“Don’t you understand?” I asked. “Smith is gone.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that he is gone,” he said. “I think he has been taken.”
“Taken!” I yelled. “Who the hell would take him? What would want him?”
He looked at me, a condescending look for which I gladly could have strangled hint. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You have never understood. You’ll never understand. You don’t feel it, do you? With it all around us, you don’t feel a thing. You’re too crass and materialistic. Brute force and bombast are the only things that mean anything to you. Even here. . .”
I grabbed his robe and twisted it to pull it tight around him and then rose to my feet, dragging him along with me. The doll fell from his grasp as he raised his hands to try to loosen my hold upon the robe. I kicked it to one side, clattering, out into the darkness.
“Now,” I yelled, “what is all of this? What is going on that I don’t see or feel, that I don’t understand?”
I shook him so hard that his hands flopped away and hung down at his side; his head bobbed back and forth and his teeth chattered.
Sara was at my side, tugging at my arm.
“Leave him alone,” she screamed at me.
I let loose of him and he staggered a bit before he got his feet well under him.
“What did he do?” Sara demanded. “What did he say to you?”
“You heard,” I said. “You must have heard. He said Smith had been taken. Taken by what is what I want to know. Taken where? And why?”
“So would I,” said Sara.
And, so help me, for once she was on my side. And just a while before she had called me Mike instead of captain.
He backed away from us, whimpering. Then suddenly he made a break, scuttling out into the darkness.
“Hey, there!” 1 shouted, starting after him.
But before I could reach him, he stopped and stooped, scooping up that ridiculous doll of his.
I turned about, disgusted, and went stalking back to the fire. I took a stick of wood off the stack of fuel and pushed the burning embers together, found three or four small sticks of wood and laid them upon the coals. Flames immediately began to lick up about them.
Squatting by the fire, I watched Sara and Tuck walking back toward me. I waited for them to come up and stayed there, squatting, looking up at them.
They stopped and stood there, looking at me. Finally Sara spoke.
“Are we going to look for George?”
“Where do we look?” I asked.
“Why, here,” she said, with a wave of her arm indicating the dark interior of the building.
“You didn’t hear him leave,” I said. “You saw him, just as he had been all night, then a moment later when you looked back, he wasn’t there. You didn’t hear him move. If he had moved, you would have heard him. He couldn’t just get up and tiptoe away. He didn’t have the time to do it and he was blind and he couldn’t have known where he was. If he had awakened, he would have been confused and called out.”
I said to Tuck, “What do you know about this? What was it you tried to tell me?”
He shook his head, like a sulky child.
“You must believe me,” Sara said. “I didn’t go to sleep. I didn’t doze. After you woke me to get some sleep yourself, I kept faithful watch. It was exactly as I told you.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I never doubted you. That leaves it up to Tuck. If he knows something, let us hear it now before we go rushing off.”
Neither Sara nor I said a word. We waited for him and finally he spoke. “You know about the voice. The voice of the person George thought of as a friend. And here he found his friend. Right here. In this very place.”
“And you think,” I said, “he was taken by this friend of his?”
Tuck nodded. “I don’t know how,” he said, “but I hope that I am right. George deserved it. He had something good coming after all the years. You never liked him. There were a lot of people who never liked him. He grated on them. But he had a beautiful soul. He was a gentle sort of person.”
Christ, yes, I thought, a gentle sort of person. Lord save me from all these gentle, whining people.
Sara said to me, “You buy any of this, captain?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Something happened to him. I don’t know if this is it. He didn’t walk away. He didn’t make it under his own power.”
“Who is this friend of his?” asked Sara.
“Not a who,” I said. “A what.”
And, squatting there by the fire, I remembered the rush of beating wings I’d heard, flying through the upper darkness of this great abandoned building.
“There is something here,” said Tuck. “Certainly you must feel it.”
Faintly out of the darkness came a sound of ticking, a regular, orderly, rapid ticking that grew louder, seeming to draw closer. We faced around into the darkness from which the ticking came, Sara with the rifle at the ready, Tuck clutching the doll desperately against him, as if it might be some sort of fetish that would protect him from all harm.
I saw the shape that went with the ticking before the others did.
“Don’t shoot!” I yelled. “It’s Hoot.”
He came toward us, his many little feet twinkling in the firelight, ticking on the floor. He stopped when he saw all of us facing him, then came slowly in.
“Informed I am,” he said. “I knew him go and hurried back.”
“You what?” I yelled.
“Your friend is go. He disappear from sense.”
“You mean you knew the instant he was gone? How could you?”
“All of you,” he said, “I carry in my mind. Even when I cannot see. And one is gone from out my mind and I think great tragedy, so I hurry back.”
“You say you heard him go,” said Sara. “You mean just now?”
“Just short ago,”said Hoot.
“Can you tell us where? Do you know what happened to him?”
Hoot waved a tentacle wearily. “Cannot tell. Only know is gone. No use to seek for him.”
“You mean he isn’t here. Not in this building?”
“Not this edifice,” said Hoot. “Not outside. Not on this planet, maybe. He is gone entire.”
Sara glanced at me. I shrugged.
Tuck said, “Why is it so hard for you to believe a fact that you can’t touch or see? Why must all mysteries have possible solutions? Why must you think only in their terms of physical laws? Is there no room outside your little minds for something more than that?”
I should have clobbered him, I suppose, but right at that moment it didn’t seem important to pay attention to a pipsqueak such as him.
I said to Sara, “We can look. I don’t think we’ll find him, but we still could have a look.”
“I’d feel better if we did,” she said. “It doesn’t seem quite right not to even try.”
“You disbelieve this thing I tell you?” Hoot inquired. “I don’t think we do,” I said. “What you say most undoubtedly is true. But there is a certain loyalty in our race-it’s a hard thing to explain. Even when we know there is no hope, we still go out to look. It’s not logical, perhaps.”
“No logic,” said Hoot, “assuredly and yet a ragged sense and admirable. I go and help you look.”
“There is no need to, Hoot.”
“You withhold me from sharing of your loyalty?”
“Oh, all right, then. Come along.”
Sara said, “I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “We need someone to watch the camp.”
“There is Tuck,” she said.
“You should know very well, Miss Foster,” Tuck said, petulantly, “that he would not trust me to watch anything at all. Besides, it all is foolish. What this creature says is true. You won’t find George, no matter where you look.”
EIGHT
We had gone only a short distance into the interior of the building when Hoot said to me, “I came to carry news, but I did not divulge it, its import seeming trivial with the lamented absence of your companion. But perhaps you hear it now.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“It concerns the seeds,” said Hoot. “To this feeble intellect, great mystery is attached.”
“For the love of Christ,” I said, “quit talking around in circles.”
“I improve upon mere talk,” said Hoot. “I point it out to you. Please veer slightly with me.”
He started off at an angle and I veered slightly with him and we came to a heavy metal grating set into the floor. He pointed at it sternly with a tentacle. “Seeds down there,” he said.