I felt Roscoe pawing at my shoulder and turned to see what it was he wanted. He pointed back the way we’d come.
And there they were, a herd of them. There was no mistaking them. They were, in flesh, the kind of monstrous beasts that had left their skeletons piled in a windrow back in the gorge where we had rescued Paint. They were massive things, running on great hind legs, with tails thrust out behind them to balance the great bulk of their bodies and their gigantic heads. With poised front legs armed with sharp and gleaming talons. The heads grinned at us and even from that distance there was evil in the faces. They might have been following us for a long time, but this was the first time they had shown themselves.
They were big and ugly and they were coming fast. I had seen what they could do and I wasn’t about to wait and let them get to work on me. I lit out of there, heading for the trail that led toward the city. The shield weighed me down and I threw it away. The scabbarded sword banged against my knees and I tried to get the belt unbuckled, and while I was doing this the sword tripped me and I went sprawling like a cartwheel. Just before I came out of my spin and was falling flat upon my face, a hand reached out and grabbed me by the sword belt and held me high enough so that I cleared the ground, just barely. I hung there, swaying back and forth and watched the ground jerk by underneath my nose and out of one corner of my eyes I saw Roscoe’s feet moving like a blur.
My God, how he could run.
I tried to angle my head around to see where we might be, but I was so near the ground I couldn’t see a thing. It wasn’t comfortable and it was embarrassing, but I wasn’t beefing any. Roscoe was covering the ground in a satisfactory manner, much faster than if he’d had to wait for me.
Then finally I saw pavement underneath my face and Roscoe jerked me up and set me on my feet. I was a little dizzy and inclined to stagger, but I saw we were in the narrow city street we’d traveled days before, with the straight white walls arrowing up into the sky above us.
Angry snarling and vicious trumpeting sounded behind me and when I spun around I saw the pursuing beasts throwing their bodies into the narrow cleft of street, throwing them ferociously and vainly, fighting to get at us, fighting to get in. But we were safe. Finally I had an answer as to why the streets should be so narrow.
TWENTY-SIX
The ghostly ships still stood upon the whiteness of the landing field with the great white cliffs of the city rising up like the inner sides of a gigantic cup. The field was as clean as ever and there was a deathly silence over everything. Nothing stirred; there was no breath of wind.
The shriveled, shrunken body of the gnome hung limp and listless at the end of a rope tied to a rafter in the storeroom. The storeroom looked as it had before, with boxes, bales and bundles piled high. There was no sign of the hobbies.
In that great room to which the ramp led up from the street the slabs of stone were still in place, with the circular control dial to one side of them. One of the slabs was glowing and in the glow was a nightmare world of what seemed a brand-new planet, its half-molten, half-crystallized surface heaving in a slow pulsation, pitted with craters of red-hot slag, steam vents sending out slender plumes of smoke and superheated water. In the distance volcanoes belched flame and heavy clouds of smoke.
Roscoe had unloaded his packs and the water tin just inside the door that opened on the ramp and now was hunkered down, scratching at the floor, but making no marks upon it, and for once he wasn’t mumbling to himself.
I went on breaking up the wooden bench I’d taken from the storeroom, feeding the fire I’d built upon the floor. And here I was, I thought, a latter-day barbarian camping in the deserted city of a vanished race, with another barbarian swinging at the end of a rope in the next door and a mechanical intelligence working on a problem that no one knew, perhaps least of all himself.
It was incredible that Roscoe could know what he was doing. There would have been no need to program him for the kind of calculations that he seemed to be engaged in working out. Was it possible, I wondered, that the beating his brain case had taken while being used as a polo ball had not only knocked out of him all ordinary sense, but had knocked genius into him?
The sun had passed its zenith and the lower part of the street outside lay in darkness, but by craning my neck, I could see the sunlight on the upper storeys of the soaring buildings. And from that upper part of the city came the faint, far-off sound of wind funneling through the higher levels. Down in the lower levels there was no hint of breeze.
A deserted city and why had it been deserted? What had happened to drive its people from it Or had they been driven? Perhaps they had accomplished their purpose and the city had served its purpose and they had simply left, for there may have been other planets where they could carry out other purposes, or maybe the same purpose as they had followed here. And could that purpose have been solely the planting of the trees-the planting of them and their careful nurturing until they had reached a size where they no longer needed care? It would have taken centuries, perhaps millennia, before the trees could be left on their own. The surveying to determine where they should be planted and the planting of them, the preliminary task alone would have required many years. And after that the building of the pits to store the seeds and the raising of the little rodents that collected them-there would be much to do.
But it would have been worth the work and time if the trees, indeed, were planted for the purpose hinted in Knight’s manuscript. Each tree a receiving station that picked up information by a means that I could not imagine (the interception of mental waves, perhaps?) that filtered out from the galaxy. Millions of receivers hanging above the expanse of the galaxy, picking up the knowledge radiations, processing and enhancing them and storing them against a time when the planters could come at periodic intervals and extract the knowledge which had been thus collected. And where would the knowledge thus derived be stored? Certainly not in the trees themselves, but in the seeds, perhaps, storing it in a complicated DNA-RNA complex altering the purely biological characteristics of the nucleic acids so that instead of biological information alone many other kinds of information also might be stored.
I sweated, thinking of it. In the pits and bins in which the rodents dropped the seeds rested a treasure greater than anyone could dream. Anyone who could gather the seeds and crack the technique and the code to give up the knowledge they contained would have the intellectual resources of the galaxy at their fingertips. If one could beat the planters of this planetary orchard to the harvest, there would be rich pickings to be had. The planters, well aware of such a danger, had taken extraordinary precautions against word of the planet and its purpose ever leaking out. Outsiders could come here, were even encouraged to come here once they were in range, but once here there was, it seemed, no way to leave and carry back to the galaxy news of what they’d found.
How often did the planters come, I wondered. Every thousand years, perhaps. In each thousand years, most certainly, there’d be new galactic knowledge worthy of acquiring. Or did they come no longer? Had something happened to them that had stopped their harvest trips? Or could they have abandoned the entire project as no longer worth the effort? In the millennia which may have passed since this city had been built and this planet planted, had there been a shift in values and in viewpoint so that now to them, now either a more mature or a senile race, this planting of the planet (or, perhaps, of many planets) might seem no more than a childish program performed in the mistaken enthusiasm of their youth.
My legs were getting cramped from crouching and I put out a hand to rest, palm down, on the floor, preparatory to changing my position and as I reached out, my hand came down upon the doll. I didn’t pick it up; I didn’t want to look at it. I simply ran my fingers over the carven planes of that saddened face and I thought, as I did this, that the planters of the planet, the builders of the city, had not been the first. Before they had arrived there had been another race, the one that had built the churchlike edifice at the city’s edge. One of them had carved the doll and it might be, I told myself, that the carving of the doll had been a greater feat, a more intellectual, certainly a more emotional, accomplishment than the building of the city and the planting of the trees.