Destiny Doll (9 page)

And out of that extent of space came a whisper that grew in volume—the sound of many wings beating frantically and fast, the same harsh whispering that could be heard when a flock of feeding birds burst from a marshy stretch of ground and beat across the sky. But it was no sudden rush of hurried flight that existed for a moment and then was done with. As we stood listening on the floor below, it kept on and on and on. Somewhere up there in the misty darkness that marked the building's upper structure a great migration seemed to be taking place, with millions of wings beating out of nowhere into nowhere. They—whatever they could have been that had the beating wings—were not merely circling in that space above our heads. They were flying with a steady, almost frantic, purpose, and for a moment of that flight they crossed those few thousand feet of emptiness that loomed above us and then were gone while others took their place, a steady stream of others, so that the rush of wings was never broken. I strained my eyes to see them, but there was nothing to be seen. They were too high to see or they were invisible or, I thought, they might not be even there. But the sound was there, a sound that in some other time or place might not be remarkable, but that here was remarkable and, unaccountably, had the freezing impact of the great unknowable. Then, as suddenly as they had come, the beating wings were gone; the migration ended, and we stood in a silence that was so thick it thundered.

Hoot let down his two pointing tentacles "Here they were not," he said 'They were otherwhere".

Immediately as he said it, I knew he had been feeling the same thing I'd been sensing, but had not really realized. Those wings—the sound of those wings—had not been in that space where we had heard them, but in some other space, and we had only heard them through some strange spatio-temporal echo. I don't know why I thought that; there was no reason to.

"Let's get back," I said to Hoot. "All of us must be hungry. It's been a long time since we've eaten. Or had any sleep. How about you, Hoot? I never thought to ask. Can you eat the stuff we have?"

"I in my second self," he said. And I recalled what he had said before. In his second self (whatever that might be) he had no need of food.

We went back to the front of the building. The hobbies were standing in a circle, with their heads all pointing inward. The packs had been taken off their backs and were stacked against the wall, close behind the doors. Alongside them sat Smith, still slumped, still happy, still out of the world, like an inflated doll that had been tossed against a wall, and beside him was propped the body of Roscoe, the brainless robot. The two of them were ghastly things to see, sitting there together.

The sun had set and outside the doors lay a dusk that was not quite so thick as the dusk inside the building. The ratlike creatures still were pouring out the door and pouring back again, harvesting the seeds.

"The firing has slacked off," said Sara, "but it picks up again as soon as you stick out your head."

"I suppose you did," I said.

She nodded. "There wasn't any danger. I ducked back in again, real fast. I'm a terrible coward when it comes to things like that. But the tree can see us. I am sure it can."

I dumped my armload of wood. Tuck had unpacked some pots and pans and a coffee pot stood ready.

"Just about here?" I asked. "Close to the door so the smoke has a chance of getting out"

Sara nodded. "I'm beat out, captain," she said. "Fire and food will be good for all of us. What about Hoot? Can he . . ."

"He isn't doing any eating or any drinking," I explained. "He's in his second state, but let's not talk about it."

She caught my meaning and nodded.

Tuck came up beside me and squatted down. "That looks to be good wood," he said. "Where did you find it?"

"There's a heap of junk back there. All sorts of stuff."

I squatted down and took out my knife. Picking up one of the smaller sticks, I began to whittle off some shavings. I pushed them in a pile, then reached for the piece of wood that had the fiber tied to it. I was about to rip some of the fiber loose when Tuck put out a hand to stop me.

"Just a second, captain."

He took the piece of wood out of my hands and turned it so that it caught some of the feeble light still coming from the doorway. And now, for the first time, I saw what it was that I had picked up. Until that moment it had been nothing more than a stick of wood with some straw or grass tied to it. "A doll," said Sara, in surprise.

"Not a doll," said Tuck. His hands were shaking and he was clutching the doll hard, probably in an attempt to keep his hands from shaking. "Not a doll. Not an idol. Look at its face!"

In the twilight the face was surprisingly plain to see. It was barely human. Primate, perhaps, although I couldn't be sure it was even that. But as I looked at it, I felt a sense of shock; human or not, it was an expressive face, and never had I seen a face with so much sadness in it or so much resignation to the sadness. It was no fancy carving. The face, in fact, was crude, it had been simply hacked out of a block of wood.

The whole thing had about it the look of a primitive corncob doll. But the knowing hands that had carved the face, driven by God knows what sadness of their own, had caught within its planes a misery of existence that wrenched one's heart to see.

Tuck slowly raised the doll in both his hands and clutched it tight against his breast. He looked from one to the other of us.

"Don't you see?" he cried at us. "Don't you understand!"

SIX

Night had fallen. The fire carved a magic circle of light out of the darkness that pressed in all about us. Back of me I could hear the gentle creak as the hobbies rocked gently back and forth. Smith still sprawled limp against the wall. We had tried to rouse him to give him food, but there was no such thing as rousing him. He was simply a sack, still with us in body, but certainly not in mind; his mind was somewhere else. Beside him leaned the metallic body of the mindless robot, Roscoe. And off a little ways sat Tuck with that doll of his clutched tight against his breast, not moving, with his eyes staring out into the darkness.

We were off to a damn poor start, I thought. Already the expedition had started to fall apart.

"Where is Hoot?" asked Sara.

"Off somewhere," I said. "Prowling. He's a restless sort of being. Hadn't you ought to try to get some sleep?"

"And you'll sit up and watch?"

"I'm not Launcelot," I told her. "if that's what you're getting at. You can depend on it—I'll rout you out later on so I can get some sack time."

"In a little while," she said. "Did you happen to notice this place is built of stone?"

"I suppose I had," I said. "I hadn't thought about it."

"Not like the buildings in the city," she said. "This one is made of honest stone. I'm not up on stone. Looks like granite, maybe. You have any idea what the city might be made of?"

"Not stone," I said. "That stuff was never quarried from the ground. Some sort of fabricated material, most likely. Chemical, perhaps. The atoms bonded more tightly than anything we know. Nothing in God's world, more than likely, could pull that stuff apart. When I fired the laser bolt into the landing field, the field wasn't even scorched."

"You know chemistry, captain?"

I shook my head. "Not so you would notice."

"The people who built this building didn't build the city. A more ancient people . . ."

"We can't know that," I said. "There is no way of knowing how long the city's stood. It would take millions of years for it to show any wear or erosion—if it would ever show it."

We sat in silence for a moment. I picked up a stick of wood and poked the sticks in the fire together. The fire blazed up.

"Come morning, captain?" she asked.

"What do you mean come morning?"

"What do we do' then?"

"We go on if the tree will let us. We have some footloose centaurs to find, to see if they have a braincase and if we can get the braincase . . ."

She nodded her head in Smith's direction. "What of him?" she asked.

"Maybe he'll come to by then. If not we sling him on a hobby. And if Tuck doesn't snap out of his trance by then, I'll kick him back to life."

"But George was looking for something, too. And he has found what he was looking for."

"Look," I said, "who was it that bought the, ship and paid the bill? Who brought Smith to this place? Don't tell me that you are ready to cave in and stop short of what you are looking for because a creep like Smith goes all of a sudden limp on us."

"I don't know," she said. "If it hadn't been for him . . ."

"All right, then." I said. "Let's just leave him here. If that is what he wants. If he's gotten to the place he was aiming for . . ."

"Captain!" 'she gasped. "You wouldn't do a thing like that!"

"What makes you think I wouldn't?"

"There must be some humanity in you. You wouldn't turn your back . . ."

"He's the one who is turning his back on us. He has what he wants . . ."

"How do you know he has?"

That's the trouble with women. No logic. She had told me that this silly Smith had gotten where he was going. But when I said the same thing, she was set to argue.

"I don't know anything," I said. "Not for certain."

"But you'll go ahead and make decisions."

"Sure," I said. "Because if I don't we could sit here forever. And we're in no situation to be sitting still. We may have a long way to go and we've got to keep on moving."

I got up and walked over to the door and stood there, looking out. There was no moon and the night was dark and there were no stars. A whiteness of the city was distinguishable in the darkness. A hazy and uncertain horizon led off beyond the city. There was nothing else that could be seen.

The tree had stopped its bombing and with all the seeds duly gathered in, the ratlike creatures had gone back to wherever they had come from.

Maybe, I thought, if we sneaked out right now we might be able to make it past the tree. But I somehow doubted it. I didn't think darkness made that much difference to the tree. It certainly didn't see us, for since when did trees have eyes. It must sense us in some other way. It had stopped the bombing, perhaps, because it figured it had us pinned down, knowing that it could start up again if we so much as tried to move, maybe even knowing somehow we'd not be apt to move at night.

But even so the thought of trying for it in the dark had some attraction for me. But we'd be plunging headlong into terrain we knew nothing of, trying to follow a path that we could not see and had never traveled. And, besides, we were too beat out to try it. We needed a good night's rest.

"Why are you here with us, captain?" asked Sara from the fire. "Even from the first you had no belief in the venture."

I went back to the fire and sat down beside her.

"You forgot," I said. "All that money that you shoved at me. That's why I'm doing it."

"That's not all of it," she said. "The money would not have been enough. You were afraid you'd never get back into space again. You saw yourself cooped up on Earth forever and even that first day you landed, it was gnawing on you."

"What you really want to know," I said, "is why I had to make the run for Earth, why I sought sanctuary. You're aching to know what sort of criminal you've been traveling with. How come you didn't get all the sordid details? You knew everything else, even to the minute I would land? I'd shake up that intelligence system of yours, if I were you. Your operatives failed."

"There were a lot of stories," she said. "They couldn't all be true. There was no way of telling which one of them was true. But I'll say this much for you—you have space shook up. Tell me, Captain Ross, was it the swindle of all time?"

"I don't know," I said. "I wasn't out to break a record, if that is what you mean."

"But a planet was involved. That is what I heard and it made sense because you were a planet hunter. Was it as good as they said it was?"

"Miss Foster," I said, "it was a beauty. It was the kind of planet Earth was before the Ice Age hit."

"Then what went wrong? There were all sorts of stories. One said there was a virus of some sort. Another said the climate was erratic. One said there wasn't any planet."

I grinned at her. I don't know why I grinned. It was no grinning matter. "There was only one thing wrong," I said. "Such a little thing. It already was inhabited by intelligences."

"But you would have known . . ."

"Not necessarily," I said. "There weren't many of them. And they were hard to spot. What do you look for when you search a planet for intelligence?"

"Why, I don't know," she said.

"Nor do I" I said.

"But you . . ."

"I hunted planets. I did not survey them. No planet hunter is equipped to survey a planet. He can get an idea of what it's like, of course. But he hasn't got the gadgets or the manpower or the savvy to dig deeply into it. A survey made by the man who finds it would have no legal standing. Understandably, there might be certain bias. A planet must be certified . . ."

"But certainly you had it certified. You could not have sold it until it was certified."

I nodded. "A certified survey," I said. "By a reputable surveying firm. It came out completely clean and I was in business. I made just one mistake. I paid a bonus for them to pile in their equipment and their crews and get the job done fast. A dozen realty firms were bidding for the property and I was afraid that someone else might turn up another planet that would be competitive."

"That would have been most unlikely, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, I suppose so. But you must understand that a man could hunt ten lifetimes and never come in smelling distance of a planet half as good. When something like that happens you fall victim to all sorts of fantasies. You wake up sweating at night at the imaginings that build up in your mind. You know you'll never hit again. You know this is your one and only chance to make it really big. You can't bear the thought that something might come along and snatch it all away."

"I think I understand. You were in a hurry."

"You're damned right I was," I said. "And the surveyors were in a hurry, too, so they could earn the bonus. I don't say they were sloppy, but they might have been. But let's be fair with them. The intelligent life forms lived in a rather restricted stretch of jungle and they weren't very bright. A million years ago Earth might have been surveyed and not a single human have turned up. These life forms were on about the same level, let us say, as Pithecanthropus. And Pithecanthropus would not have made a splash in any survey of the Earth at the time he lived. There weren't many of him and, for good reason, he would have stayed out of sight, and he wasn't building anything that you could notice."

"Then it was just a big mistake."

"Yeah," I said. "Just a big mistake."

"Well, wasn't it?"

"Oh, sure. But try to tell that to a million settlers who had moved in almost overnight and had laid out their farms and surveyed their little towns and been given time enough to really appreciate this new world of theirs. Try to tell it to a realty firm with those million settlers howling for their money back and filing damage claims. And there was, of course, the matter of the bonus."

"You mean it was taken for a bribe."

"Miss Foster," I said, "you have hit it exactly on the head."

"But was it? Was it a bribe, I mean?"

"I don't know," I told her. "I don't think so. I'm fairly sure that when I offered it and, later, paid it, I didn't think of it as a bribe. It was simply a bonus to do a good job fast. Although I suppose, unconsciously, that the company might have been disposed to do a little better for me than they would have done for someone else who didn't pay a bonus, that they might even be inclined to shut their eyes to a thing or two."

"But you banked your money on Earth. In a numbered account. You'd been doing that for years. That doesn't sound too honest."

"That's nothing," I said, "that a man can be hanged for. With a lot of operators out in space it's just standard operating procedure. It's the only planet that allows numbered accounts and Earth's banking setup is the safest one there is. A draft on Earth is honored anywhere, which is more than you can say for many of the other planets."

She smiled at me across the fire. "I don't know," she said. "There are so many things I like about you, so many things I hate. What are you going to do with George when we're able to leave?"

"If he continues the way he is," I said, "we may bury him. He can't go on living too long without food or water. And I'm not an expert on force feeding. Perhaps you are."

She shook her head a little angrily. "What about the ship?" she asked, changing the subject.

"Well, what about it?"

"Maybe, instead of leaving the city, we should have gone back to the field."

"To do what? To bang a little on the hull? Try to bust it open with a sledge? And who has got a sledge?"

"We'll need it later on."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe not. We may know more then. Pick up an angle, maybe. Don't you think that if a ship, once covered by that goo, could be cracked open by main force and awkwardness someone else would have done it long ago?"

"Maybe they have. Maybe someone cracked their ship and took off. How can you know they haven't?"

"I can't, of course. But if this vibration business is true, the city is no place to hang around."

"So we're going off without even trying to get into the ship?"

"Miss Foster," I said, "we're finally on the trail of Lawrence Arlen Knight. That's what you wanted, wasn't it?"

"Yes, of course. But the ship . . .

"Make up your mind," I said. "Just what in hell do you want to do?"

She looked at me levelly. "Find Knight," she said.