it. It was a strangely wooded land dressed in flaming color that shone like glowing fires in the sun of afternoon.
“Autumn” Elmer said. “I had forgotten that Earth had autumn. Back there you couldn’t tell. All the trees were green.”
“Autumn?” I asked.
“A season,” Elmer told me. “A certain time of year when all the trees are colored. I had forgotten it ”
He twisted his head around so he could look up at me If he could have wept, he would have.
“One forgets so many things,” he said.
Chapter 5
It was a world of beauty, but of lusty, two-fisted, brooding beauty unlike the delicate, almost fragile beauty of my world of Alden. It was solemn and impressive and there was a dash of wonder and a streak of fear intertwined into the structure and the color of it.
I sat on a moss-grown boulder beside a brawling, dark-brown stream that carried on its surface the fairy boats of red and gold and yellow that were the fallen leaves. If one listened sharply he could pick out, at the edge of the throaty gurgle of the dark-brown water, the faint, far-off pattering of other leaves falling to the earth. And for all the color and the beauty, there was an ancient sadness there. I sat and listened to the liquid sliding of the water and the faint patter of the leaves, and looking at the trees, I saw that they were massive growths, exuding a sense of age, and that there was something secure and homelike and comfortable about them. There was color here and mood and sound, quality and structure, and a texture that could be felt with the fingers of the mind.