Destiny Doll (13 page)

TWELVE

We sat around the fire in the deepening dark.

"Bones," said Hoot. "Bones upon the ground."

"You're sure of that?" I asked. "Could it have been something else? Why should the hobbies be so scared of bones?"

"Sure of it," said Hoot. "Bones was all to see. Nothing else in sight."

"Maybe certain kinds of bones," said Sara. "The skeleton of something they are afraid of, even dead."

Somewhere in the fastness of the badlands a band of honkers were talking back and forth, breaking forth at times into flurries of insane gobblings. The fire flared as a new piece of the oily wood took flame and the wind that came flowing down the draw had an edge to it.

And here we were, I thought. Marooned in the center of a howling wilderness, not even sure where we had been heading, the winding trail our only orientation and the only place to flee to, if we could flee, back to that great white city, which in its way was as much of a howling wilderness as this.

But this, I sensed, was not the time to bring the matter up. In the morning, at the beginning of a brand new day, we'd have a look at it and then decide the best course for us to take.

Hoot waved a tentacle at the pile of blankets.

"I greedy," he said. "I take too much of him. He have less than I imagine."

"He'll be all right," said Sara. "He is sleeping now. He drank a bowl of broth."

"But why?" I demanded. "Why did the damn fool do it? I was ready and willing. I was the one Hoot asked. It should have been me. After all, Hoot and I . . ."

"Captain," Sara said, "have you considered that this was the first chance Tuck had to make a contribution? He must have felt a fairly useless member of this expedition. You have done your best to make him feel that way."

"Let us face it," I said. "Up until he did this job for Hoot, he had been fairly useless."

"And you begrudge him this chance?"

"No," I said. "No, of course I don't. What bothers me is what he said. I have life to give, he said. What did he mean by that?"

"I wouldn't know," said Sara. "There is no point now in worrying about what he might have meant. The thing we have to worry about is what we do now. We have been put afoot. Whatever we do we'll have to leave supplies behind. Water is the problem. Most of what we can carry will have to be water. Unless the hobbies should come back."

"They won't come back." I told her. "They've been waiting for this chance ever since we left the city. They would have deserted in a minute if it hadn't been for Hoot. He kept them in line."

"Surprise they catch me by," said Hoot. "I was ready for them. I bop them time and yet again and it did no good."

"The horrible thought occurs to me," said Sara, "that this may be standard operating procedure. Take a group of visitors out here somewhere and leave them stranded, with little chance of getting back. Not, perhaps, that it would do much good if they did get back . . ."

"Not us," I said. "Other people, maybe, but not these particular people. Not us, around this fire."

She glanced sharply at me and not approvingly—but that was not peculiar. By and large, she did not approve of me.

"I can't quite be sure," she said, "if you are trying to make fun of me or are whistling in the dark."

"Whistling in the dark," I said. "You have no idea how much a little inspired and determined whistling will achieve."

"I suppose you knew exactly what to do," she said. "You have it all in mind. You'll disclose it to us in a sudden flash of genius. You've been in jams before and you never panic and . . ."

"Oh," I said, "lay off it. Let's talk in the morning."

And the terrible thing about it was that I really meant let us wait till morning. It was the first time in my life that I had ever put off decision-making. It was the first time in my life that I found myself reluctant to face what I was up against.

It was these badlands, I told myself—these barren, desolate stretches of tortured land and twisted trees. They took the heart out of a man, they ground him down, they made him as desolate and no-account as the tangled, forsaken land itself. One could almost feel himself melting into the landscape, becoming a part of it, as uncaring and as hopeless.

"In the morning," Sara said, "we'll go and' see Hoot's bones."

THIRTEEN

We found the bones about a half mile down the gully. It made a sharp turn to the left and when we rounded the turn, there they were. I had expected that we would find a few bones scattered about, gleaming against the mudlike brownness of the soil, but instead of that there was a heap of bones, a great windrow of them that stretched from one wall of the gully to the other.

They were large bones, many of them a foot in diameter or more, and a grinning skull that was so located in the heap that it appeared to be peeking out at us, was elephant-size or bigger. They were yellowed and crumbling, porous where exposure to the sun and weather had leached out the calcium. While heaped mostly in a windrow, some were scattered about the edges of the windrow, probably hauled there by scavengers which in some long-gone day must have swarmed to feasting.

Beyond the bones the gully ended abruptly. The walls of earth, with rocks from fist-size to boulders, sticking out of them like raisins in a cake, swept around in a semicircle to close off the depression. The bones lay fifty feet or so from the end of the gully and at the foot of the earthen wall which marked its end lay a great jumble of rocks which in ages past had fallen from the cliff.

The gully itself was depressing enough, with its earthy barrenness, lonely beyond all concept of loneliness. One would have said that as it stood the place could not have been made more lonely or more barren, but that would have been wrong, for the bones added that one further factor or dimension which pushed it to a point of awesome loneliness that seemed to be more than the human mind could bear.

I felt uneasy, almost ill—and it takes a lot to make me ill. There was a feeling that one should turn from this place and flee, that something which had happened here long ago had cast upon this place an aura of evil and of awfulness to which no one should subject himself.

And out of this awfulness a voice came to us.

"Gracious sirs or mesdames," it piped, loud and cheerfully, "or whatever you may chance to be, pity please upon me, hauling me hence from this awkward and embarrassing position in which I have been long since."

I could not have stirred if I had been paid a million. The voice nailed me into place and held me stupefied.

The voice spoke again. "Against the wall," it said. "Behind the jumbled rocks which, forsooth, proved so poor a fortress as to get all killed but I."

"It could be a trap," said Sara in a hard metallic voice that sounded strange from her. "The hobbies might have sensed the trap. That's maybe why they ran."

"Please," pleaded the piping voice. "Please away you do not go. There been others and they did turn away. There is nothing here to fright you."

I moved forward a step or two.

"Captain, don't!" cried Sara.

"We can't walk away," I said. "We would always wonder."

It wasn't what I meant to say or what I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was turn around and run. It was as if another person, some sort of second person, a surrogate of me, had spoken.

But all the time I was walking forward and when I came to the pile of bones I began to scramble over them. They made unsteady footing and they crumbled under me and shifted, but I made it over them and was on the other side.

"Oh, most noble creature," cried the piping voice, "you come to sympathetic rescue of my unworthy self."

I raced across the space between the bones and boulders and went swarming up the pile of rocks from which the voice seemed to come. They were good-sized boulders, better than man-high, and when I scrambled to the top of them and looked down behind them I saw what had been piping at us.

It was a hobby, its milk-glass whiteness gleaming in the shadow, flat upon its back with its rockers sticking straight up in the air. One side of it lay against the boulder that I stood upon, wedged tightly against it by another smaller boulder which had been dislodged from the pile. Pinned between these two masses of rock, the hobby was held completely helpless.

"Thank you, gracious one," it piped. "You did not turn away. See you I am unable, sir, but from other evidences I deduce you are humanoid. Humanoids be the best of people. Filled with much compassion and no little valor."

It waggled its rockers at me in a gesture of gratitude.

The trapped hobby was not the only thing behind the barricade. Out of the dirt a humanoid skull grinned at me and there were scattered bones and chunks of rusted metal.

"How many years ago?" I asked the hobby, and It was a foolish thing to ask, for there were other more important questions that I should have asked.

"Honored sir," it said, "of time all track I've lost. The minutes run like years and the years like centuries and it seems to me that since I last stood upon my rockers an eternity has passed. No one upside down as I am can be relied upon to keep a count of time. There be others of us, but they ran away. And still others of us, but they died. I be the only one left out of that noble company."

"All right," I said, "just take it easy. We'll have you out of there."

"Take it easy," piped the hobby, "I have done for long. The time I passed with many thoughts and fantasies and much hoping and much fanciful imaginings of what would happen to me. I knew that at length the rocks would rot away, for this material of mine outlasts any rock. But hope I did that before that came about there would be other intervention, from such kind-intentioned person as yourself."

The others were scrambling across the pile of bones and I waved them on.

"We have a hobby here," I shouted at them, "and there is at least one human skull and some scattered bones."

And even as I told them this, I was not so much wondering about what might have happened here or why humans may have died here, but was thinking that with the rescued hobby we would be trapped no longer in this little stretch of badlands. The hobby could carry the water we would need either to continue up the trail or race back to the city.

It took all three of us, with Hoot standing off and calling out encouragement to us, to roll away the smaller rock that held the hobby pinned against the bigger boulder. And when we had it rolled away we had to tip that stupid hobby over and set him on his rockers. He stared at us solemnly, which, I suppose, was the only way that he could stare, for hobbies are not designed for facial expression.

"I be Paint," he told us, "although at times I be called Old Paint, which is beyond my feeble understanding, for I be no older than the hobbies. We all be forged and fabricated at the selfsame time and there be no one of us older than the other."

"There were other hobbies?" Sara asked.

"There be ten of us," said Paint. "Nine others ran away and the only reason for my staying is the unfortunate circumstance from which you kindly liberated me. We be forged on distant planet, of which I be ignorant the name, and brought here to this planet. Coming up the trail we be attacked by a horde of raveners, result of which you see."

"The ones who brought you here, the ones who fabricated you," asked Sara. "They were the same as us?"

"Same as you," said Paint. "There be no profit in talking more of them. They died."

"Why were they here?" she asked. "What were they looking for?"

"For another one of them," said Paint. "For humanoid person long disappeared, but with many stories told."

"For Lawrence Arlen Knight?"

"I know not," the hobby said. "They do not tell me things."

FOURTEEN

We decided to go on, following the trail. We threshed it out as we sat around the smoky campfire, with Paint standing beside the pile of our supplies, gently rocking back and forth. Actually there wasn't much threshing out to do. Tuck didn't really care. He sat a little apart from us, clutching his doll tight against him and silently rocking back and forth. It was enough to give a man the jitters, watching the two of them, Paint and Tuck, rocking back and forth. Sara and I made the decision and there was no real argument. There was nothing, we were convinced, for us back there in the city. And so far as we knew, there was nothing for us up there on the trail, unless it were the sort of thing that had happened to those men back there in the gully. But the very fact that other humans, Lord knows how long ago, had followed this same trail, apparently for the selfsame reason that we followed it, seemed at least to Sara a powerful argument that we should continue.

But there was one thing, I figured, I should get straight with her.

"Knight must be dead," I said. "Surely you know that. You must have known it back on Earth when we started out."

She flared at me. "There you go again! Can't you let loose! You've been against this idea from the start. Why did you ever come with us?"

"I told you that before," I said. "The money."

"Then what do you care if he's dead or alive? What do you care if we find him or we don't?"

"That's an easy one," I told her. "I don't give a damn one way or the other." '

"But you're willing to go on? You sounded just a while ago as if you preferred going on."

"I think I do," I said. "We might find something up ahead. We'll find nothing going back."

"We might round up the hobbies."

I shook my head. "if either the hobbies or the gnome found we were coming back, we'd never see them, much less lay a hand on them. There must be a million places in that city where you could hide an army."

"The hobbies must be the ones who ran away," she said, "down there in the gully. Do you suppose that they remembered when they saw the bones? Do you suppose they might have forgotten, but when they saw the bones remembered and it was such a shock to them, this old memory from the past . . ."

"There were eight of them," I said, "and Paint makes nine. He said there were ten. Where did the other go?"

"We may never know," she said.

I couldn't figure out what difference all this made, why we should be sitting here and speculating. I didn't really see what difference anything could make. We would go on and we'd not know where we were going, but we could always hope that we'd find a better place than this bone-dry wilderness with its flinty ridges and its twisted badlands, we could always hope that we might get a break somehow and that we'd recognize it soon enough to take advantage of it.

The fact that the men whose bones lay there in the gully's end had been seeking someone did not necessarily mean they knew he'd come this way. Probably they had been as confused as we were. And there was no real evidence that Knight had been the one they had been looking for.

So we sat there by the campfire and planned it out.

We would load Paint with Roscoe's useless carcass and all the water and food that he could carry. Tuck and I would carry heavy packs while Sara, the only one of us with a weapon, would carry a light load, so that in a moment of emergency she could drop her pack and be ready with the rifle. Hoot would carry nothing. He would be our scout, ranging out ahead of us and spying out the land.

That afternoon, much as we disliked the doing of it, we went down the gully and dug through the fort. We found three human skulls and half a dozen rusted weapons that were too far gone to determine what kind of guns they might have been. Paint recalled that there had been eight humans and the large number of scattered bones seemed to bear him out. But three skulls were all we found.

Back at camp we made up our packs and hauled the rest of the supplies off the trail, caching them in a narrow fissure than ran down into the gully. Using branches, we brushed out our tracks leading off the trail. Neither the caching job or the brushing out of tracks was done too expertly. But I had the feeling that it was all a waste of time, that the trail had been long abandoned and that we might have been the first to travel it for a century or more.

The day was far gone, but we loaded up and left. There was none of us who wanted to stay in that camp for a minute longer than was necessary. We fled from it, glad to get away, to be free of the depressing walls of barren earth and the sense of ancient doom one could feel hanging over it. And there was, as well, a sense of urgency, a never-expressed, perhaps never-admitted feeling that we were running out of time.