“No,” I admitted, “but we aren’t really lost. If we head back east we are bound to come to proved ground.”
“Perhaps we had better.”
“Wait a minute.” There was a particularly big boulder ahead of us. I picked a way and managed to scramble to the top with nothing worse than a cut on my hand. I stood up. “I can see the road,” I told Dad. “We’re north of where we ought to be. And I think maybe we’ve come too far.” I marked a spot with my eye and came down.
We worked south the amount I thought was right and then headed east again. After a bit I said, “I guess we missed it, George. I’m not much of an In-
He said, “So? What’s this?” He was a little ahead of me and had stopped.
It was a cairn with a flat rock on top. Painted on it was: “117-H-2, SE corner.”
We had been on our farm for the past half hour; the big boulder I had climbed up on was on it.
We sat down on a fairly flat rock and looked around. Neither of us said anything for a while; we were both thinking the same thing: if this was a farm, I was my own great uncle.
After a bit Dad muttered something. I said, “What did you say?”
“Golgotha,” he said out loud. “Golgotha, the place of skulls.” He was staring straight ahead.
I looked where he was looking; there was a boulder sitting on top of another and the way the sun caught it, it did look like a skull. It leered at us.
It was so darn quiet you could hear your hair grow. The place was depressing me. I would have given anything to hear something or see something move. Anything—just a lizard darting out from behind a rock, and I could have kissed it.
But there were no lizards here and never had been.
Presently Dad said, “Bill, are you sure you want to tackle this?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“You don’t have to, you know. If you want to go back to Earth and go to M.I.T., I could arrange it for the next trip.”
Maybe he was thinking that if I went back, I could take Peggy with, me and she would be willing to go. Maybe I should have said something about it. But didn’t; I said, “Are you going back?”
“No.”
“Neither am I.” At the moment is was mostly stubbornness. I had to admit that our “farm” wasn’t flowing with milk and honey; in fact it looked grim. Nobody but a crazy hermit would want to settle down in such a spot.
“Think it over, Bill.”
“I’ve thought it over.”
We sat there a while longer, not saying anything, just thinking long thoughts. Suddenly we were almost startled out of our boots by somebody yodelling at us. A moment before I had been wishing to hear just anything, but when it came it was like unexpectedly encountering a clammy hand in the dark.
We both jumped and Dad said, “What in the—?” I looked around. There was a large man coming toward us. In spite of his size he skipped through the rocks like a mountain goat, almost floating in the low gravity. As he got closer I knew I had seen him before; he was on the Court of Honor, a Mr. Schultz.
Dad waved to him and pretty soon he reached us. He stood half a head taller than Dad and would have made the pair of us, he was so big. His chest was as thick as my shoulders were broad and his belly was thicker than that. He had bushy, curly red hair and his beard spread out over his chest like a tangle of copper springs. “Greetings, citizens,” he boomed at us, “my name is Johann Schultz.”
Dad introduced us and he shook hands and I almost lost mine in his. He fixed his eyes on me and said, “I’ve seen you before, Bill.”
I said I guessed he had, at Scout meetings. He nodded and added, “A patrol leader, no?”
I admitted that I used to be. He said, “And soon again,” as if the matter were all settled. He turned to Dad. “One of the kinder saw you going past on the road, so Mama sent me to find you and bring you back to the house for tea and some of her good coffee cake.”