I could hold in no longer and I yelled at him, “What the hell is that?”
“That,” he said, “cat, rat, vat, pat, mat, sat,” and then suddenly he was talking, not in rhyme, but still, so far as I was concerned, in gibberish: “Valence bond wave function equals product of antisymmetric spatial wave functions times symmetric wave functions times spin function of both antisymmetric and symmetric wave functions. . .”
“Wait just a goddamn minute,” I yelped at him. “What is going on? You talk like Mother Goose one minute and now you’re talking like a prof. . .”
“Prof,” he said, happily and solemnly, “scoff, doff, cough…”
But he went on writing that lingo in the dust. Writing steadily, with never any hesitation, as if he knew what he was doing and exactly what it meant. He filled the place he’d smoothed with symbols, then wiped it clean and smoothed it out again, and continued with his writing.
I held my breath and wished that I could read what he was writing, for despite all his clownishness, I was convinced that it was important.
Suddenly he froze, with his finger in the dust, no longer writing.
“Paint,” he said, and I waited for the string of rhyming words, but they did not come. ‘Paint,” he said again.
I leaped to my feet and Roscoe rose to stand beside me. Paint was coming down the trail, loping gracefully. He was alone; Sara was not with him.
He came to a sliding halt before us.
“Boss,” he said, “back I come, reporting for orders. She say for me to hurry. She say to you good-bye, she say to tell God bless you, which is beyond my feeble intellect to comprehend. She say she hope you get safely back to Earth. This humble being, sir, ask you what is Earth.”
“Earth is the home planet of our race,” I told him.
“Please, illustrious sir, you take me back to Earth?”
I shook my head. “Why should you want to go to Earth?”
“You, sir,” he said, “are being of compassion, You did not run away. You come into place of terror and fail to run away. From ridiculous predicament you rescue me with dainty gallantry. I would not willingly wish to wander from your side.”
“Thank you, Paint,” I said.
“Then, gratefully, I march with you, all the way to Earth.” “No, you don’t,” I said.
“But you said, fair sir…”
“I have something else for you to do.”
“Gladly will I perform in small recompense for your rescue of me, but, dear human, I had wished so hard for Earth.”
“You’ll go back,” I said, “and wait for Sara.”
“But she say good-bye distinctly. She say it as she meant it.”
“You’ll wait for her,” I said. “I don’t want her coming out and no way to get back.”
“You think she will come out?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“But wait for her I do?”
“That’s exactly it,” I said.
“But I wait,” he wailed “You go off to Earth and waiting still I am. I may be wait forever. If you want her, most kindly being, why don’t you come back and say to her. . .”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “Damn fool though she may be, she has to have her chance. Like George. Like Tuck.”
And I was surprised when I heard what I was saying.
Decision, I had told myself. There was a decision to he made. And here, finally, I had made it-without thought, with no pondering, a decision made without any reason, on no more than instinct. As if I, myself, may not have made it, as if someone else, standing off somewhere in the wings of time, had made it for me. As if Hoot had made it for me.
And as I thought of this, I remembered him telling me that I could not interfere, almost pleading with me not to go back into the valley and drag her out of there, as I had said I’d do. Stricken, I wondered how much of himself Hoot had left in me when he’d gone into his third self. And I tried to snare some remembrance of what it had been like, hand in tentacle, but all of it still was buried, out of reach, somewhere inside my mind, and I couldn’t reach it.
“Then I return,” said Paint, “full of sadness, but obedient. Earth it may not be, but better than the gully.”
He turned to go, but I called him back. I took the rifle and the cartridge belt and tied them to the saddle.
“The weapon she left for you,” Paint ‘told him. “No need of it has she.”
“If she comes out, she will,” I said.
“She not coming out,” Paint declared. “You’ know not coming out. Stars in her eyes she had when she go between the rocks.”
I didn’t answer. I stood and watched him as he turned and went back down the trail, going slowly so he’d not be out of hearing if I should call him back.
I didn’t call him back.
TWENTY-THREE
That evening, beside the campfire, I opened the box that I had grabbed off the table in Knight’s shack.
We had traveled well that day, although with every step I took I fought against the terrible feeling that something called me back, that, as a matter of fact, there was an actual force which sought to turn me back. Slogging along, I tried to figure who it was (not what it was, but who it was) who tried to hold me back. Sara, perhaps-the feeling that I should do something for her, if it were no more than going back to wait in hope she would return. A sense of guilt at deserting her, although I knew well and good I’d not deserted her, no more than we had deserted either George or Tuck. A belief that I had somehow failed her, and in certain instances I undoubtedly had failed her, but not in this particular instance. I think that more than anything else the thing that bothered me was that she apparently had not believed me about what Hoot and I had seen back in the valley. The idea persisted that somehow I should have made her understand, should have so convinced her she’d have had no thought of returning there. The going back I could understand-if someone had stood just for a moment inside the gates of Heaven he would not suffer gladly being yanked from out the gates. The thing I could not understand was how she could have, willfully and deliberately, failed to understand, clinging to a beloved delusion in the face of fact.
Or could Hoot have been the one, I wondered, who was tugging at me? Was there something lying hidden in my mind, something that he had planted there in those last few seconds, that kept up a faceless nagging at me? I tried once again to dredge up the bit of information-any bit of information-bearing upon that final encounter, but once again I failed.
Or could it be Paint? I had played a dirty trick on Paint, setting him a task I was unable or unwilling to perform myself. Perhaps, I told myself, I should turn around and go back and tell him he was relieved of the charge I had placed upon him. I tried to fend it off, but could not erase from mind the vision of Paint a thousand years from now, (a million years from now if he still existed a million years from now) still mounting solemn guard outside the portals, waiting for an event that was not about to happen, still faithful to words long gone into the wind as the mouth that spoke them had long gone into dust.
Miserable with all these thoughts, I stumbled down the trail.
To a watcher, we must have seemed a strange pair, I with my ridiculous shield and sword, Roscoe with the pack slung upon his back, clumping along behind me, mumbling to himself.
We had made a good day’s journey when we stopped for the night. Going through the pack to get out food, I found the box I’d stolen from Knight. I put it to one side to look at after I had eaten. Roscoe gathered wood and I built a fire and cooked myself a meal while that great stupid hulk hunkered down across the blaze from me and chattered conversationally-and this time not rhyming words nor equation gibberish.
“One eye thou hast,” he told me, glibly, “to look to Heaven for grace. The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.”
I stared at him, amazed, wondering hopefully if he’d snapped out of it and could finally talk some sense-either that, or gone completely off his rocker.
“Roscoe,” I said, as quietly as I could, not wishing to startle him out of any new-found sense, “I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of something else. I wonder. . .”