I felt uneasy, almost ill-and it takes a lot to make me ill. There was a feeling that one should turn from this place and flee, that something which had happened here long ago had cast upon this place an aura of evil and of awfulness to which no one should subject himself.
And out of this awfulness a voice came to us.
“Gracious sirs or mesdames,” it piped, loud and cheerfully, “or whatever you may chance to be, pity please upon me, hauling me hence from this awkward and embarrassing position in which I have been long since.”
I could not have stirred if I had been paid a million. The voice nailed me into place and held me stupefied.
The voice spoke again. “Against the wall,” it said. “Behind the jumbled rocks which, forsooth, proved so poor a fortress as to get all killed but I.”
“It could be a trap,” said Sara in a hard metallic voice that sounded strange from her. “The hobbies might have sensed the trap. That’s maybe why they ran.”
“Please,” pleaded the piping voice. “Please away you do not go. There been others and they did turn away. There is nothing here to fright you.”
I moved forward a step or two.
“Captain, don’t!” cried Sara.
‘We can’t walk away,” I said. “We would always wonder.”
It wasn’t what I meant to say or what I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was turn around and run. It was as if another person, some sort of second person, a surrogate of me, had spoken.
But all the time I was walking forward and when I came to the pile of bones I began to scramble over them. They made unsteady footing and they crumbled under me and shifted, but I made it over them and was on the other side.
“Oh, most noble creature,” cried the piping voice, “you come to sympathetic rescue of my unworthy self.”
I raced across the space between the bones and boulders and went swarming up the pile of rocks from which the voice seemed to come. They were good-sized boulders, better than man-high, and when I scrambled to the top of them and looked down behind them I saw what had been piping at us.
It was a hobby, its milk-glass whiteness gleaming in the shadow, flat upon its back with its rockers sticking straight up in the air. One side of it lay against the boulder that I stood upon, wedged tightly against it by another smaller boulder which had been dislodged from the pile. Pinned between these two masses of rock, the hobby was held completely helpless.
“Thank you, gracious one,” it piped. “You did not turn away. See you I am unable, sir, but from other evidences I deduce you are humanoid. Humanoids be the best of people. Filled with much compassion and no little valor.”
It waggled its rockers at me in a gesture of gratitude.
The trapped hobby was not the only thing behind the barricade. Out of the dirt a humanoid skull grinned at me and there were scattered bones and chunks of rusted metal.
“How many years ago?” I asked the hobby, and It was a foolish thing to ask, for there were other more important questions that I should have asked.
“Honored sir,” it said, “of time all track I’ve lost. The minutes run like years and the years like centuries and it seems to me that since I last stood upon my rockers an eternity has passed. No one upside down as I am can be relied upon to keep a count of time. There be others of us, but they ran away. And still others of us, but they died. I be the only one left out of that noble company.”
“All right,” I said, “just take it easy. We’ll have you out of there.”
“Take it easy,” piped the hobby, “I have done for long. The time I passed with many thoughts and fantasies and much hoping and much fanciful imaginings of what would happen to me. I knew that at length the rocks would rot away, for this material of mine outlasts any rock. But hope I did that before that came about there would be other intervention, from such kind-intentioned person as yourself.”
The others were scrambling across the pile of bones and I waved them on.
“We have a hobby here,” I shouted at them, “and there is at least one human skull and some scattered bones.”
And even as I told them this, I was not so much wondering about what might have happened here or why humans may have died here, but was thinking that with the rescued hobby we would be trapped no longer in this little stretch of badlands. The hobby could carry the water we would need either to continue up the trail or race back to the city.
It took all three of us, with Hoot standing off and calling out encouragement to us, to roll away the smaller rock that held the hobby pinned against the bigger boulder. And when we had it rolled away we had to tip that stupid hobby over and set him on his rockers. He stared at us solemnly, which, I suppose, was the only way that he could stare, for hobbies are not designed for facial expression.
“I be Paint,” he told us, “although at times I be called Old Paint, which is beyond my feeble understanding, for I be no older than the hobbies. We all be forged and fabricated at the selfsame time and there be no one of us older than the other.”
“There were other hobbies?” Sara asked.
“There be ten of us,” said Paint. “Nine others ran away and the only reason for my staying is the unfortunate circumstance from which you kindly liberated me. We be forged on distant planet, of which I be ignorant the name, and brought here to this planet. Coming up the trail we be attacked by a horde of raveners, result of which you see.”
“The ones who brought you here, the ones who fabricated you,” asked Sara. “They were the same as us?”
“Same as you,” said Paint. “There be no profit in talking more of them. They died.”
“Why were they here?” she asked. “What were they looking for?”
“For another one of them,” said Paint. “For humanoid person long disappeared, but with many stories told.”
“For Lawrence Arlen Knight?”
“I know not,” the hobby said. “They do not tell me things.”
FOURTEEN
We decided to go on, following the trail. We threshed it out as we sat around the smoky campfire, with Paint standing beside the pile of our supplies, gently rocking back and forth. Actually there wasn’t much threshing out to do. Tuck didn’t really care. He sat a little apart from us, clutching his doll tight against him and silently rocking back and forth. It was enough to give a man the jitters, watching the two of them, Paint and Tuck, rocking back and forth. Sara and I made the decision and there was no real argument. There was nothing, we were convinced, for us back there in the city. And so far as we knew, there was nothing for us up there on the trail, unless it were the sort of thing that had happened to those men back there in the gully. But the very fact that other humans, Lord knows how long ago, had followed this same trail, apparently for the selfsame reason that we followed it, seemed at least to Sara a powerful argument that we should continue.
But there was one thing, I figured, I should get straight with her.
“Knight must be dead,” I said. “Surely you know that. You must have known it back on Earth when we started out.”
She flared at me. “There you go again! Can’t you let loose! You’ve been against this idea from the start. Why did you ever come with us?”
“I told you that before,” I said. “The money.”
“Then what do you care if he’s dead or alive? What do you care if we find him or we don’t?”
“That’s an easy one,” I told her. “I don’t give a damn one way or the other.” ‘
“But you’re willing to go on? You sounded just a while ago as if you preferred going on.”
“I think I do,” I said. “We might find something up ahead. We’ll find nothing going back.”
“We might round up the hobbies.”
I shook my head. “if either the hobbies or the gnome found we were coming back, we’d never see them, much less lay a hand on them. There must be a million places in that city where you could hide an army.”
“The hobbies must be the ones who ran away,” she said, “down there in the gully. Do you suppose that they remembered when they saw the bones? Do you suppose they might have forgotten, but when they saw the bones remembered and it was such a shock to them, this old memory from the past . . .”