bedbug.”
“And how are you now?” asked Gary.
“Why, now,” the voice said, “as funny as it seems, I’m quite rational. I’m
very much myself.”
“Then how about fixing it up so that we can get back?”
“Right away,” said the voice, very businesslike. “I’ll just clean up a
thing or two. Don’t like the residue of my irrationality cluttering up the
planet. That Hellhound ship over there….”
But instead of the Hellhound ship, it was the Earth ship that went skyward
in a terrific gout of flame that sent a wash of heat across the barren
land.
“Hey, there…” yelled Gary and then stood stock still as the enormity of
what had happened crackled in his mind.
“Tsk, tsk,” said the voice. “How very stupid of me. How could I have done a
thing like that! Now I’ll never be able to send you home again.”
His cackling laughter filled the sky and beat like a mighty drum.
“The Hellhound ship!” yelled Gary. “Run… run…”
But even as they whirled to race toward it, it was gone in a blaze of fire,
followed by a trail of smoke that hung briefly above the scorched piece of
the ground where the ship had lain.
“You couldn’t have operated it, anyhow,” said the voice. “It wouldn’t have
done you a single bit of good.”
He laughed again and the laughter trailed off into distance, like a
retreating thunderstorm.
Gary and Caroline stood side by side and looked at the emptiness of the bog
and mushroom forest. A goblin ducked out of a clump of mushrooms and hooted
at them, then dashed back in again.
“What do we do?” asked Caroline and it was a question that went echoing
down the long corridor of improbability, a question for which there was, at
the moment, no satisfactory answer.
Swiftly, Gary made an inventory:
The clothes they stood in.
A few matches in his pocket.
A bow and some arrows, but the bow didn’t count for much.
And that was all. There was nothing else.
“More pets,” said Caroline, bitterly.
“What’s that?” asked Gary, not sure he heard her right.
“Let it go,” she said. “Forget I ever said it.”
“There’s nothing to get hold of,” Gary said. “Nothing you can touch. The
voice… the voice is nothing.”
“It’s a horrible thing,” said Caroline. “Don’t you see, Gary, what a
horrible thing it is. The tag end of some great race. Think of it. Millions
of years, millions of years to build up a mighty mental civilization. Not a
mechanical civilization, not a materialistic culture, but a mental
civilization. A striving toward understanding rather than toward doing.
“And now it’s a senile thing, an insane thing that has gone back to its
second childhood, but its power is too great for a child to wield and it is
dangerous… dangerous…”
Gary nodded. “It could masquerade as anything it pleased. It sent one of
the goblins to the city of the Engineers and the Engineers thought the
goblin was the mentality that they had contacted. But it wasn’t. It was a
simple, foolish puppet, but the voice moved it as it wished, talked through
its flimsy mind.”
“The Engineers must have sensed the inherent insanity of that mind,” said
Caroline. “They may not have been sure, but they must, at least, have
sensed it, for they sent it away with all the rest of them. The voice could
have worked with us. You notice how it talks the way a human talks…
that’s because it picked our minds, because it found the thoughts and words
we used, because it was able to know everything we know.”
“It could see everything in the universe,” said Gary. “It could know
everything that there was to know.”
“Perhaps it did,” Caroline told him. “Perhaps the weight of the knowledge
was too great. When you overload an engine, the engine will burn out. What
would happen if you should overload a mind, even a great communal mind such
as we have here?”
“Insanity, maybe,” said Gary. “Lord, I don’t know. It’s like nothing I ever
ran across before.”
Caroline moved close to Gary.
“We’re alone, Gary,” she said. “The human race stands all alone. No other
race has the balance that we have. Other races may be as great, but they do
not have the balance. Look at the Engineers. Materialistic, mechanical to a
point where they cannot think except along mechanistic lines. And the
voice. It goes on the opposite tangent. No mechanics at all, just
mentality. An overwhelming and an awful mentality. And the Hellhounds.
Savage killers. Bending every knowledge to the business of killing.
Egomaniacs who would destroy the universe to achieve their own supremacy.”
They stood silent, side by side. The great red sun was nearing the western
horizon. The goblins scuttered through the mushrooms, chirping and hooting.
A disgusting thing, a couple of feet long, crawled out of the slimy waters
of the bog, reared itself and stared at them, then lumbered around and slid
into the water once again.
“I’ll start a fire,” said Gary. “Night will be coming soon. We’ll have to
keep the fire going once we get it started.
I only have a few matches.”
“Maybe we can eat the mushrooms,” said Caroline. “Some of them may be
poisonous,” Gary told her. “We’ll have to watch the goblins, eat what they
eat. No absolute guarantee, of course, that what they eat wouldn’t poison
us, but it’s the only way we have of knowing. We’ll eat just a little at a
time, only one of us eating…”
“The goblins! Do you think they will bother us?”
“Not likely,” Gary told her, but he wasn’t as confident as he made it
sound.
They gathered a stack of the dried stems of the mushrooms and corded them
against the night. Gary, carefully shielding the flame with a protecting
hand, struck a match and started a small fire.
The sun had set and the stars were coming out in the hazy darkness of the
sky… but stars they did not know.
They crouched by the fire, more for the companionship of its flames than
for the heat it gave, and watched the stars grow brighter, listening to the
chattering of the busy goblins in the mushrooms behind them.
“We’ll need water,” said Caroline.
Gary nodded. “We’ll try filtering it. Lots of sand. Sand is a good filter.”
“You know,” said Caroline, “I can’t feel that this has happened to us. I
keep thinking, pretty soon we’ll wake up and it will be all right. It
hasn’t really happened. It…”
“Gary…” she gasped.
He jerked upright at the alarm in her tone.
Her hands were at her head, feeling of the braids of hair.
“It’s there again!” she whispered. “The braid I cut off to make a
bowstring. I cut it off and it was gone and it is there again!”
“Well, I’ll be…” But he did not finish the sentence. For there, not more
than a hundred feet away, was the ship… Tommy Evans’ ship, the ship that
the voice had destroyed in a single flash of fire. It sat on the sand
sedately, with light pouring from its ports, with the shine of starlight on
its plates.
“Caroline!” he shouted. “The ship! The ship!”
“Hurry,” said the voice to them. “Hurry, before I change my mind. Hurry,
before I go insane again.”
Gary reached down a hand and pulled Caroline to her feet.
“Come on,” he shouted.
“Think of me as kindly as you can,” said the voice. “Think of me as an old
man, an old, old man, who is not quite the man he was… not quite the man
he was.”
They ran, stumbling in the darkness, toward the ship. “Hurry, hurry,” the
voice shouted at them. “I cannot trust myself.”
“Look!” cried Caroline. “Look, in the sky!”
The wheel of light was there, the slow, lazy wheel of light they first had
seen on Pluto… the entrance to the space-time tunnel.
“I gave you back the ship,” said the voice. “I gave you back the strand of
hair. Think kindly of me please… think kindly…”
They clambered up the ladder to the open port and slammed the lock behind
them.
At the controls, Gary reached out for the warming knob, found that it was
already turned on. The tubes, the indicator said, were warm.
He gunned the ship into the sky, centering the cross hairs on the wheel
that shimmered above them.
They hit it head-on and the black closed in around them and then there was
light again and the city of the Engineers was below them… a blasted city,
its proud towers gone, great heaps of rubble in its streets, a cloud of
stone-dust, ground in the mills of atomic bombing, hanging over it.
Gary glanced over his shoulder, triumphant at their return, and saw the
tears that welled in Caroline’s eyes and trickled down her cheeks.
“The poor thing,” she said. “That poor old man back there.”