Destiny Doll (6 page)

I went sliding down the slope and Sara came climbing up meet me.

Her face was very solemn. "We may have a chance," she said.

"A chance of getting out of here?"

"You told this Hoot of yours what happened," she said. "He seems to know about this sort of thing."

I was astonished. "I wasn't even sure he knew what I was talking about," I told her.

"He didn't understand entirely, but he asked some questions and now they're working on it."

"They?"

"Tuck and George are helping. George is very good at it. It seems he is able to pick out the door."

"George would be able to," I said.

"I wish you'd stop not liking George," she said.

It was no time to get into a hassle with her, so I went on down the dune.

The three of them were squatting in a row—or at least the other two of them were squatting and Hoot was lying there, with his legs buried in the sand. Tuck was staring fixedly ahead and Smith had an intense, excited look upon his flabby face. All Hoot's tentacles were extended straight in front of him and the tips of them were quivering.

I looked where Tuck was looking and I couldn't see a thing. There was just the slope of the other dune pitching upward to the sky.

I stood quietly behind them and Sara came up and stood beside me. We didn't stir a muscle. I didn't know what was going on, but whatever it might be, I didn't want to interfere. If they thought there was a chance to bust that door wide open, I was all in favor of it.

Suddenly Hoot's tentacles went limp and sagged down to the ground. Tuck and Smith slumped in, upon themselves. It was quite apparent that whatever they had tried had failed.

"More strength we need," said Hoot. "If all of us, perhaps . . ."

"All of us?" I asked. "I'm afraid I’m not good at this sort of thing. What is it you are trying?"

"We strain upon the door," said Hoot. "We try to pull it open."

"It still is there," said George. "I can sense the edges of it."

"We can try," said Sara. "That's the least that we can do." She squatted down beside Hoot.

"What do we do?" she asked.

"You try to visualize the door," said Tuck.

"Then you pull," said Hoot.

"Pull with what?' I asked.

"With your mind," Tuck said, nastily. "This is a time, captain, when a big mouth and muscles do not help at all."

"Friar Tuck," said Sara coldly, "that was very much uncalled for."

"That's all he's been doing," Tuck declared, "ever since we set foot upon the ship. Yelling at us and pushing us around."

"Brother," I said, "if that is what you thinks once we're out of this . . ."

"Be quiet, the two of you," said Sara. "Captain, if you please."

She patted the sand beside her and I squatted down with the rest of them, feeling mortified and foolish. In all my life, I'd never seen such downright stupidity. Oh, there was no doubt about it—there were some alien folk who could accomplish wonders with their mental powers, but we were human beings (all of us but one) and the human race had never been noted for anything like that. Although, I thought, take a couple of jerks like Tuck and George and anything might happen.

"Now, please," said Hoot, "all of us together leave us bring forth the door."

His tentacles shot out in front of him, so fast they seemed to snap, standing out rigidly with their tips a-quiver.

God knows, I tried to concentrate. I tried to see a door in front of us, and, so help me, I did see it, a sort of ghostly door with a thin edge of light around it, and once I saw it, I tried to pull on it, but there was nothing on it for a man to grab a hold of and with nothing to grab a hold on there was little chance of pulling. But I tried just the same and kept on trying. I could almost feel the fingers of my mind trying to get hold of its smooth and slippery surfaces, then slowly sliding off.

We would never make it, I knew. The door seemed to be coming open a bit, for the crack of light around it appeared to have widened. But it would take too long; we never could hold out, to get it open wide enough so we could slide through.

I was getting terribly tired—both mentally and physically, it seemed—and I knew the others could be in no better shape. We would try again, of course, and again and again, but we'd be getting weaker all the time and if we couldn't get it open in the first several tries, I knew that we were sunk. So I tried the harder and I seemed to get some small hold on it and pulled with all my might and could feel the others pulling, too—and the door began to open, swinging back toward us on invisible hinges until there was room enough for a man to get his hand into the crack, that is, if the door had been really there. But I knew, even as I pulled and sweated mentally, that the door had no physical existence and that it was something a man could never lay a hand on.

Then, with the door beginning to open, we failed. All of us together. And there was no door. There was nothing but the dune climbing up the sky.

Something crunched behind us and I jumped up and swung around. The wheel loomed tall above us, crunching to a halt, and swarming down from the green mass in the center, swinging down the silvery spider web between the rim and hub was a blob that dripped. It was not a spider, although the basic shape of it and the way it came scrambling down the web brought a spider to one's mind. A spider would have been friendly and cozy alongside this monstrosity that came crawling down the web. It was a quivering obscenity, dripping with some sort of filthy slime, and it had a dozen legs or arms, and at one end of the dripping blob was what might have been a face—and there is no way to put into words the kind of horror that it carried with it, the loathsome feeling of uncleanliness just from seeing it, as if the very sight of it were enough to contaminate one's flesh and mind, the screaming need to keep one's distance from it, the fear that it might come close enough to touch one.

As it came down the web it was making a noise and steadily, it seemed, the noise became louder. Although it had what one could imagine was its face, it had no mouth with which to make the noise, but even with no mouth, the noise came out of it and washed over us. In the noise was the crunch of great teeth splintering bones, mixed with the slobbering of scavenger gulping at a hasty, putrid feast, and an angry chittering that had unreason in it. It wasn't any of these things alone; it was all of them together, or the sense of all of them together, and perhaps if a man had been forced to go on listening to it for long enough he might have detected in it other sounds as well.

It reached the rim of the wheel and leaped off the web to land upon the dune-spraddled there, looming over us, with the filthiness of it dripping off its body and splashing on the sand. I could see the tiny balls of wet sand where the nastiness had dropped.

It stood there, raging at us, the noise of it filling all that world of sand and bouncing off the sky.

And in the noise there seemed to be a word, as if the word were hidden and embedded in the strata of the sound. Bowed down beneath that barrage of sound, it seemed that finally I could feel—not hear, but feel—the word.

"Begone!" it seemed to shout at us. "Begone! Begone! Begone!"

From somewhere out of that moonlit-starlit night, from that land of heaving dunes, came a wind, or some force like a wind, that hammered at us and drove us back—although, come to think of it, it could not have been a wind, for no cloud of sand came with it and there was no roaring such as a wind would make. But it hit us like a fist and staggered us and sent us reeling back.

As I staggered back with the loathesome creature still spraddled on the dune and still raging at us, I realized that there was no longer sand underneath my feet, but some sort of paving.

Then, quite suddenly, the dune was no longer there, but a wall, as if a door we could not see had been slammed before our faces, and when this happened the creature's storm of rage came to an end and in its stead was silence.

But not for long, that silence, for Smith began an insane crying. "He is back again! My friend is back again! He's is in my mind again! He has come back to me."

"Shut up!" I yelled at him. "Shut up that yammering!"

He quieted down a bit, but he went on muttering, flat upon his bottom, with his legs stuck out in front of him and that silly, sickening look of ecstasy painted on his face.

I took a quick look around and saw that we were back where we had come from, in that room with all the panels and behind each panel the shimmering features of another world.

Safely back, I thought with some thankfulness, but through no effort of our own. Finally, given time enough, we might have hauled that door wide enough for us to have gotten through. But we hadn't had to do it; it had been done for us. A creature from that desert world had come along and thrown us out.

The night that had lain over the white world when we had been brought there had given way to day. Through the massive doorway, I could see the faint yellow light of the sun blocked out by the towering structures of the city.

There was no sign of the hobbies or the gnomelike humanoid who had picked the world into which the hobbies threw us.

I shucked up my britches and took the gun off my shoulder. I had some scores to settle.

FOUR

We found them in a large room, which appeared to be a storeroom, one flight down from the lobby that had the doors to all those other worlds.

The little gnomelike creature had our luggage spread out on the floor and was going through it. Several bundles of stuff had been sorted out and he was going through another bag, with the rest of it all stacked neatly to one side, waiting his attention.

The hobbies stood in a semicircle about him, looking on and rocking most sedately and while they had no expression on their carven faces, I thought that I detected in them a sense of satisfaction at having made so good a haul.

They were so engrossed in what was going on that none of them noticed us until we were through the door and had advanced several paces into the room. Then the hobbies, seeing us, reared back upon their rockers and the gnome began to straighten slowly, as if his back might have grown stiff from standing all bent over to go through our things. Still half bent over, he stared up at us through a tangle of unruly hair that hung down across his eyes. He looked like an English sheepdog looking up at us.

All of us stopped and stood together. We didn't speak, but waited.

The gnome finally, straightened up by degrees, very cautiously and slowly. The hobbies stayed motionless, reared back on their rockers.

The gnome rubbed his gnarled hands together. "We were about, my lord," he said, "to come after you."

I motioned with my gun toward the luggage on the floor. He looked at it and shook his head.

"A mere formality," he said. "An inspection for the customs."

"With a view to a heavy tax?" I asked. "A very heavy tax."

"Oh, not at all," he said. "It is merely that there are certain things which must not be allowed upon the planet. Although, if you should be willing, a small gratuity, perhaps. We have so little opportunity to collect anything of value. And we do render services of which you are much in need. The shelter against the danger and the . . ."

I looked around the storeroom. It was piled with crates and baskets and other kinds of less conventionalized containers and there were articles of all sorts all heaped and piled together.

"It seems to me," I said, "that you've been doing not too badly. If you ask me, I think you had no thought to get us. We could have stayed in that desert world forever if it had been up to you."

"I swear," he said. "We were about to open up the door. But we became so interested in the wonderful items that you carried with you that we quite lost track of time."

"Why did you put us there to start with?" Sara asked. "In the desert world?"

"Why, to protect you from the deadly vibrations," be explained. "We, ourselves, took cover. Each time a ship lands there are these vibrations. They always come at night, before the dawning of the day that follows the landing of the ship."

"An earthquake?" I asked. "A shaking of the planet."

"Not of the planet," said the gnome. "A shaking of the senses. It congeals the brain, it bursts the flesh. There can nothing live. That is why we put you in that other world—to save your very lives."

He was lying to us. He simply had to be. Or at least he was lying about his intention to bring us back from the desert world. The kind of rat he was, there was no reason that he should. He had everything we had; there would have been nothing for him to gain by getting us out of the world he'd thrown us into.

"Buster," I said, "I don't buy a word of what you say. Why should the landing of a ship set off vibrations of that kind?"

He laid a crooked finger alongside his bulbous nose. "The world is closed," he said. "None is welcome here. When visitors do come the world makes certain that they die before they can leave the city. And if they should so manage to escape, the planet seals the ship so they can't take off again and spread the word of what they found."

"And yet," I said, "there is a strong directional beam, a homing beam, reaching well out into space. A beam to lure them in. You lured us in and you got rid of us in the desert world and you had everything we had taken from the ship. You had everything but the ship and maybe you are working on how to get the ship—our ship and all the others that are standing out there, sealed. No wonder the hobbies insisted on bringing all our luggage in. They knew what would happen to the ship. Apparently you haven't figured out how to beat this sealing business yet."

He shook his head. "It's a part of the closed planet routine, sir. There must be a way to get around it, but it's not been ciphered yet."

Now that he knew I had him pegged, he'd not bother to deny it. He'd admit everything or almost everything and hope to gain some credit for being frank and forthright. Why was it, I wondered, that so many primates, no matter where you found them, turned out to be such stinkers?

 "Another thing that I can't cipher," said the gnome, "is how you all got back here. Never before has there been anyone who could come back from one of the other worlds. Not till we let them out."

"And you claim you were going to let us out?"

"Yes, I swear we were. And you can have all your things. We had no intention of keeping any of them."

"Now, that is fine," I said. "You're becoming reasonable. But there are other things we want."

He bristled a little. "Like what?" he asked.

"Information," I told him. "About another man. A humanoid very much like us. He would have had a robot with him."

He glanced around, trying to make up his mind. I twitched the muzzle of the gun and helped him make it up.

"Long ago," he said. "Very long ago."

"He was the only one to come? The only one of us?"

"No. Even longer than him there were others of you. Six or seven of them. They went out beyond the city and that was the last I saw of them."

"You didn't put them into another world?"

"Why, yes, of course," he said. "All who come we put there. It is necessary. Each arrival triggers another killing wave. Once that killing wave is done, we are safe until another ship arrives. We put all who arrive into another world, but we always bring them out."

Perhaps, I admitted to myself, he was telling us the truth. Although maybe not all the truth. Perhaps he had another angle that he hadn't sprung on us. Although now, I was fairly certain, even if he had another one he might hesitate to spring it. We had him dead to rights.

"But there is always another killing wave," I reminded him, "when another ship arrives."

"But only in the city," he told me. "Out of the city and you are safe from it."

"And no one, once they arrive, stays in the city?"

"No. They always leave the city. To hunt for something they think they'll find outside the city. All of them always bunt for something."

God, yes, I thought, all of them are on the trail of something. How many other intelligences, in how many different forms, had heard that voice Smith had heard and had been lured to follow it?

"Do they ever tell you," Sara asked, "what it is they hunt for?"

He grinned crookedly. "They are secretive," he said.

"But this other humanoid," Sara reminded him. "The one who came alone, accompanied by the robot . . ."

"Robot? You mean the metal humanoid very like himself?"

"Don't play dumb," I snapped. "You know what a robot is. Those hobbies there are robots."

"We not be robots," Dobbin said. "We be honest hobbies."

"You shut up," I said.

"Yes," said the gnome. "The one with the robot. He also went away and did not come back. But in time the robot did. Although he would tell me nothing. He had not a word to say."

"And the robot still is here?" asked Sara.

The gnome said, "A part of him I have. The part that makes him function, I regret very much, is gone. The brain I suppose you call it. The brain of him is gone. I sold it to the wild hobbies that dwell in the wilderness. Very much they wanted it, very much they paid. Still I could not refuse them. It was worth my life to do it."

"Those wild hobbies?" I asked. "Where do we go to find them?"

He made a shrugging motion. "No telling that," he said. "They wander wide and far. Most often they are found north of here. Very wild indeed."

"What did the wild hobbies want of Roscoe's brain?" asked Sara. "What possible use could it be to them?"

He spread his hands. "How could I know?" he asked. "They are beings one does not question closely. Very rough and wild. They have a hobby's body, but heads they have like you, and arms, and they yell most loudly and are unreasonable."

"Centaurs," said Tuck. "There are many of them, I understand, spread throughout the galaxy. Almost as common as the humanoids. And they are, I understand, as the gentleman here says, most unreasonable. Although I have never met one."

"You sold them only the braincase," I said. "You still have the robot's body here."

"They did not want the body. I still have it here."

I dropped the space lingo and switched to English, speaking to Sara. "What do you think?" I asked. "Do we try to track down Knight?"

"He would be the one . . ."

"If he is still alive, he'd be an old, old man by now. I think the chances are he is not alive. The robot came back. He'd not have left Knight if he were still alive."

"We might find out where he was heading," Sara said. "If we could get the braincase and put it back in Roscoe's body, he might have some idea of what Knight was looking for and where it might be found."

"But he wasn't talking. He wouldn't tell the gnome."

"He might talk to us," said Sara. "After all, we're his people. It was people like us who made him and if he had any loyalty, which I suspect he had, that loyalty also was to a human being."

I turned back to the gnome. "All right," I said, "we'll need the robot's body and maps of the planet. A supply of water. The hobbies to carry us and our packs and . . ."

He threw up his hands in horror, backing away from me, shaking his head stubbornly from side to side. "The hobbies you can't have, he said "I have need of them myself"

"You didn't let me finish.," I said. "We are taking you along."

"That you cannot do," shrilled Dobbin. "He must stay to warn the creatures on incoming ships and get them under cover against the killing wave. Sire, you must understand . . ."

"We'll take care of all of that," I said. "We'll shut off the beam. If there is no beam to lure them, no one will ever come."

"But you can't shut it off," wailed the gnome. "No one can do that, for the location of the transmitter is something that we do not know. I have never found it. I have hunted and the others before me hunted and it has not been found."

He stood before us, dejected. Somehow or other the props had been knocked out from under him.

'Well, I'll be damned," I said.

"It makes sense," said Sara. "It had me puzzled all the time. Whoever built this city installed the beam and our scrawny friend is not the kind of people who could have built this city. He is simply living here—a savage living in a deserted city, picking up whatever scraps he can."

I should have thought of it myself, I knew. But I had been so burned up at being tossed into the desert world, and burned up, too, when I found the gnome going through our things that I'd been out for blood. If that little twerp had made one wrong step, I would have mowed him down.

"Tell us," Sara said to him, "exactly what you are. It wasn't your people who built this city, was it?"

His face was contorted with rage. "You have no right to ask," he screeched. "It is bad enough without you asking it."

"We have every right to ask," I said. "We need to know exactly what is going on. I'll give you about five seconds."

He didn't take five seconds. He legs collapsed and he sat down hard upon the floor. He wrapped his scrawny arms about his middle, hard, and rocked back and forth as if he had the bellyache.

"I'll tell," he moaned. "Do not shoot—I'll tell. But the shame of it! The shame, the shame, the shame."

He looked up at me with beseeching eyes. "I cannot lie," he said. "If I could, I would. But there is someone here who would know if I were lying.

"Who is that?" I asked.

"It is me," said Hoot.

"What have you got?" I asked "A built-in lie detector?"

"One of my feeble capabilities," said Hoot. "Do not ask me how, for I cannot tell you. Deficiencies I have in amplitude, but of this and several others I have good command. And this personage, aware of it, has been telling a semblance of the truth, although not in all its fullness."

The gnome was still staring up at me. "It seems that in times like this," he pleaded, "us humanoids should somehow stick together. There is a common bond . . ."

I said, "Not between you and I, there isn't."

"You are being hard on him," said Sara.

"Miss Foster," I said, "I haven't even started. I intend to hear this."

"But if he has any reason . . ."

"He hasn't any reason. Have you a reason, Buster?" He had a good look at me, then he shook his head.

"My pride is in the dust," he said. "The memories of my ancestors are besmirched. It has been so long—we pretended for so long that at times even we ourselves believed it—that we were the ones who raised this wondrous city. And if you had let me alone, if you had never come, I finally could have died believing it, warm in the presence that it were we who built it. Then it would have been all over, it would not have mattered if someone, or all the universe, should know we were not the architects. For I am the last of us and there is no one further to whom it will ever matter. There are no others after me. The duties I've performed then will be passed on to the hobbies and in the fullness of time they may find some other to whom they can pass those duties on. For there must be someone here to warn and save those who arrive upon this planet."

I looked toward Dobbin. "Could you tell me," I asked, "what this is all about?"

"Nothing I will tell you, sire," said Dobbin. "You come to us with a heavy hand. We save your life by putting you in another world, then you suspicion we will not get you out. You are incensed greatly when you find your benefactor satisfying no more than normal curiosity in an examination of your luggage. And you talk of the giving of five seconds and you throw your weight around and act vastly ungracious in every sort of way and you . . ."