At times I pulled the doll from the jacket pocket and sat staring at its face-at that terrible, tortured face-perhaps to cancel out that other face across the fire from me, perhaps in the irrational hope that those wooden lips would part and speak, giving me an answer. For, again irrationally, the doll was a part of it as well, a part of all that was happening as many great imponderables seemed to be closing upon collision courses.
At last, after many days, we climbed a ridge and saw before us the beginning of that last badlands area-where the hobbies had deserted us and we’d found the pile of bones and Paint.
The trail led down the rise and across a flat and climbed, twisting, up into the badlands.
Far up the trail, just this side of the point where it plunged to disappear into the badlands, something was moving, a tiny point of light flashing in the sun. I watched it, puzzled for a moment, and then it moved into a position on the trail where it was outlined against the darker ground behind it. And there was no mistaking it-the rocking, bobbing lope.
Roscoe spoke quietly beside me. “It is Paint,” he said.
“But Paint wouldn’t come back without. . .”
And then I was running down the slope, waving my arms and shouting, with Roscoe close upon my heels.
From far off she saw us and waved back at us, a little gesturing doll upon the loping Paint.
Paint was coming like the wind. He fairly skimmed the ground. We met out on the flat, Paint skidding to a stop. Before I could reach her, Sara slid off Paint. She was raging at me. It was like old times.
“You did it again!” she yelled at me. “I couldn’t stay. You loused it up for me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forget what you and Hoot had told me. You knew it would be like that. You had it figured out. You were so sure of it you left Paint to bring me back.”
“Sara,” I protested, “for the love of God, be reasonable.”
“No,” she cried, “you listen. You spoiled everything for me. You took away the magic and you. . .”
She stopped talking in mid-sentence and her face was twisted up as if she were trying not to weep.
“No, that’s not it,” she said. “It wasn’t only you. It was all of us… With our petty bickering and. . .”
I took two quick steps and had her in my arms. She clung to me. Hating me, perhaps, but clinging to me because I was the one last thing that she had to cling to.
“Mike,” she said, her voice muffled against my chest, “we aren’t going to snake it, it is simply no use. They won’t let us make it.”
“But that’s all wrong,” I told her. “The ship is clear. Roscoe found the way. We’re going back to Earth.”
“If generous, hopeful human will only take a look,” said Paint, “he’ll perceive what she be talking of. They follow all the way. They dog our hurrying footprints. They get more all the time.”
I jerked up my head and there they were, crowding together along the rugged skyline of the badlands-a mighty herd of the massive beasts that bad left their bones in a wind-row in the gully.
They crept forward, pushing and shoving, and some of them were forced down the distant slopes to make way for those who crowded in behind them. There were hundreds of them, more likely thousands of them. They didn’t seem to move; they flowed, spilling off the slopes, spreading out on either flank.
“They’re behind us, too,” said Roscoe, speaking far too quietly, making too much of an effort to stifle rising panic.
I twisted my head around and there, on the crest of the ridge we had just crossed, they were surging into view.
“You found the doll,” said Sara.
“What doll?” I asked. At a time like this, of all crazy things…
“Tuck’s doll,” she said. She reached out and tugged it from the pocket. “Do you know, all the time Tuck had it, I never really saw it.”
I pushed her away from me and lifted the laser rifle. Roscoe grabbed my arm.
“There are too many of them,” he said.
I pulled my arm savagely away from him. “What do you want me to do?” I shouted at him. “Stand here and let them run us down?”
There were more of them than ever and in any direction one might look. We were surrounded by them. They came surging up on every side. There was just one big herd of them and we were in the center of it and they all were facing us. They were taking it easy. They were not in any hurry. They had us pegged and they could take us any time they wanted.
Roscoe dropped to his knees and smoothed out a patch of ground with an outstretched palm.
“What the hell!” I yelled.
Surrounded by man-eating monsters and there was Sara, standing transfixed, staring at a doll, and here that bumbling, mumbling idiot down upon his knees, fiddling with equations.
“The world at times makes little sense,” said Paint, “but with you and I on guard…”
“You keep out of this!” I yelled at him. I had enough to keep an eye on without having to bandy words with a stupid hobby.
I couldn’t get them all, of course, but I’d get the most of them. I’d burn them by the thousands into smoking crisps of flesh and I might discourage them. They were brave and confident; they’d never faced a laser gun. They’d go up in puffs of smoke; they’d flare and not be there. Whenever they might take a mind to charge they would pay for it.
But I knew there were too many of them. They were all around us and when they began to move, they’d move on every side.
“Captain Ross,” said Roscoe, “I think I finally have it.”
“Well, good for you,” I said.
Sara moved over close beside me. Her rifle was slung across one shoulder and she had that silly doll clutched against her breast, the way Tuck always carried it.
“Sara,” I said, saying what I hadn’t meant to say, hadn’t planned to say, had scarcely known I wanted to say, my breath catching in my throat like any awkward schoolboy. “Sara, if we get out of this, can you and I start over? Can we start as if I were just coming through that door back on Earth and you waiting in the hall? You were wearing a green dress…”
“And you fell in love with me,” said Sara, “and then you insulted me and mocked me and I lashed back at you and the entire thing went haywire…”
“We fight so well together,” I said, “it would be a shame if anything should stop it.”
“You’re a bully,” Sara told me, “and I hated you. There were times I hated you so hard I could have beat your head in. But thinking back, I guess I loved every minute of it.”
“When they come at us,” I said, “crouch down out of the line of fire. I’ll be shooting in all directions as fast as I…”
“There is another way,” said Sara. “Tuck used it. The doll. An old race made the doll. A race that understood…”
“It’s all hogwash!” I yelled. “Tuck was nothing but a freak…”
“Tuck understood,” she yelled back at me. “He knew how to use the doll. George knew some of it, even with no doll. Hoot would have understood.”
Hoot, I thought. Barrel-shaped, pattering, many-legged little scurrier, with a face full of tentacles and three lives to live, now gone forever into his third phase, a part of me and that part gone and if he were here he’d know…
Even as I thought it, he was there, welling up inside my brain, as I had known him in that instant when hands and tentacles had clasped and held and we had been as one. It all was there again-all that I had known and felt, all that I had tried to recapture since and could not find again. All the glory and the wonder and some terror, too, for in understanding there must be certain terror. And out of the welter of all the wonder and the knowing, certain facts separated themselves from the mass of it and stood out crystal clear. And, I stood there, half myself, half Hoot-and not only Hoot, but all the rest of them there with me, and they there only because of what Hoot had given me, the ability to reach out and grasp and merge with the minds of others, as if for an instant it were not many minds, but a single mind. And myself as well, the forgotten edges of myself, the unplumbed depths of self.