Time became real to me in a way I can’t express in words. Instead of a concept, it became a material thing that I could distinguish (although it was not seeing and it was not feeling) and could understand. The years and eons did not roll back for me. Rather, they stood revealed. It was as if a chronological chart had become alive and solid. Through the wavering lines of the time structure as if the structure might have been a pane of glass made inexpertly, I could faintly glimpse the planet as it had been in those ages past-ages which were no longer in the past but now stood in the present, as if I were outside of time and independent of time and could see and evaluate it exactly as I could have seen and evaluated some material structure that coexisted with me on my own time level.
The next thing I remember was waking up and for a moment it seemed to me that I was waking from that interval when I saw time spread out before me, but in a little while I realized that could not be so, for the badlands now were gone and it was night and I was stretched out on my back with blankets under me and another covering me. I looked straight up at the sky and it was a different sky than I had ever seen. For a moment I was puzzled and lay quietly, trying to work out the puzzle. Then, as if someone had told me (although no one did), I knew that I was looking at the galaxy, all spread out before me. Almost directly overhead was the brilliant glow of the central area and spread out all around it, like a gauzy whirlpool, were the arms and outlying sectors.
I turned my head to one side and here and there, just above the horizon, were brilliant stars and I realized that I was seeing a few of the globular clusters, or more unlikely, other nearby stars, fellows with the star about which the planet I was on revolved-those outlaw members of the galactic system which in ages past had fled the system and now lay in the outer dark at the edge of galactic space.
A fire was burning-almost burned down-just a few feet from me and a hunched and blanketed figure lay close beside the fire. Just beyond the fire were the hunched-up hobbies, gently rocking back and forth, with the dim firelight reflecting from their polished hides.
A hand touched my shoulder and I twisted around to face in that direction. Sara knelt beside me.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“I feel fine,” I said, and that was the truth. Somehow I felt new and whole and my head and thoughts were clear with an echoing, frightening clarity-as if I were the first human waking to the first day of a brand-new world, as if time had been turned back to the first hour that ever was.
I sat up and the covering blanket fell off me.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“A day’s journey from the city,” she told me. “Tuck wanted to stop. He said you were in no condition to be traveling, but I insisted we keep on. I thought you’d want it that way.”
I shook my head, bewildered. “I remember none of it. You are sure Tuck said that we should stop?”
She nodded. “You hung onto the saddle and were terribly sick, but you answered when we spoke to you. And there was no place to stop, no good camping spot.”
“Where’s Hoot?”
“Out on guard. Prowling. He says he doesn’t need to sleep.”
I got up and stretched, like a dog will stretch after a good night’s sleep. I felt fine. God, how fine I felt!
“Is there any food?” I asked.
She got to her feet and laughed.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked.
“You,” she said.
“Me?”
“Because you are all right. I was worried. All of us were worried.”
“It was that damn Hoot,” I said. “He drained my blood.”
“I know,” she said. “He explained it to me. He had to. There was nothing else to do.”
I shivered, thinking of it. “It’s unbelievable,” I said.
“Hoot himself,” she said, “is unbelievable.”
“We’re lucky that we have him,” I told her. “And to think that I almost left him back there in the dunes. I wanted to leave him. We had trouble enough without reaching out for more.”
She led the way to the fire.
“Build it up,” she said. “I’ll fix some food for you.”
Beside the fire was a little pile of brush, twisted branches broken from some of the desert trees. I squatted down and fed some of them to the fire and the flame blazed up, licking at the wood.
“I’m sorry about the laser gun,” I said. “Without it, we stand sort of naked.”
“I still have my rifle,” she pointed out. “It has a lot of power. In good hands . . .
“Like yours,” I said.
“Like mine,” she said.
Beyond the fire the heap of blankets lay unmoving. I gestured toward them. “How is Tuck?” I asked. “Any sign of him snapping out of it?”
“You’re too hard on him,” she said. “You have no patience with him. He’s different. He’s not like the two of us. We are very much alike. Have you thought of that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I have.”
She brought a pan and set it on the coals, squatting down beside me.
“The two of us will get through,” she said. “Tuck won’t. He’ll break up, somewhere along the way.”
And strangely I found myself thinking that perhaps Tuck now had less to live for-that since Smith had disappeared he had lost at least a part of his reason for continuing to live.
Had that been why, I wondered, he had appropriated the doll? Did he need to have something he could cling to, and make cling to him by offering it protection? Although, I recalled, he had grabbed hold of the doll before George had disappeared. But that might not apply at all, for he may have known, or at least suspected, that George would disappear. Certainly he had not been surprised when it had happened.
“There’s another thing,” said Sara, “you should know. It’s about the trees. You can see for yourself as soon as it is light. We’re camped just under the brow of a hill and from the hilltop you can see a lot of country and a lot of trees, twenty or thirty of them, perhaps. And they’re not just haphazard. They are planted. I am sure of that.”
“You mean like an orchard?”
“That is right,” she said. “Just like an orchard. Each tree so far from every other tree. Planted in a checkerboard sort of pattern. Someone, at some time, had an orchard here.”
ELEVEN
We went on-and on and on.
Day followed day and we traveled from dawn until the failing of the light. The weather held. There was no rain and very little wind. From the appearance of the country, rain came seldom here. The country changed at times. There were days when we struggled uphill and down in twisted badland terrain; there were other days on end when we traveled land so flat that we seemed to be in the center of a concave bowl-a shallow dish-with the horizons climbing upward on every hand. Ahead of us what at first had been a purple cloud lying low against the horizon became unmistakably a far-off mountain range, still purpled by the distance.
Now there was life, although not a great deal of it. There were honking things that ran along the hilltops when we crossed the badlands area and went streaking down the painted gulleys, gobbling their excitement. There were the ones we called the striders, seldom seen and always at a distance, so far off that even with our glasses we never got a good look at them, but from what we saw incredibly twisted life forms that seemed to be walking on stilts, lurching and striding along at a rapid rate, not seeming to move swiftly but covering a lot of ground. And out on the desiccated plains the whizzers-animals (if they were animals) the size of wolves that moved so fast we were unable to see what they really were or how they traveled. They were a blur coming toward us and a whish going past and another blur as they went away. But although they came close, they never bothered us. Nor did the honkers or the striders.
The vegetation changed, too, from one type of landscape to another. Out on some of the plains strange curly grasses grew and in some of the badlands areas distorted trees clung to the hillsides and huddled in the gullies. They looked more like palms than pines, although they were not palms. Their wood was incredibly tough and oily and when we passed through regions where they grew we collected as many of their fallen branches as the hobbies could carry to serve as wood for campfires.