“There were eight of them,” I said, “and Paint makes nine. He said there were ten. Where did the other go?”
“We may never know,” she said.
I couldn’t figure out what difference all this made, why we should be sitting here and speculating. I didn’t really see what difference anything could make. We would go on and we’d not know where we were going, but we could always hope that we’d find a better place than this bone-dry wilderness with its flinty ridges and its twisted badlands, we could always hope that we might get a break somehow and that we’d recognize it soon enough to take advantage of it.
The fact that the men whose bones lay there in the gully’s end had been seeking someone did not necessarily mean they knew he’d come this way. Probably they had been as confused as we were. And there was no real evidence that Knight had been the one they had been looking for.
So we sat there by the campfire and planned it out.
We would load Paint with Roscoe’s useless carcass and all the water and food that he could carry. Tuck and I would carry heavy packs while Sara, the only one of us with a weapon, would carry a light load, so that in a moment of emergency she could drop her pack and be ready with the rifle. Hoot would carry nothing. He would be our scout, ranging out ahead of us and spying out the land.
That afternoon, much as we disliked the doing of it, we went down the gully and dug through the fort. We found three human skulls and half a dozen rusted weapons that were too far gone to determine what kind of guns they might have been. Paint recalled that there had been eight humans and the large number of scattered bones seemed to bear him out. But three skulls were all we found.
Back at camp we made up our packs and hauled the rest of the supplies off the trail, caching them in a narrow fissure than ran down into the gully. Using branches, we brushed out our tracks leading off the trail. Neither the caching job or the brushing out of tracks was done too expertly. But I had the feeling that it was all a waste of time, that the trail had been long abandoned and that we might have been the first to travel it for a century or more.
The day was far gone, but we loaded up and left. There was none of us who wanted to stay in that camp for a minute longer than was necessary. We fled from it, glad to get away, to be free of the depressing walls of barren earth and the sense of ancient doom one could feel hanging over it. And there was, as well, a sense of urgency, a never-expressed, perhaps never-admitted feeling that we were running out of time.
FIFTEEN
Hoot stumbled on the centaurs the second day out.
We still were in the badlands. Heretofore any of them we had come to had been crossed in a few hours or a day at most. But this badlands area seemed to stretch on forever and we all looked forward to the end of it, if the end should ever come. Loaded down with heavy packs as Tuck and I were, it was rugged going, mostly up and down, with only short respites when the trail ran for short distances across more level land.
Hoot kept out ahead of us. We saw him only now and then and then only glimpses of him when he stood on some high point to look back and see how we were doing.
Shortly before noon I saw him sidewheeling rapidly down the trail above us. Glad of an excuse to rest, I dropped my pack and waited for him. So did Sara, but Tuck merely stopped when we stopped and did not drop his pack. He stood there, hunched over under the weight of it, staring at the ground. Since we’d left the camp where we had lost the hobbies, he had been more withdrawn than ever, fumbling along without paying attention to anything at all.
Hoot came slithering down the trail and stopped in front of us.
“Hobbies ahead,” he hooted at me. “Ten times ten of them. But without their rockers and with faces such as you.”
“Centaurs,” Sara said.
“Playing,” panted Hoot. “In depression in the hills. Playing at game. Knocking sphere about with sticks.”
“Centaurs playing polo,” Sara said, enchanted. “What could be more appropriate!”
She reached up to brush the truant lock of hair out of her eyes and watching her, I caught a glimpse again of the girl who had met me in the hallway of that old house back on Earth-as she had looked before the dust and wear of travel on this planet had blunted the sharp edge of her beauty.
“Understand do I,” said Hoot, “that you seek for them. Glad I be to find them.”
“Thank you, Hoot,” said Sara.
I reached down and picked up my pack and shrugged into the harness.
“Lead on, Hoot,” I said.
“Do you think,” asked Sara, “that the centaurs still might have the brain case? They might have lost it or broken it or used it up some way.”
“We’ll know,” I said, “when we talk with them.”
“What about his memory?” she asked. “If we get the case and put it into him, will the memory still be there? Will he remember as well as when it was taken out of him?”
“The memory won’t be lost,” I assured her. “Everthing he ever knew will still be there. It’s the way a robotic brain is made. They don’t forget like people.”
There was a chance, of course, that there’d be more than one tribe of centaurs on the planet, that there might be many tribes of them, and that this one up ahead, engaged in their polo playing, would not be the tribe that had Roscoe’s brain case. But I didn’t mention this to her.
There was a chance as well they’d not be interested in parting with it. Although I couldn’t imagine what earthly good a robotic brain case would be to anyone unless they had a robot.
When we neared the top of the hill beyond the one down which Hoot had scrambled to bring us word, he whispered to us that the centaurs were just beyond the bill.
I’m not sure why we did it, for no one passed the word to do it, but we all scrooched down when we neared the top of the hill and peeked over it.
Below us lay a wide flat area of sand and scrawny vegetation and beyond that little area the red and yellow of the desert lay, with the badlands formations finally petering out.
Hoot had been wrong in his counting of them. There were many more than ten times ten. The bulk of them were ranged solidly around a rectangular playing field, which was a playing field only by the virtue of a game being played upon it. It was a level chunk of desert, with two rows of white stones serving as goals. Upon the field a dozen centaurs were involved in furious action, long clubs clutched in their hands, fighting for the possession of a ball, whacking it back and forth-a rude and very elemental version of the noble game of polo.
Even as we watched, however, the, game came to an end. The players trotted off the field and the crowd began breaking up.
Beyond the polo field a few tents were set up, although one should not have called them tents. They were simply large squares of some sort of dirty fabric supported by poles thrust into the ground, designed perhaps for nothing more than shelter from the sun. Here and there among the shelters were piles of packs, probably containing the few possessions of the tribe.
The centaurs were milling about, with no seeming purpose, exactly as a crowd of people on an aimless holiday would mill around.
“What do we do now?” asked Sara. “Just walk down to them?”
Tuck came out of his trance. “Not all of us,” he said. “Just one.”
“And I suppose that’s you,” I said, half-kidding.
“Of course it’s me,” said Tuck. “If anyone is going to get killed, I’m the candidate.”
“I don’t think,” said Sara, “that they’d just up and kill someone.”
“That’s what you think,” I said.
“Let’s look at it logically,” said Tuck, in that dirty supercilious way of his that made you want to belt him. “Of all of us, I am the least likely to get killed. I am a humble-looking person, very inoffensive and with no bluster in me and probably not appearing quite right in the head. And I have this brown robe and I don’t wear shoes, but sandals. . .”