“It is beyond human experience,” said Knight. “It is, indeed, beyond human imagination. I sometimes wonder if someone in some distant age, by some process which I cannot even begin to understand, caught a glimpse and the meaning of this place and called it Heaven. . .”
He was old. He was incredibly old and filthy, a walking corpse. The skin was drawn tight over his cheekbones and pulled back from his lips, revealing yellowed, rotting teeth. Through a great rent in his robe, caked with filth, his ribs stood out like those of a winter-starved horse. His hands were claws. His beard was matted with dirt and drool and his hooded eyes gleamed with a vacant light, eyes half-dead and yet somehow sharp, too sharp to be housed in such an ancient, tottering body.
“Sara,” I shouted.
For she was standing in complete and polite absorption, listening ecstatically to the words mouthed by the filthy old wreck who sat huddled in his chair.
She whirled on me. “For the last time, Mike. . .”
By the look of cold fury on her face, I knew that she still saw him as he had appeared before, that the change was not apparent to her, that she still was trapped in whatever enchantment had ensnared us.
I moved fast, scarcely thinking. I clipped her on the chin, hard and accurately and without pity, and I caught her as she fell. I slung her over my shoulder and as I did I saw that Knight was struggling to push himself out of the chair and even as he continued his efforts, his mouth kept moving and he never stopped his talk.
“What is the trouble, my friends?” he asked. “Have I done some unwitting thing to offend you? It is so hard at times to know and appreciate the mores of the people that one meets. It is easy to perform one misguided act or say one unguarded word…”
I turned to go and as I did I saw that wooden box on the table top and reached out to grab it.
Hoot was pleading with me. “Mike, delay do not. Stand not on ceremony. Flee, please, with all alacrity.”
We fled with all alacrity.
TWENTY
We made good time, not looking back. I did look back, for an instant only, before we plunged into the canyonlike cleft between the soaring rocks that led back to the gateway.
Sara came to and screamed at me, kicking and beating at my back with clenched fists, but I hung tightly to her with one arm, holding her against my shoulder. In the other arm, I clutched the wooden box I had lifted from the table.
Still running, we reached the end of the canyon. Roscoe and Paint stood exactly as we had left them. Sara’s rifle leaned against the rocky wail and my sword and shield lay beside them.
I dumped Sara on the ground with no ceremony. I had taken quite a beating from her flailing feet and fists, and was not feeling exactly kindly toward her and was glad to be rid of her.
She landed on her rump and stayed sitting there, looking up at me, her face white with fury, her jaws working, but so sore at me that she could form no word but one, “You- you-you,” she kept saying. It was probably the first time in her money-buttressed life that anyone had laid violent and disrespectful hands upon her.
I stood there, looking down at her, blown with my mad, frantic running up the valley and through the canyon, gulping air, weak in the knees, sore in the back and belly, where she had hammered me-and thinking of that one backward look I’d taken before I’d plunged into the canyon.
“You hit me!” she finally said screaming in her outrage.
She said it and waited for my answer. But I had no answer. I had no answer in my mind and no breath to speak an answer. I don’t know what she expected as an answer. Maybe she was hoping I’d deny it, so that she could berate me not only as a bully, but a liar, too.
“You hit me!” she screamed again.
“You’re damned right I did,” I said. “You didn’t see a thing. You would have argued with me. There was nothing else to do.”
She leaped to her feet and confronted me. “We found Lawrence Arlen Knight,” she yelled. “We found a wonderful, shining place. After all our traveling, we found what we set out to find and then. . .”
Hoot said, “Gracious lady, the fault belongs on me. I sensed it with the edges of my third self and I made Mike to see. Strength I did not have to make more than one of you to see. Not the second one. And I made Mike to see. . .”
She whirled on him. “You filthy beast!” she cried. She lashed out with her foot. The kick caught him in the side and bowled him over. He lay there, his tiny feet working like little pistons, trying frantically to right himself.
Then, swiftly, she was on her knees beside him. “Hoot,” she cried, “I’m sorry. Can you believe me, I am sorry. I am sorry and ashamed.” She set him on his feet.
She looked up at me. “Mike! Oh, Mike! What has happened to us?”
“Enchantment,” I said. “It’s the only thing I can think of that would cover it. Enchantment happened to us.”
“Kindly one,” Hoot said to her, “resentment I do not bear. Reaction of the foot was a natural one. I quite understand.”
“Stand,” said Roscoe, “band, grand, sand.”
“Shut up,” said Old Paint, gruffly. “You’ll drive us nuts with that gibberish.”
“It was all illusion,” I told her. “There were no marble villas. There were only filthy huts. The stream did not run free and shining; it was clogged with garbage from those huts. There was a terrible smell to it that caught you in the throat. And Lawrence Arlen Knight, if that is who he was, was a walking corpse kept alive by God knows what alchemy.”
“Wanted here we’re not,” said Hoot.
“We are trespassers,” I said. “Once here we can’t go back to space because no one must know about this planet. We’re caught in a big fly trap. Once we came near we were tolled in to a landing by the signal. And finally we chased a myth and that myth was another fly trap-a trap within a trap.”
“But Lawrence Arlen Knight chased the myth back in the galaxy.”
“And so did we,” I said. “So did the humanoids who left their bones back in the gully. In some insect traps certain scents and odors are used to attract the insects, even from far off. And in many cases the scents and odors drift on the winds to very distant places. Read, instead of scent and odor, myth and legend. . .”
“But that man back there,” she said, “was happy and contented and so full of life and plans. His days were busy days and full. Knight or not, he was sure he’d reached the place that he had hunted.”
“What simpler way,” I asked, “to keep a life form where you want it than to make it happy where you put it?”
“You are sure?” she asked. “Sure of what you saw? Hoot could not have fooled you?”
“Fool him I did not,” said Hoot. “I make him see it straight.”
“But what difference would it make?” she asked. “If he is happy there. If he has purpose there. If life is meaningful and there is no such thing as time to rob it of its meaning. . .”
“You mean we could have stayed?”
She nodded. “He said there was a place for us. That there are always places. We could have settled down. We could have…”
“Sara,” I asked, “is that what you really want? To settle down in imagined happiness? Never to go back to Earth?”
She started to speak, then hesitated.
“You know damn well,” I said, “it isn’t. Back on Earth you have this house filled with hides and heads, with trophies of the hunt. The great huntress. The killer of the vicious life forms of the galaxy. They gave you social status, they made you a glamor figure. But there were too many of them. People began to yawn at them. They were getting bored with your adventures. So to keep on being glamorous, you had to hunt a different game. . .”
She leaped to her feet and her hand swung in a vicious arc and caught me in the face.
I grinned at her. “We’re even now,” I said.
TWENTY-ONE
We turned back, traveling down the trail that we had used in coming, back across that great blue land of high plateau, with the purple mountains looming up behind us.
I had expected Sara to raise a fuss about it. I was not sure that she believed what I had told her; how could she? All she had was my word for it and I was not certain how much reliance she would put upon my word. She had seen none of what I’d seen. So far as she was concerned, the valley still was a shining place, with a flashing stream and bright white sunlight, with the marble villas still perched among the crags. If she were to go back, I was sure, it would all be there for her, unchanged. The enchantment still was working for her.