“You are talking about the gnome,” I said.
“You could have reasoned with him.”
“Reasoned with him and he about to steal us blind?”
“He said he would have gotten us out of that other world,” she said, “and I’m inclined to have believed him. There have been other parties here and he must have pulled them back out of the worlds he put them in and let them go ahead.”
“In such a case,” I said, “please account for all that loot he had the storeroom jammed with.”
“He maybe stole some of it,” admitted Sara, “or he ran a bluff and got some of it before they started out or some of the expeditions failed and he went out and picked up the stuff after they had failed.”
It was possible, I knew, any one of the alternatives she suggested could be possible. But somehow I didn’t think so. The gnome had said that we had been the first to get out of one of the other worlds without any help from him, but that could have been a lie, perhaps calculated to make us feel good about being so smart we had gotten out of it. And we really hadn’t gotten out of it. We’d been thrown out of it, and there was a good chance that some of the other parties that had landed here had been thrown out as well. The residents of those other worlds must by now be tired of having someone keep on dumping aliens in on them.
But not all of the people dumped into those other worlds would have been thrown out and that would have meant that the gnome and his pals, the hobbies, would have had good pickings. Although what good all that stuff was doing them was hard to figure out. They couldn’t begin to use all of it and on a planet such as this, with a built-in trap for any who might land on it, there’d be little chance of trading with someone out in space. The gnome apparently did a little local trading, for he’d sold Roscoe’s braincase to a centaur tribe, but the local trading couldn’t amount to so very much.
“Speaking of the gnome,” said Sara. “At first you threatened you’d bring him along with us and then you didn’t bring him. Personally, since we’re running this kind of show, I’d feel better if we had him where we could keep an eye on him.”
“1 couldn’t stand his whining and his bawling,” I told her, shortly. “And, besides, once it became apparent we weren’t hauling him along, he got so happy about it that he let us take the other things we needed without any argument. Including what is left of Roscoe and all that water and the maps.”
We walked in silence for a moment, but she still wasn’t satisfied. She was sore at me. She didn’t like the way I operated and she meant to tell me so, very forcefully, and she wasn’t having much success.
“I don’t like this Hoot of yours,” she said. “He’s a crawly sort of creature.”
“He saved our necks when the hobbies went for us,” I said. “I suppose you’re all knotted up because you don’t understand what he used to hit the hobbies. Me, I don’t care what he used, just so he still has it and can use it again if we get into a jam. And I don’t care how crawly he may seem, just so he stays with us. We need a guy like him.”
She flared at me. “That’s a crack at the rest of us. You don’t like George and you don’t like Tuck and you’re barely civil to me. And you call everybody Buster, I don’t like people who call other people Buster.”
I took a long, deep breath and began to count to ten, but I didn’t wait till ten.
“Miss Foster,” I told her, “you undoubtedly recall all that money you transferred to my account on Earth. All I’m trying to do now is to earn all that lovely money. And I’m going to earn it no matter what you do or say. You don’t have to like me. You don’t have to approve of anything I do. But you’re signed onto this harebrained scheme just like all the rest of us and I’m in charge of it because you put me in charge of it and I’m going to stay in charge of it and you haven’t a damned thing to say about it until we’re back on Earth again-if we are ever back.”
I didn’t know what she might do. I didn’t care too much.
This business had been building up for a long time now, since shortly after we had taken off from Earth and there had to be an end to it or we’d all go down the drain. Although, to tell the truth, I figured we were part-way down the drain already. There was something about the planet that made a man uneasy-something furtively vicious, a hard coldness like the coldness of a squinted eye, a thing a man couldn’t put a finger on and perhaps was afraid to put a finger on because of what he’d find. And how were we to get off the planet with our ship sealed shut?
I thought maybe she’d stop right there in the street and throw a tantrum at me. I thought maybe she might try to brain me with her rifle or maybe try to shoot me.
She did nothing of the sort. She just kept walking along beside me. She never broke her stride. Then quietly, almost conversationally, she said, “What a sleazy son-of-a-bitch you turned out to be.”
And it was all right. I probably deserved it. I’d been rough on her, but I’d had to be. She had to understand and, anyhow, I’d been called lot worse things than that.
We kept walking along and I wondered what time it was.
My watch said we’d been walking down the street for a bit better than six hours, but that didn’t mean a thing, for I hadn’t the least idea of how long this planet’s day might be.
I tried to keep a sharp lookout as we went along, but I had no idea what I was watching for. The city seemed deserted, but that didn’t mean there couldn’t be something very nasty in it that might come popping out at us. It was all too quiet and innocent. A place like this begged for someone or something to be living in it.
The streets were narrow, the one that we were following and the others that ran off from it. The buildings rose straight up from them and went soaring upward. There were occasional breaks in the blank, white walls that probably were windows, but didn’t look like windows. Usually several small, unpretentious doors fronted the street from each building, but at times there were great ramps leading up through a recess sliced out of a building’s front up to massive doors that stood several stories high. Seldom were any of these doors closed; most of them stood open. Someone, sometime, had built this city and used it for a while and then had walked away from it, not even bothering to close the doors when they turned their backs on it.
The street jogged suddenly and as we came around the corner we were looking down a narrow lane where the street ran straight for a much greater distance than it had run straight all the time we had traveled on it. And far off, at the end of the street, stood a tree, one of those great trees that towered above the city. We had seen some of them when we’d been out on the landing field, but this was the first one we’d seen since. Traveling in the street, the buildings stood so high that they cut off the sight of everything that wasn’t directly overhead.
I stopped and Sara stopped beside me. Behind us the hobbies shuffled to a halt. Now that the clanking of the hobbies’ rockers was still I could hear the crooning sound. I had been hearing it for some time, I realized, but had paid no attention to It, for it had been blotted out by the noise made by the rockers.
But the hobbies were standing silent now and the crooning still kept on and when I swung around I saw it came from Smith. He was sitting in the saddle, rocking gently back and forth and he was making these cooing sounds like a happy baby.
I was standing there and saying nothing when Sara said, “Well, go ahead and say it.”
“I haven’t said a thing,” I told her, “and I won’t say anything. But if he doesn’t shut his trap, I’ll rig a muzzle for him.”
“It’s only happiness,” said Tuck. “Surely, captain, you can’t complain at a little happiness. We are getting very close, it seems, to the creature that has been talking with him all these years and he’s almost beside himself with an inner happiness.”