After several days, from boredom rather than from curiosity, I opened the box again and took out the manuscript. Starting at the very beginning of it, I read it carefully-not all at once, of course, for it was slow going and tightly written and hard to decipher and there were many pages of it. I studied it as a scholar in some time-droning monastery might have studied some arcane roll of parchment, seeking, I think, not so much information as an understanding of the kind of mind that would write such a mass of garbage, trying to look through the vapid wanderings of that mind to a kernel of truth that still might dwell subconsciously in the man.
But there was nothing there, or at least nothing I could find. It was totally unintelligible and most of it inconceivable to anyone but an utter moron overflowing with words that must be gotten out of him, no matter what they meant.
It was not until the tenth night or so, when we were only two days march from the beginning of the desert, that I finally reached a portion of the manuscript that seemed to make some sense:
And these ones seek blue and purple knowledge. From all the universe they seek it. They trap all that may be thought or known. Not only blue and purple, but all spectra of knowing. They trap it on lonely planets, far lost in space and deep in time. In the blue of time. With trees they trap it and trapped, it is stored and kept against a time of golden harvest. Great orchards of mighty trees that tower into the blue for miles. Soaking in the thought and knowledge. As other planets soak in the gold of sun. And this knowledge is their fruit. Fruit is many things. It is sustenance of body and for brain. It is round and long and hard and soft. It is blue and gold and purple. Sometimes red. It ripens and it falls. It is harvested. For harvesting is a gathering and fruiting is a growing. Both are blue and gold.
And he was off again into his nonsensical ramblings in which color and shape and size, as it had all through the manuscript, played a major role.
I went back and read the single paragraph again and went back carefully over the preceding page to find some indication of who “these ones” might be, but there was nothing that could help me.
I put the manuscript away and sat late beside the fire, thinking furiously. Was that one paragraph no more than the disordered meandering of a half-mad mind, as must be all the rest of it? Or did it, perchance, represent a single lucid moment during which he’d written down some fact, couched in his disjointed, mystic style, that he knew might be important? Or could it be that Knight was less crazy than I thought and that all the gibberish of the manuscript was no more than a camouflage in which might be concealed a message that he wanted to transmit to whoever might somehow get his hands upon it? That this might be the case seemed farfetched. If he had been clear enough in mind to do a thing like that he would have long since quit the valley and come pelting down the trail, hoping against hope that he might find some way to flee the planet and carry what he knew back to the galaxy.
If the words should be a hidden message, how had he found out? Was there a record somewhere in the city that would tell the story? Or had he talked to someone or something that had seized the chance to pass on the knowledge of why this planet should be a planted orchard? Or had it, perhaps, been Roscoe who had learned the truth? There might be ways, I thought, that Roscoe could find out, for Roscoe was, of all things, a telepathic robot. Although right now he didn’t look like one. He squatted beside me and once again he had smoothed out a slate upon the ground and was writing symbols, softly jabbering to himself.
I almost asked him and then decided not to try. There was nothing, I was convinced, that anyone could learn from this battered robot.
The next morning we went on and on the second day we came to the cache we’d made, filled one of the water tins and retrieved some food. With the water and the supplies on Roscoe’s back, we faced the desert.
We made good time. We passed the field where I had fought the centaurs and came to, and went on without stopping, the gully where we’d found Old Paint. We stumbled on old campfires where we’d spent a night, we recognized certain landmarks and the land was red and yellow and honkers hooted in the distances and we glimpsed at times some of the other strange denizens of the place. But nothing interfered with us and we drove on down the frail.
Now the others came out to travel with us, a shadowy, ghostly company-Sara riding on Old Paint, Tuck tripping in his long brown robe and leading the stumbling, fumbling George Smith by the hand, Hoot ranging far ahead, always ranging far ahead to spy out the trail, and I found myself shouting to him, a, foolish thing to do, for he was too far ahead of us to hear me. There were times, I think, when I believed they were really with us, and other times when I knew they weren’t. But even when I knew they weren’t, it was a comfort to imagine that I saw them. There was one, thing that perplexed me. Tuck carried the doll clutched tight against his breast and at the same time I carried the selfsame doll in the pocket of my jacket.
The doll no longer was glued to my hand. I could let loose of it, but I kept on carrying it. I don’t know why I did. Somehow I just had to. At nights I’d sit and look at it, half-repelled, half-fascinated, but night by night, it seemed, the repulsion wore away and the fascination won. I either sat looking at the doll, hoping that some day I might encompass within my mind all I saw upon its face and then be done with it. Either that or read the manuscript, which continued on its witless way until near the very end when this occurred:
Trees are tallness. Trees reach high. Never satisfied. Never fulfilled. What I write about trees and trapped knowledge being true. Tops are’ vapory, blue vapor…
What I say about trees and trapped knowledge being true…
Was that single sentence tucked in among the gibberish put there to fortify and reaffirm what he had written many pages back? Another flash of lucidity in the midst of all his foolishness? One was tempted to believe so, but there was no way to know.
The next night I finished reading the manuscript. There was nothing more.
And the third day after that we sighted the city, far off, like a snowy mountain thrusting up into the sky.
TWENTY-FIVE
The tree still lay where I had chopped it down with the raking laser beam, its jagged stump like a massive spear stabbing at the sky. The bole stretched for miles along the ground, its vegetation shriveled brown, revealing its woody skeleton.
Beyond it loomed the bulk of the red-stone edifice in which the tree had penned us with its bombardment, and looking at, it, I could hear again, in memory and imagination, the sound of millions of invisible wings flying underneath its roof, beating their way out of nowhere into nowhere.
A foul and bitter stench blew from the free and as we approached it I could see that the circular, lawnlike area which had surrounded the stump had caved in upon itself and become a pit. Out of the pit rose the stench and from the knoll on which we stood I caught a glimpse of slimy skeletons- strangely wrought but undeniably skeletons-floating in the oily liquid that half filled the pit.
Not just one life, I told myself, not the life of the free alone, but an entire community of life-the little, crying, mewling creatures that had swarmed out to cry their denunciations of us and now this, another community of life which had existed in a fluid reservoir underneath the tree. Life that in some way was intimately bound up with the free, that could no longer live once the tree was dead, that may have lived only so that the tree might live. I looked for some evidence of the mewling creatures which, by now, must be dead as well. There was no sign of them. Had they in death, I wondered, dried up into almost weightless nothingness, and been scattered by the wind.
I had been the one, I thought. It had been my hand that had loosed the death. I had intended to kill the tree alone; I had killed much else besides. I wondered what had come over me that I should be thinking this. They’d had it coming, hadn’t they? The tree had attacked us and I had had every moral reason and every legal right to fight back. That much at least was gospel, a personal and very intimate gospel built up through the years. Nothing acted tough toward me that I didn’t act tough right back. And it worked, I told myself grimly. Throughout our long trek to the mountains and the long trek back, no tree had made a pass at us. The word somehow had been passed along: Leave this guy alone; he’s pure poison if you mess around with him. Not knowing I no longer had a laser gun, apparently not wanting to take the chance of finding out.