Highway of Eternity (38 page)

He went back over the plan and thought it through, point by point, searching for glitches that could trip him up. He found none that he could not circumvent. After all, a hopeless people, offered hope, would not question it too closely. They'd be eager for it, they would lap up a promised salvation and would scream for more. Worked out right, he told himself, the scheme was foolproof. It would take a great deal more thinking and more planning, and he would give it those. He'd think it out in every detail before he went ahead with it. It was a solid and workable plan, and he was the one who could work it out.

He rose from his crouch and headed for the car. He had been in the arroyo longer than he'd thought. The sun was about to set.

You came back, the sphere shrieked joyously at him. I had thought you might not. I agonized you might not.

“No need for you to have agonized,” said Martin. “I am here.”

He checked the battery and it was up, as up as it would ever get. He moved the sphere to the well beside the seat and climbed in to start the car.

“One question,” he asked the sphere. “How about your ethics? Have you any ethics?”

What are ethics? asked the sphere. Please explain to me.

“Never mind,” Martin told it. “You'll do. We'll make a team together.”

He turned the car around and headed for the road.

18

Horseface

Horseface sat at ease at a table that stood in front of the cafe hut, now empty of the robot and equipment. Near him floated the net with the chest in which the galactic chart had been locked away. The visor that Enid had thought she stole was on the table, close to hand. The trolley car still stood on its track, waiting for the next passenger, who might never come. And around all this was wrapped the foggy grayness of the Highway of Eternity.

As he had done many times before, Horseface pondered on the Highway. So far, all his pondering had come to nothing, and he supposed it always would. He wondered who or what had engineered this never-ending thread of road, yanked askew and canted out of normal time and space. He had first heard of it very long ago and very far away, from an incredible creature that seemed to mock all the needs and qualities of life. It was this incredibility who had called it the Highway of Eternity, but who did not answer when he asked the reason for the name.

“Don't go looking for it,” the incredibility had warned him. “It cannot be found by looking. It must be stumbled upon.”

Horseface had stumbled upon it millennia ago and, curiously, had then found its representation worked into the ancient galactic chart. But he was sure his race had never built it, though they had been aware of it.

Having stumbled upon the Highway, he had decided it might make a place to sit and ponder his various choices of action. He had installed the hut with the tables and chairs, and had put the robot in charge. Since the tracks were there, he had placed the trolley on them and had rigged alarms so that he would be notified should someone or something appear along this section of the Highway.

For many centuries, nothing happened. Then, only a few years before, the alarms had been tripped by Boone in his first stepping around a corner. That strange happening had seemed to provide a possible key for which Horseface had been looking to solve the problem presented by the humans at Hopkins Acre.

He had been hopeful, but not completely convinced, until Boone's second appearance. Then he had recognized that he was witnessing an entirely new talent in a race from which he had not suspected such talents. The talent itself was less important than the fact that within the race there existed a capacity to develop masked new capabilities in an evolutionary mode. With his realization of that, Boone had become central to his project.

Now that project, Horseface told himself, was finally underway, working out far better than he had hoped. What now remained were years of monitoring and close watching to make certain no hitches developed, but he would have help with that. Spike and The Hat would be accepted by the family, as Spike had been for years.

Horseface chuckled as he thought of that. Galactic Center had considered Spike their undercover agent, and he had been inserted into the family at the moment they were about to flee into the past to escape the Infinites. Spike's reports to Horseface had reinforced his hunch that this band of humans was worth his close attention.

Of course, there was no guarantee that he would not fail in this project as he had failed in others in the past. Intelligence, it appeared, had a miserable chance of developing to its full capacity. There had been other races he had tried to help over long centuries of effort, and each had been a failure. There had been races he had not helped who had failed as well. The Rainbow People had failed finally because they had lost all true values by repressing their emotions until such emotions had shriveled away. The Infinites had become lost in their drive toward their fanatical crusade. Even Horseface's own people had failed when their too-successful search for immortality had caused a sacrifice of racial fertility that left him, finally, as the last surviving member of his race.

A soft plopping sound jerked his attention from his reminiscenses. The Hat stood opposite him, shaking himself as a dog would shake off water. With the shaking, his disarranged garments fell into their accustomed places. The Hat sat down carefully.

I am not deserting my post, The Hat told Horseface. I shall return and carry on my duties. I come to escape the wolf. He tosses me about and shakes me. He walks away, making me hope he has deserted me; then he turns and pounces on me. His teeth have battered and chewed upon me, and …

“You must put up with it,” Horseface said. “It is a rôle you must play. While you seem only a ragged doll, they will not suspect you spy upon them. Consider the rôle I must play. I must act a clown, talk as they would expect from an uncouth alien, tell them untruths, and play seedy tricks upon them.”

Like the trick he had played upon the little Enid, making her believe she must hold her finger upon a point while he tied a knot. He had gained her confidence by making her feel she helped to create the net, which, of course, had been there all along, needing only his thought to make it visible.

And to convince her of her importance on the net, he had let her believe that she was stealing the visor he had placed on the pink-and-purple world where he had left the chart chest. The compulsion to go to it had been put into her mind while she believed they were both thinking at each other. Then he had let her think she was saving him from the purple monster that was only trying to ride the net with them.

You need not have done any of it, The Hat said, if you had minded your own business. But you
must
interfere in the lives of others. No one seeks your advice or help. You are simply an objectionable busybody.

“Perhaps I am,” Horseface admitted. “But I cannot do otherwise, when a small push might place some race on the path toward a full development of the intellectual powers possible.”

And I have helped you, said The Hat. I have even acted on my own many times. That is how I got in trouble with the wolf. There your precious Boone was, stupidly dozing by his campfire, with the wolf edging up on him. The wolf would have torn out his throat in another minute had I not taken over its small mind and engulfed it with a sense of brotherhood for Boone and doglike devotion to him.

“Yes,” said Horseface. “You did well, as I have said before. You did well in programming the travelers whenever the family fled in them. Even when you programmed Martin's to bring him and the Infinites here, you did well—although I did not think so when he first appeared.”

And I saved Corcoran while you were in the chart, The Hat added. I watched him and when I saw he was about to fall, I zapped him unconscious and brought him to the Highway. And now I become a plaything for the wolf so that I can spy on your chosen Enid and Boone. It is not a proper reward for …

Horseface interrupted. “Tell me, do you see any signs that the two of them will mate?”

They have done so already, The Hat answered. I think Enid is feeling guilty that it took place before the rite they term a wedding. I do not understand this wedding business.

“Don't try,” Horseface told him. “The sexual ethics of all races make little sense. And the syndrome that humans call love is beyond all understanding.”

But The Hat was no longer listening. The Hat had collapsed into his rag doll phase and lay limply across the table.

Poor little tyke, Horseface thought in sudden sympathy. Perhaps he had been used hardly and deserved a rest.

Horseface recalled the day he had found the creature, tucked away in a display niche of an ancient museum of his own people, perhaps left against a time when the race would be gone. He had glanced at The Hat and passed on, unwilling to load himself down with relics of the past. Later, however, he had gone back to retrieve the doll. He never ceased to bless the urge that led him to do so, for The Hat had strange abilities beyond any he could understand, such as the power to move and carry across space and time without such aids as the net.

So Enid and Boone had mated and the die was cast. It was, Horseface knew, a genetic gamble, but better than many other gambles he had made. Horseface knew much about genetics.

From their union, there was a chance that a new race would spring—an offshoot of humanity that combined the evolutionary trend shown by Boone and the toughness of that small group of humans who had stubbornly dared to resist the menace of the Infinites.

He had admired that stubbornness and he had helped the rebels, recognizing the promise in them. He had supplied them with one of the most simple of the time machines developed by his race as an ancient forerunner of the net. The Infinites had time travel, of course, but theirs were such complicated devices that the rebels could not have understood them. Lying again, Horseface had let the rebels believe they were stealing it from the Infinites.

That was before he discovered Boone in a stroke of pure luck. But having discovered him, there had been the problem of getting him in contact with the Hopkins Acre family. More shifty-footed maneuvers had been called for—a whisper of rumor to Martin to send him to Corcoran and another rumor for Corcoran to take to Martin to scare him into leaving without his larger traveler.

Horseface had learned of Corcoran's weird vision before and of his friendship with Boone. A little prodding of Corcoran had sent the man to the Everest to gaze at Martin's suite and see the traveler.

Corcoran, Horseface admittted to himself, could have been a mistake. He had expected Boone to step around a corner into the traveler alone, leaving Corcoran behind. He had underestimated Boone's talent. But fortunately, Corcoran had caused no trouble. The discovery of the strange tree had been a danger point, but all had worked out well in the end.

Someday, Horseface told himself, he must take the time to find out what Corcoran's tree really was, though he could probably never learn what race or people was responsible for it, nor why it had been placed in that period on Earth.

In the end, he decided, all comes out better even than he could have hoped. There was still work to do, of course. He would have to find mates for the yet unborn children of Boone and Enid. Perhaps suitable ones could be found on one of the planets colonized by the humans. But the big job was done.

Idly, he pulled the visor closer to check on Martin. He seemed to have an odd compulsion to keep track of Martin, though the man was stashed away where he could not escape. Still, Martin was a slippery character.

In the visor plate, he saw the interior of a temple filled with starry-eyed worshippers. Martin, decked out in gold and purple vestments, stood before an ornate altar. The killer monster's brain case rested on a pedestal against the altar, glowing in the flickering light of many candles. It was apparent that Martin was in the middle of a spirited harangue. Suddenly he flung up his arms and the crowd leaped to its feet, mouths open in what must have been wildly happy response.

Martin had it made. He had the power that he had wanted and no one to challenge him. He was safely trapped in his own self-glorification. And yet, Horseface knew with some disgust, he'd keep on checking on Martin.

There was still one more chore to do now. It was not necessary, perhaps, but in all decency it should be done. The visor showed the far future now, where a glitter of sparkles rested in the faint shadow of an ancient tree while the world swirled slowly in its orbit around a swollen, blood-red, dying sun.

As Horseface began to clamber onto the net, The Hat came awake again and sat up groggily.

What are you doing now? he asked.

“I'm bringing Henry back to the family,” Horseface told him. “I don't know what Henry may think about it, but the rest of the family will be glad to see him. Do you want to come along?”

The Hat shook his head. There you go again, he told Horseface. Interfering. Still a busybody.

The net vanished, and The Hat collapsed upon the table, a limp, lumpy, and much-abused plaything.

About the Author

During his fifty-five-year career, Clifford D. Simak produced some of the most iconic science fiction stories ever written. Born in 1904 on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, Simak got a job at a small-town newspaper in 1929 and eventually became news editor of the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
, writing fiction in his spare time.

Simak was best known for the book
City
, a reaction to the horrors of World War II, and for his novel
Way Station
. In 1953
City
was awarded the International Fantasy Award, and in following years, Simak won three Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award. In 1977 he became the third Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and before his death in 1988, he was named one of three inaugural winners of the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement.