Something happened, Gary told himself. And he felt the chill of fear in his
veins.
Something happened and here we are – in what strange corner of the
universe?
“Something went wrong,” Caroline said again. “Some inherent weakness in the
co-ordinates, some streak of instability in the mathematics themselves,
perhaps.”
“More likely,” Gary told her, “the fault lies in the human brain – or in
the brain of the Engineer. No man, no being, can see far enough ahead,
think so clearly that be will foresee each eventuality. And even if he did,
be might be inclined to let some small factor slip by with no other thought
than that it was so small it could do no harm.”
Caroline nodded at him. “The mistakes creep in so easy,” she admitted.
“Like mice… mice running in the mind.”
“We can turn around and go back,” said Gary, but even as he said it he knew
that it was no good. For if the tunnel of distorted time-space through
which they had come was jiggered out of position at this end, it would be
out of focus at the other end as well.
“But we can’t,” said Caroline.
“I know we can’t,” said Gary. “I spoke too quickly. Without thinking.”
“We can’t even try,” said Caroline. “The wheel is gone.” He saw that she
was right. The wheel of light was no longer in the sky. It had snuffed out
and they were here alone.
Here? he asked. And where was here?
There was a simple answer. They simply did not know. At the moment, there
was no way of telling.
“Lost,” said Caroline. “Like the babes in the woods. The robins came, you
remember, and covered them with leaves.”
The ship was gliding down toward the planet and Gary swung around to the
controls again.
“We’ll look it over,” he said.
“There may be someone there,” said Caroline.
Someone, Gary thought, was not quite the word. Something would be more like
it. Some thing.
The planet was flat, a world without mountains, without rivers, without
seas. There were great green bogs instead of seas and flat arid plains with
splotches of color that might be vegetation or might be no more than the
outcropping of different geological strata.
The ship took up its descent spiral and Gary and Caroline hung close above
the visor, watching for some sign of habitation, for some hint of life. A
road, perhaps. Or a building. Or a vehicle moving on the ground or in the
air. But there was nothing.
Finally Gary shook his head. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “We might as
well go down. One place on this planet is as good as any other.”
They landed on a flat expanse of sand between the shore of one of the green
bogs and the edge of a patch of splotched vegetation, for by now it was
apparent that the color spots on the planet’s surface were vegetation of a
sort.
“Toadstools,” said Caroline, looking out the vision plate. “Toadstools and
that other kind of funny stuff, like asparagus spears, only it’s not
asparagus.”
“Like something out of a goblin book,” said Gary.
Like something that you thought about when you were a kid and couldn’t go
to sleep after grandmother had read you some story about a shivery place
and you had pulled the covers up over your head and listened for the
footsteps to start coming through the dark.
They made the tests and the planet was livable without their suits –
slightly high in oxygen, a little colder and a slighter gravity than Earth,
but livable.
“Let’s go out,” said Gary, gruffly, “and have a look around.”
“Gary, you sound as if you might be scared.”
“I am,” he admitted. “Pink with purple spots.”
The silence smote them as they stepped outside the ship. An awesome and
abiding silence that was louder than a shattering sound.
There was no sound of wind, and no sound of water. No song of birds. No
grass to rustle.
The great red sun hung in the sky above them and their shadows were soft
and fuzzy on the sand, the faint, fugitive shadows of a cloudy day.
On one hand lay the stagnant pools of water and the hummocks of slimy
vegetation that formed the bog and on the other stretched the forest of
giant mushrooms, towering to the height of an average man.
“You’d expect to see a goblin,” Caroline said, and she shivered as she said
it.
All at once the goblin was there.
He stood underneath one of the toadstools and he was looking at them. When
he saw that they had seen him, he lowered one eyelid in a ponderous and
exaggerated wink and his slobbering mouth twisted into a grimace that might
have been a smile. Its skin was mottled and its eyes were narrow, slitted
eyes and even as they watched, an exudation of slimy substance welled out
of one of the gland-like openings which pitted its face and ran down its
cheek and dripped onto its chest.
“Good Lord!” said Gary. “I know that fellow!”
The goblin leaped into the air and cracked its heels together and gobbled
like an excited turkey.
“He’s the one that was there the day the Engineers held the conference,”
said Gary. “You remember, when they got all the aliens together – all those
that had come through space to the city of the Engineers. It was him – or
one just like him. He sat opposite me and he winked at me, just like he did
now, and I thought that…
“There’s another one,” said Caroline.
The second one was perched on top of one of the mushrooms, with his splayed
feet swinging over the edge.
Then there was a third one peeping from behind a stem and still another
one, sitting on the ground and leaning against a stem. All of them were
watching and all of them were grinning, but the grins were enough to strike
terror and revulsion into one’s soul.
Caroline and Gary retreated backward to the ship, step by slow step until
they stood with their backs against it.
Now there was sound, the soft padding of feet coming through the toadstool
forest, the clucking noises that the goblins made.
“Let’s go away,” said Caroline. “Let’s get in the ship and go.”
“Wait,” counseled Gary. “Let us wait a while. We can always go. These
things are intelligent. They have to be, since they were among the ones the
Engineers called in.”
He stepped out from the ship two slow paces and called.
“Hello,” he called.
They stopped their clucking and their running and stood and looked at him
out of slitted eyes.
“We are friends,” said Gary. They didn’t move a muscle.
Gary held up his empty hands, palms outward in the human gesture of peace.
“We are friends,” he said.
The silence was on the world again – the dreadful, empty silence. The
goblins were gone.
Slowly Gary came back to the ship.
“It doesn’t work,” he said. “I had no reason to believe it would.”
“All things,” said Caroline, “would not necessarily communicate by sound.
That’s just one way of making yourself understood. There would be many
other ways. These things make sounds, but that doesn’t mean they would have
to talk with sound. They may have no auditory apparatus. They may not even
know that they make sounds, might not know what sound is.”
“They’re back again,” said Gary. “You try this time. Try thinking at them.
Pick out one of them and concentrate on him.”
A minute passed, a minute of utter silence.
“It’s funny,” said Caroline. “I couldn’t reach them at all. There wasn’t
even a flicker of response. But I had the feeling that they knew and that
they rejected what I tried to tell them. They closed their minds and would
not listen.”
“They don’t talk,” said Gary. “And they either can’t or won’t telepath.
What’s next?”
“Sign language,” Caroline said. “Pictures after that. Pantomime.”
But it did no good. The goblins watched with interest when Gary tried sign
language. They crept close to watch as he drew diagrams in the sandy soil.
And they squealed and chortled when he tried pantomime. But that they
understood any of it they gave not a single sign.
Gary came back to the ship.
“They’re intelligent,” he said. “They have to be, otherwise how would they
ever have been brought to the rim of the universe by the Engineers.
Something like that takes understanding, a mechanical aptitude, a penchant
for higher mathematics.”
He gestured in disgust. “And yet,” he said, “they do not understand even
the most elementary symbolism.”
“These ones may not be trained,” said Caroline. “There may be others here
who are. There may be an elite, an intelligentsia. These may be the
peasants and the serfs.”
Gary said wearily: “Let’s get out of here. Make a circuit or two of the