I was too weak to slug him. He gave me a pill.
I took no further part in events for a while, but what had happened was this: Captain Hattie had waited, at Paul’s urgent insistence, for a couple of hours, and then had announced that she had to blast. She had a schedule to keep with the Covered Wagon and she had no intention, she said, of keeping eight thousand people waiting for the benefit of two. Hank and I could play Indian if we liked; we couldn’t play hob with her schedule.
There was nothing Paul could do, so he sent the rest back and waited for us.
But I didn’t hear this at the time. I was vaguely aware that we were in the walker wagon, travelling, and I woke up twice when I was repacked with ice, but the whole episode is foggy. They travelled east, with Hank driving and Paul navigating—by the seat of his pants. Some long dreamy time later they reached a pioneer camp surveying a site over a hundred miles away—and from there Paul radioed for help.
Whereupon the Jitterbug came and got us. I remember the landing back at Leda—that is, I remember somebody saying, “Hurry, there! We’ve got a boy with a burst appendix.”
20. Home
There was considerable excitement over what we had found—and there still is—but I didn’t see any of it. I was busy playing games with the Pearly Gates. I guess I have Dr. Archibald to thank for still being here. And Hank. And Sergei. And Paul. And Captain Hattie. And some nameless party, who lived somewhere, a long time ago, whose shape and race I still don’t know, but who designed the perfect machine for traveling overland through rough country.
I thanked everybody but him. They all came to see me in the hospital, even Captain Hattie, who growled at me, then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek as she left. I was so surprised I almost bit her.
The Schultzes came, of course, and Mama cried over me and Papa gave me an apple and Gretchen could hardly talk, which isn’t like her. And Molly brought the twins down to see me and vice versa.
The Leda daily Planet interviewed me. They wanted to know whether or not we thought the things we found were made by men?
Now that is a hard question to answer and smarter people than myself have worked on it since.
What is a man?
The things Hank and I—and the Project Jove scientists who went later—found in that cave couldn’t have been made by men—not men like us. The walker wagon was the simplest thing they found. Most of the things they still haven’t found out the use for. Nor have they figured out what the creatures looked like—no pictures.
That seems surprising, but the scientists concluded they didn’t have eyes—not eyes like ours, anyhow. So they didn’t use pictures.
The very notion of a “picture” seems pretty esoteric when you think it over. The Venetians don’t use pictures, nor the Martians. Maybe we are the only race in the universe that thought up that way of recording things.
So they weren’t “men”—not like us.
But they were men in the real sense of the word, even though I don’t doubt that I would run screaming away if I met one in a dark alley. The important thing, as Mr. Seymour would say, they had—they controlled their environment. They weren’t animals, pushed around and forced to accept what nature handed them; they took nature and bent it to their will.
I guess they were men.
The crystals were one of the oddest things about it and I didn’t have any opinions on that. Somehow, those crystals were connected with that cave—or space ship hangar, or whatever it was. Yet they couldn’t or wouldn’t go inside the cave.
Here was another point that the follow-up party from Project Jove recorded: that big unwieldly walker wagon came all the way down that narrow canyon-yet it did not step on a single crystal. Hank must be a pretty good driver. He says he’s not that good.
Don’t ask me. I don’t understand everything that goes on in the universe. It’s a big place.