The hobbies spread out in a thin line on the ridge-top and Hoot came scrambling up the slope to stand beside me.
“What is it, captain?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
And that was strange, I thought. For I could have said it was a lawn and let it go at that. But there was something about it that told me, instinctively, that it was no simple lawn.
Looking at it, a man wanted to walk down on it and stretch out full length upon it, putting his hands behind his bead, tilting his hat over his eyes, and settle down for an easy afternoon. Even with the tree no longer standing to provide the shade, it would have been a pleasant spot to take a midday nap.
That was the trouble with it. It looked too inviting and too cool, too familiar.
“Let’s move on,” I said.
Swinging a little to the left to give the circular patch of green plenty of room, I set off down the ridge. As I walked I kept a weather eye cocked to the right and nothing happened, absolutely nothing. I was prepared to have some great and fearsome shape burst upward from an expanse of sward and come charging out at us. I imagined that the grass might roll up like a rug and reveal an infernal pit out of which horrors would come pouncing.
But the lawn continued to be a lawn. The massive stump speared up into the sky and just beyond it lay the mighty bulk of the shattered trunk-the ruined home of the humping little shapes that had cried out their anguish to us.
Ahead of us lay the trail, a slender, dusty thread that wound out into the tortured landscape, leading into a dim unknown. And looming over the horizon other massive trees that towered into the sky.
I found that I was tottering on my feet. Now that we were past the tree and swinging back onto the trail, the nervous tension that had held me together was swiftly running out. I set myself the task of first one foot, then the other, fighting to stay erect, mentally measuring the slowly decreasing distance until we should reach the trail.
We finally did reach it and I sat down on a boulder and let myself come unstuck.
The hobbies stopped, spread out in a line, and I saw that Tuck was looking down at me with a look of hatred that seemed distinctly out of place. There he sat atop Dobbin, a scarecrow tricked out in a ragged robe of brown and with the ridiculous doll-like artifact clutched against his chest. He looked like a sulky, overgrown girl, but with a strange wistfulness about him, if you left out his face. If he’d stuck his thumb into his mouth and settled down to sucking it, the picture would have been entirely rounded out. But the face was the trouble, the impression of the ragged little girl stopped when you saw that hatchet face, almost as brown as the robe he wore, the great, pool-like eyes glazed with the hatred in them.
“You are, I presume,” he said, with his rat-trap mouth biting off the words, “quite proud of yourself.”
“I don’t understand you, Tuck,” I said. And that was the solemn truth; I didn’t understand what he had in mind with that sort of talk. I had never understood the man and I supposed I never would.
He gestured with his hand, back toward the cut-down tree.
“That,” he said.
“I suppose you think I should have left it there, taking shots at us.”
I had no yen to argue with him; I was too beat out. And it was beyond me why he should be up in arms about the tree. Hell, it had been taking shots at him as well as the rest of us.
“You destroyed all those creatures,” he said. “The ones living in the tree. Think of it, captain! What a magnificent achievement! A whole community wiped out!”
“I didn’t know about them” I said. I could have added that even if I had, it would have made no difference. But I didn’t say it.
“Well,” he demanded, “have you nothing more to say about it?”
I shrugged. “It’s their tough luck,” I said.
Sara said, “Lay off him, Tuck. How could he have known?”
“He pushes everyone,” said Tuck. “He pushes everyone around.”
“Most of all himself,” said Sara. “He didn’t push you, Tuck, when he took your place. You were fumbling around.”
“A man can’t take on a planet,” Tuck declared. “He has to go along with ft. He has to adapt. He can’t bull his way through.”
I was ready to let it go at that. He had done his grousing. He’d got it off his chest. He had had his say. It must have been humiliating, even for a jerk like Tuck, when I took over from him and he had something coming. He had a right to take it out on me if it helped him any.
I struggled off the boulder to my feet.
“Tuck,” I said, “I wonder if you’ll take over now. I need to ride a while.”
He got down off Dobbin and as I moved up to mount we came face to face. The hatred still was there, a more terrible hatred, it seemed to me, than had been in his face before. His thin lips scarcely moved and he said, almost in a whisper, “I’ll outlast you, Ross. I’ll be alive when you’re long dead. This planet will give you what you’ve been asking for all your entire life.”
I didn’t have too much strength left, but I had enough to grab him by an arm and fling him out, sprawling, into the dusty trail. He dropped the doll and groveled, on his hands and knees, picking it up.
I hung onto the saddle to keep from falling down. “Now lead out,” I told him. “And, so help me Christ, you do one more stupid thing and I’ll get down and beat you to a pulp.”
TEN
The trail wound across the arid land, crossing flats of sand and little pools of cracked, dried mud where weeks or months, or maybe even years before, rainwater had collected. It climbed broken, shattered ridges, angling around grotesque land formations. It wended its way around dome-shaped buttes. The land stayed red and yellow and sometimes black where ledges of glassy volcanic stone cropped out. Far ahead, sometimes seen, sometimes fading in the horizon blueness, lay a smudge of purple that I thought were mountains, but could not be sure.
The vegetation continued sparse-little bushes that crouched close against the ground, the sprawling thorn that ran along the surface. The sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky, but it was not hot, just pleasantly warm. The sun, I was sure, was smaller and fainter than the sun of Earth-either that, or the planet lay a greater distance from it.
On some of the higher ridges were little, cone-shaped houses of stone, or at least structures that looked like houses. As if someone or something had needed temporary shelter or protection and had gathered up flat slabs of stone, which lay about the ridges, and had constructed a flimsy barrier. The stones were laid up dry, with no mortar, piled one atop another. Some of the structures still stood much as their builders must have left them, in many of the others stones had fallen out of place, and in still others the entire structure had collapsed and lay in fallen heaps.
And there were the trees. They loomed in all directions, each one standing alone and lordly in its loneliness and each of them several miles from any other. We came close to none of them.
There was no life, or none that showed itself. The land ran on and on, motionless and set. There was no wind.
I used both hands to hang onto the saddle and continually I fought against falling down into the darkness that stole upon me every time I forgot to fight it back.
“You all right?” asked Sara.
I don’t remember answering her. I was busy hanging on to the saddle and fighting back the darkness.
We stopped at noon. I don’t remember eating, although I suppose I did. I do remember one thing. We had stopped in a rugged badlands area below one of the ridges and I was propped up against a wall of earth, so that I was looking at another wall of earth and the wall, I saw, was distinctly stratified with various strata of different thicknesses, some of them no more than a few inches deep while others would have been four or five feet, and each of them a distinctive color. As I looked at the strata I began to sense the time which each one represented. I tried to turn it off, for with this recognition was associated a most unrestful feeling, as if I were stretching all my faculties to a straining point, as if I were using all my energy and strength to drive deeper into this sense of time which the wall of earth invoked. But there was no way to turn it off; for some reason I was committed and must keep on and could only hope that at some point along the way I would reach a stopping point-either a point where I could go no further or a point where I had learned or sensed all there was to learn or sense.