Something tapped my arm. I glanced down and saw that Hoot was tapping me with a tentacle. He pointed silently with another one. I looked and saw the heap, a mound of blackness, not neat and rounded, but a little ragged, as if a pile of junk had been thrown into a pile.
“Maybe wood,” said Hoot
We walked toward it and it was larger and farther off than we had thought it was, but we finally reached it and I threw a beam of light upon it. There was wood, all right-broken, shattered sticks and chunks of it, as if someone had smashed up a bunch of furniture and heaved it in a pile. But there was more than wood. There was metal, too, some of it rusted and eroded, but some of it still bright. At one time chunks of metal had been fashioned, apparently into tools or instruments, but they had been bent and twisted out of shape. Someone had done a good wrecking job, as good a one upon the metal objects as had been done upon the furniture. And there was, as well, what seemed to be hunks of torn cloth and some strangely shaped chunks of wood with fiber tied about them.
“Much rage,” said Hoot, “expended upon objects of inanimation. Mystery very deep and logic hard to come by.”
I handed him the flashlight and he wrapped a tentacle about it and held it steady so I could see. I knelt and began to pick up wood and load it on one arm, selecting pieces that were campfire length. It was dry and heavy and it should make good fuel and there was a lot of it and we’d not run out of it, no matter how long we might be forced to stay. I picked up one of the strangely shaped pieces with fabric tied about it and, seeing my mistake, was about to throw it to one side when the thought occurred to me that the fiber might serve as, tinder, so left it on the load.
I built myself a good armload and rose slowly to my feet. The wood was loaded in the crook of my left arm and I found that I needed my right hand to keep the load from sliding loose.
“You hang onto the light,” I said to Hoot. “I need all the arms I have.”
He didn’t answer and when I looked down at him, I saw that he was rigid. He had stiffened out like a dog pointing at a bird and two of his tentacres were pointed straight up at the ceiling-if the building had a ceiling.
I glanced up and there was nothing there to see, except that I had the feeling I was looking up onto a great expanse of space, that the space extended, without interruption, from the floor on which I stood up to the very top of all the spires and turrets.
And out of that extent of space came a whisper that grew in volume-the sound of many wings beating frantically and fast, the same harsh whispering that could be heard when a flock of feeding birds burst from a marshy stretch of ground and beat across the sky. But it was no sudden rush of hurried flight that existed for a moment and then was done with. As we stood listening on the floor below, it kept on and on and on. Somewhere up there in the misty darkness that marked the building’s upper structure a great migration seemed to be taking place, with millions of wings beating out of nowhere into nowhere. They-whatever they could have been that had the beating wings-were not merely circling in that space above our heads. They were flying with a steady, almost frantic, purpose, and for a moment of that flight they crossed those few thousand feet of emptiness that loomed above us and then were gone while others took their place, a steady stream of others, so that the rush of wings was never broken. I strained my eyes to see them, but there was nothing to be seen. They were too high to see or they were invisible or, I thought, they might not be even there. But the sound was there, a sound that in some other time or place might not be remarkable, but that here was remarkable and, unaccountably, had the freezing impact of the great unknowable. Then, as suddenly as they had come, the beating wings were gone; the migration ended, and we stood in a silence that was so thick it thundered.
Hoot let down his two pointing tentacles “Here they were not,” he said ‘They were otherwhere”.
Immediately as he said it, I knew he had been feeling the same thing I’d been sensing, but had not really realized. Those wings-the sound of those wings-had not been in that space where we had heard them, but in some other space, and we had only heard them through some strange spatio-temporal echo. I don’t know why I thought that; there was no reason to.
“Let’s get back,” I said to Hoot. “All of us must be hungry. It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten. Or had any sleep. How about you, Hoot? I never thought to ask. Can you eat the stuff we have?”
“I in my second self,” he said. And I recalled what he had said before. In his second self (whatever that might be) he had no need of food.
We went back to the front of the building. The hobbies were standing in a circle, with their heads all pointing inward. The packs had been taken off their backs and were stacked against the wall, close behind the doors. Alongside them sat Smith, still slumped, still happy, still out of the world, like an inflated doll that had been tossed against a wall, and beside him was propped the body of Roscoe, the brainless robot. The two of them were ghastly things to see, sitting there together.
The sun had set and outside the doors lay a dusk that was not quite so thick as the dusk inside the building. The ratlike creatures still were pouring out the door and pouring back again, harvesting the seeds.
“The firing has slacked off,” said Sara, “but it picks up again as soon as you stick out your head.”
“I suppose you did,” I said.
She nodded. “There wasn’t any danger. I ducked back in again, real fast. I’m a terrible coward when it comes to things like that. But the tree can see us. I am sure it can.”
I dumped my armload of wood. Tuck had unpacked some pots and pans and a coffee pot stood ready.
“Just about here?” I asked. “Close to the door so the smoke has a chance of getting out”
Sara nodded. “I’m beat out, captain,” she said. “Fire and food will be good for all of us. What about Hoot? Can he…”
“He isn’t doing any eating or any drinking,” I explained. “He’s in his second state, but let’s not talk about it.”
She caught my meaning and nodded.
Tuck came up beside me and squatted down. “That looks to be good wood,” he said. “Where did you find it?”
“There’s a heap of junk back there. All sorts of stuff.”
I squatted down and took out my knife. Picking up one of the smaller sticks, I began to whittle off some shavings. I pushed them in a pile, then reached for the piece of wood that had the fiber tied to it. I was about to rip some of the fiber loose when Tuck put out a hand to stop me.
“Just a second, captain.”
He took the piece of wood out of my hands and turned it so that it caught some of the feeble light still coming from the doorway. And now, for the first time, I saw what it was that I had picked up. Until that moment it had been nothing more than a stick of wood with some straw or grass tied to it. “A doll,” said Sara, in surprise.
“Not a doll,” said Tuck. His hands were shaking and he was clutching the doll hard, probably in an attempt to keep his hands from shaking. “Not a doll. Not an idol. Look at its face!”
In the twilight the face was surprisingly plain to see. It was barely human. Primate, perhaps, although I couldn’t be sure it was even that. But as I looked at it, I felt a sense of shock; human or not, it was an expressive face, and never had I seen a face with so much sadness in it or so much resignation to the sadness. It was no fancy carving. The face, in fact, was crude, it had been simply hacked out of a block of wood.
The whole thing had about it the look of a primitive corncob doll. But the knowing hands that had carved the face, driven by God knows what sadness of their own, had caught within its planes a misery of existence that wrenched one’s heart to see.