22

FOR a moment, Horton was spattered across the universe, with the same sickening sense of endlessness that he had felt before; then the spattering came together and the universe was narrowed, and all sense of strangeness ceased. There was coordinated time and space again, neatly tied together, and he knew where he was, except there seemed to be two of him, although the twoness of him seemed not inconvenient and even natural.

He crouched in the warm black loam between two rows of vegetables. Ahead of him, the two rows went on and on, two green lines with a strip of black between them. To the left and right, there were innumerable other parallel green lines with the black lines between them—although he had to imagine the black lines, for the greenness of the green lines merged together and on either side, there was only a dark green carpet.

Squatting on his heels, feeling the warmth of the soil against his bare feet, he looked back over his shoulder and behind him the green carpet ended, very far away, against the uplift of a structure that towered so high its top was lost in a white puffy cloud pegged against the blueness of the sky.

He reached out his little boy’s hands and picked the beans that hung heavily on the plants, using his left hand to pull the bushes apart so he could reach the pods entangled in the foliage, picking them with his right hand and dropping them into a half-filled basket sitting in the black loam strip just in front of him.

Now he saw what he had not seen before, that at regular intervals between rows, ahead of him other baskets waited, empty baskets waiting to be filled, placed there by rough calculation of when one basket would be filled and another needed. And back of him other baskets, already filled and waiting for the vehicle which later on would move along the rows to collect the baskets filled with beans.

Something else he had not realized before—that he was not alone in the field, but that there were 55

many others with him, most of them children, although some were old men and women. Some of them were ahead of him, being faster, or perhaps less careful, pickers, others behind him.

Clouds flecked the sky, fleecy, lazy clouds, but at the moment none covered the sun and it shone down with a fierce warmth that he could feel striking through the thinness of his shirt. He crawled along the row, picking as he went, being conscientious in his work, leaving some of the smaller pods to mature for another day or two, picking all the others with the sun upon his back, sweat starting in his armpits and running down his ribs, the softness and the warmth of the well-broken, cultivated soil pressing on his feet. His mind held in neutral, clinging to the present, neither moving back nor forth in time, content in the present moment, as if he were a simple organism which absorbed the warmth and in some strange way drew nourishment from the soil, as had the beans he picked.

But there was more than that. There was the boy, perhaps nine or ten, and there was, as well, the present Carter Horton, a seemingly invisible second person, who stood to one side, or was positioned somewhere else, who watched the boy he once had been, feeling and thinking and experiencing what he once had known, almost as if he were the boy. But knowing more than the boy knew, knowing what the boy could not even guess, aware of the years and events which lay between this expansive bean field and a time a thousand light-years into space. Knowing, as the boy could not know, that men and women in the great, distant structure which rose at one end of the field, and in many other similar structures in the world, had recognized the seeds of another crisis-point and, even then, were planning its solution.

Strange, he thought, that even given a second chance, the human race still must come upon its crisis-points and realize at last that the only solution lay in other possible planets in other hypothetical solar systems, where men once more could make other starts, some of these starts failing, but some, perhaps, succeeding.

Less than five centuries before this morning in the bean patch, the Earth had faltered to a halt, not in war, but in worldwide economic collapse. With the profit and free-enterprise system finally buckling under the cracks which had begun to be apparent early in the twentieth century, with a large fraction of the world’s more basic natural resources gone, with population soaring, with industry introducing more and more technological labor-saving devices, with food surpluses no longer stretching far enough to feed the people of the world—with all of these, famine, unemployment, inflation, and a lack of confidence in world leadership had resulted. Government had disappeared; industry, communications and trade had ground to a halt and, for a time, there had been anarchy and chaos.

Out of this anarchy had risen another way of life, put together, not by politicians and statesmen, but by economists and sociologists. But in a few hundred years, this new society had exhibited symptoms which had sent the scientists to their laboratories and engineers to their drafting boards to design the starships that would transplant the human race to space. The symptoms had not been misread, the second, the invisible Horton told himself, for on this very day (which day? this day or another day?) Elayne had told him of the final collapse of the way of life the economists and sociologists had carpentered so carefully.

Earth had been too sick, he thought, too debased, too exploited, too polluted by the errors of mankind to survive.

He felt the soil between his toes and the little whiff of breeze that came across the field to blow against his sweat-soaked, sun-warmed back. He dropped the handful of beans that he had picked into the basket and pushed it ahead of him, bunching along, the row to reach other bushes in the seemingly never-ending row of bushes. The basket, he saw, was almost full. Just ahead of him was an empty basket.

He was getting tired. Glancing at the sun, he saw that it was still an hour or more till noon when the lunch wagon would come driving down the rows; A half hour for lunch, he thought, and then he’d be back at the picking until the sun went down. He stretched out the fingers of his right hand, flexing them to take away the cramp and tired. He saw that the fingers were stained green.

Tired and hot and beginning to get hungry and a long day yet ahead, but he had to keep on 56

picking, as hundreds of others were picking—the very young and the very old—doing jobs that they could do, leaving other more capable workers free to do other jobs. He squatted on his heels and stared out across the greenness. Not only beans, he thought, but many other crops in season, produce that when the time came must be harvested to feed the people of the tower.

To feed the people of the tower, thought Horton (the insubstantial, invisible Horton), to feed the tribe, the clan, the commune. My people. Our People. One for all and all for one. The tower built high, above the clouds, so that it would take little ground space, piling a city perpendicularly so that the land would be left to grow the food to feed the people of the piled-up city. People crowded into a tower because the tower, huge as it was, must be as small as possible.

Make do. Make last. Get along without. Grow and harvest food with stoop labor because there was little fuel. Eat carbohydrates because they took less energy to grow than protein. Build and manufacture for permanence and not for obsolescence; with the profit system swept away, obsolescence had become not only criminal, but ridiculous.

With industry gone, he thought, we grew our food, we took in one another’s washing. We got along—we got along. We went back to tribal patterns, living in a monolith rather than a collection of rude huts. In time, we sneered at the olden times, at the profit system, at the work ethic, at private enterprise and all the time we sneered, there was a sickness in us—the sickness of humankind. No matter what we tried, he told himself, there was a sickness in us. Must it be that the human race cannot live in harmony with its environment? Must it, to survive, have new planets to rape each few millennia? Are we doomed to move like an invading swarm of locust across the galaxy, across the universe? Is the galaxy, the cosmos, doomed to us? Or will the day come when the universe will rise up in annoyance and slap us down—not in anger, but in annoyance? There is, he thought, a certain greatness in us, but a destructive and a selfish greatness. Earth lasted for a matter of two million years after our species first arose, but during most of those years, we were not effective as we now are effective—it took us a time to grow up to our full potential for destruction. But starting, as we are now, on other planets, how long would it take to introduce that deadly virus of mankind—

how long will it take the disease to run its course?

The boy parted the bushes and was reaching out to pick the beans thus exposed. A worm which had been clinging to the leaves lost it footing and dropped off. Striking the ground, it rolled itself into a ball. Scarcely without thinking, scarcely pausing in his work, the boy shifted a foot, lifting it to come down on the worm, grinding it deep into the soil.

A gray mist came creeping to blot out the bean field, and the great monolithic building that loomed mile-high in the distance and there, hanging in the sky, surrounded by the misty fog that swept about it in streaming tendrils was the skull of Shakespeare, looking down at Horton—not leering down at him, not grinning down at him, but regarding him most companionably, as if the flesh might still exist, as if the barrier line of death did not exist at all.

Horton found himself speaking to the skull. “How now, old companion?” And that was strange, for Shakespeare bad never been his companion save in the general companionship of humanity, the two of them belonging to that strange and awesome race of creatures which had proliferated on one planet and then, in desperation rather than adventurously, had gone storming out into the galaxy—

going only God knew how far, for certainly, at this moment, no member of the race might know with any certainty how far the others may have gone.

“How now, old companion?” And that was strange as well, for Horton knew that it was not the manner in which he’d ordinarily speak—almost as if he were speaking in a sort of Mother Goose adaptation of the kind of speech the original Shakespeare had used to pen his plays. As if he were not the original Carter Horton, but, as well, another Mother Goose adaptation mouthing rote sentiments to some symbolism that he once had dreamed. He raged inwardly at himself for being what he was not; but try as he could, he could not find himself again. His psyche was so entangled with the boy who crushed a worm and with a dried-bone skull case that there was no way he could find the path back to his normal self.

“How now, old companion?” he asked. “You say we all are lost. But where lost? How lost? Why lost? Have you dug down to the basics of our lostness? Is it carried in our genes, or did something 57

happen to us? Are we the only lost ones, or are there others like us? Is lostness an innate characteristic of intelligence?”

The skull said to him, clattering its bony jaws, “We are lost. That is all I said. I did not go digging into the philosophy of it. We are lost because we lost the Earth. We are lost because we do not know where we are. We are lost because we can’t find the way back home. There now is no place for us. We walk strange roads in stranger lands and along the way, there is nothing that makes sense. Once we knew some answers because we knew the questions to be asked, but now we can find no answers because we do not know the questions. When others in the galaxy reach out to make contact with us, we do not know what to say. We are, in such a situation, gibbering idiots who have not only lost our way, but our sense as well. Back there in your precious bean field, even at the age of ten, you had some sense of your purpose and where you might be going, but you do not have that same sense now.”

“No,” said Horton, “I don’t suppose I have.”

“You’re damned right you haven’t. You want some answers, do you?”

“What kind of answers?”

“Any kind of answers. Any kind at all are better than no answers. Go and ask the Pond.”

“The Pond? What could the Pond tell me? It’s just a glob of dirty water.”

“It’s not water. You know it isn’t water.”

“That’s right. It isn’t water. Do you know what it is?”

“No, I don’t,” said Shakespeare.

“Did you talk with it?”

“I never dared. Basically, I’m a coward.”

“You were afraid of the Pond?”

“Not that. Afraid of what it might tell me.”

“But you knew something about the Pond. You figured it could talk with you. And yet you never wrote about it.”

“How can you know?” asked Shakespeare. “You have not read everything I wrote. But you are right; I never wrote about it except to say it stank. And I never wrote about it because I did not want to think about it. It gave rise to great unease in me. It was more than just a pond. Even had it been no more than water, it would have been more than just a pond.”

“But why unease?” asked Horton. “Why did you feel that way about it?”

“Man prides himself upon his intellect,” said Shakespeare. “He glorifies in his reason and his logic. But these are new things, very lately come by. Before that, he had something else. It was this something else that told me. Call it a gut feeling; call it intuition; call it any fancy name you wish.

Our prehistoric ancestors had it, and it served them well. They knew, but could not tell you how they knew. They knew what to be afraid of and that, at the bottom of it, is what any species must have if it is to survive. What to be afraid of, what to walk around, what to leave alone. If you have that, you’ll live; if you don’t, you won’t.”

“Is this your spirit talking to me? Your shade? Your ghost?”

“First tell me this,” said the skull, clattering its jaws with the two teeth missing. “First tell me what is life and what is death, and then I’ll answer you about the spirit and the shade.” 23

THE Shakespeare skull hung above the doorway, grinning down at them—and a moment before, Horton told himself, it had not been grinning. It had been talking with him as another man might talk. It had been strange, but it had not been horrible, and it had not grinned. Its two missing teeth had been no more than missing teeth, but now they had about them a macabre quality that was unsettling. Evening dusk had fallen, and the flicker of the fire reflecting off the polished bone made it seem that the jaws might still be moving and lent a blinking to the deep darkness of the sockets where once the eyes had been.

“Well,” said Nicodemus, staring at the steaks, “this business of the god-hour has messed my cooking most atrociously. These slabs of meat are burned almost to a crisp.” 58

“It’s all right,” said Horton. “I like my eating rare, but it doesn’t matter that much.” Beside Horton, Elayne seemed to be emerging from a trance. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, accusingly. “Why didn’t you let me in on what it would be like?”

“There is no way,” said Carnivore. “How can you tell the shriveling of the gut . . .”

“What was it like?” asked Horton.

“Frightening,” she-said. “But wonderful as well. As if someone had taken you to some great cosmic mountaintop, with the universe all spread out before you—all the glory and the wonder, all the sadness. All the love and hate, all the compassion and not-caring. You stand there, frail and blown by the wind that sweeps the worlds and, at first, you are lonely and confused and you feel as if you are someplace you are not meant to be, but you remember then that you did not aspire to be there, but were somehow brought there and then it seems all right. You know what you are looking at, and it does not look anyway at all the way you would have imagined that it would—if, in fact, you ever had imagined that you’d see it, which you never did, of course. You stand and stare at it, at first with no comprehension and then, slowly, you begin to comprehend just a little, as if someone were telling you what it was all about. And, at last, you begin to understand, using truths you had not known existed, and you’re about ready to say to yourself so that’s the way it is and then, before you can say it to yourself, it all is gone. Just when you feel that you are ready to grasp some meaning of it, then it all is gone.”

That was the way it was, thought Horton—or at least that was the way it had been. But this time, for him, it had been different, as Shakespeare had written; it could be different, And the logic of that difference, the reason for that difference?

“I timed it this time,” said Nicodemus. “It ran slightly under a quarter of an hour. Did it seem that long?”

“Longer,” said Elayne. “It seemed to last forever.”

Nicodemus looked questioningly at Horton. “I don’t know,” said Horton. “I had no very clear impression of time.”

The conversation with Shakespeare had not lasted too long, but when he tried to calculate, in memory, how long he had been in the bean field, he could not even make a guess.

“It was the same for you?” asked Elayne. “You saw much the same I did? This was what you could not describe to me?”

“This time it was different. I went back to my boyhood.”

“And that was all?” asked Elayne. “Just back to your boyhood?”

“That was all,” said Horton.- He could not bring himself to tell of his conversation with the skull.

It had an odd sound to it and more than likely, Carnivore would panic at the telling. It was better, he decided, to simply let it lie.

“The thing I want,” said Carnivore, “is this god-hour to tell us how to fix the tunnel. You are quite sure,” he said to Nicodemus, “that no farther you can go.”

“I can’t imagine what,” said Nicodemus. “I tried to get the cover off the control, and that seems impossible. I tried to chisel out the control, and that rock is hard as steel. The chisel bounces off it.

It’s not just ordinary rock. In some way, it has been metamorphosed.”

“Magic we could try. Among the four of us. . .“ “I know no magic,” Nicodemus told him.

“Nor do I,” said Horton.

“I know some,” said Carnivore, “and perhaps m’lady.”

“What kind of magic, Carnivore?”

“Root magic, herb magic, dancing magic.”

“Those all are primitive,” said Elayne. “They have but small effect.”

“By the very nature of it, all magic is primitive,” said Nicodemus. “It is the appeal of the ignorant to powers that are suspected, but of which no one is sure.”

“Not necessarily so,” said Elayne. “I know of peoples who have workable magic—magic you can count on. Based, I think, on mathematics.”

“But not our kind of mathematics,” said Horton.

“That is right. Not our kind of mathematics.”

 

59

“But you don’t know this magic,” said Carnivore. “The mathematics you don’t have.”

“I’m sorry, Carnivore. I have no inkling of them.”

“You put down my magic,” howled Carnivore. “You, all of you, put me down most snottily. At my simple magic, of roots and leaves and barks, you sneer with quiet accomplishment. Then you tell me of other magic that might have a chance to work, that might open wide the tunnel, but you do not know this magic.”

“Once again,” Elayne told him, “I am very sorry. I wish, for your sake, I did have the magic. But we are here and it is somewhere else, and even if I could go in search of it, to find those who could manipulate it , I am not sure that I could interest them in such a project. For they, undoubtedly, would be very supercilious people and no easy folks to talk with.”

“No one,” said Carnivore, with feeling, “really gives a damn. You, all three of you, can go back to the ship. . .“

“We could go back to the tunnel in the morning,” said Nicodemus, “and have another look at it.

We might see something we have missed. After all, I spent all my time on the control panel, and no one paid attention to the tunnel itself. We might find something there.”

“You’d do this?” asked Carnivore. “You’d really do it for good old Carnivore?”

“Yes,” said Nicodemus. “For good old Carnivore.”

And now, thought Horton, this is the end of it. They’d go out tomorrow morning and inspect the tunnel once again. Finding nothing, there’d be no more they could do—although, come to think of it, that was wrongly phrased; up to the moment, they’d done exactly nothing. After several thousand years, if one took Elayne’s fates at face value, they had finally reached a planet where a man could live, and then had gone rushing off on a rescue mission which had come to nothing. It was illogical for him to be thinking this, he told himself, but it was the truth. The only thing of value they had found had been the emeralds and, in their situation, the emeralds were not worth the picking off the ground. Although, perhaps, on second thought, they had found something that might be worth the time expended. But it was something, on the face of it, to which they could lay no claim. By all that was right and proper, Carnivore must be the heir of Shakespeare, and this would mean that the Shakespeare volume must belong to him.

He glanced up at the skull affixed above the door. I would like that book, he told the skull, speaking in his mind. I’d like to settle down and read it, try to live the days of your exile, to judge the madness and the wisdom in you, finding, no doubt, more wisdom than madness, for even in madness there may, at times, be wisdom, try to correlate chronologically the paragraphs and snatches that you wrote so haphazardly, to find the kind of man you were and how you came to terms with loneliness and death.

Did I really talk with you? he asked the skull. Did you reach out beyond the death-dimension to establish contact with me, perhaps specifically to tell me about the Pond? Or was it simply a reaching out to anyone, any other intellectual blob, that was in a position to suspend a natural disbelief and to thus be able to talk with you? Ask the Pond, you said. And how do you ask the Pond? Do you walk up to the Pond and say, Shakespeare said I could talk with you—so go ahead and talk? And what do you really know about the Pond? Could there have been more than you wished to tell me, but did not have the time to do it? It is safe to ask you all this now, for you cannot answer. Although, it helps one to believe that he talked with you by now bombarding you with a flurry of questions that one knows will not be answered, not by a thing of weathering bone pegged above a doorway.

You told Carnivore none of this, but then you’d not have told Carnivore; for in your madness, you must have feared him even more than you allowed your writing to reveal. You were a strange man, Shakespeare, and I’m sorry that I could not know you, but perhaps I know you now. Perhaps I know you better than I would have known you in the flesh. Perhaps even better than Carnivore could have known you, for I’m a human and Carnivore was not.

And Carnivore? Yes, what of Carnivore? For now it was at an end and someone must make some decision on what they were to do for Carnivore. Carnivore—the poor damn slob, the unlovable and disgusting, and yet something must be done for him. After raising up his hopes, they could not 60

simply walk away and leave him here. Ship—he should have asked Ship about it, but he had been afraid to. He’d not even tried to contact Ship, for if he did, when he did, the matter of Carnivore would come up and he knew the answer. It was an answer that he didn’t want to hear, one that he couldn’t bear to hear.

“That pond stinks hard tonight,” said Carnivore. “There are times when it stinks more than others, and when the wind is right, there is no living with it.” As the words penetrated his consciousness, Horton again became aware of the others seated about the fire, with the Shakespeare skull no more than a splotch of whiteness hung above the door.

The stench was there, the foul rottenness of the Pond, and out beyond the circle of the campfire-light came a swishing sound. The others heard it and their heads turned to stare in the direction from which the sound had come. Listening hard for the sound to repeat itself, no one spoke.

The sound came again and now there was a sense of movement in the outer darkness, as if a part of the darkness had moved, not a movement one could see, but a sense of movement. A small part of the darkness took on a sheen, as if one small facet of the darkness had become a mirror and was reflecting back the firelight.

The sheen grew larger and there was now an unmistakable movement in the darkness—a sphere of deeper dark that was rolling closer, swishing as it came.

First there had been only a hint of it, then a sensing of it, and now, quite suddenly and unmistakably, it revealed itself—a sphere of darkness, two feet or so in diameter, that came rolling from the night into the circle of the firelight. The stench came with it—a deepening stench that seemed, however, as the sphere came closer, to lose some of its pungency.

Ten feet from the fire, it stopped and waited, a black ball that held within itself an oily gleam. It simply sat there. It was motionless. There was no quiver, no pulsation, no sign that it had ever moved or was capable of movement.

“It’s the Pond,” said Nicodemus, speaking quietly as if he did not wish to disturb or frighten it.

“It’s from the Pond. A part of the Pond come visiting.” There was tension and fear within the group, but not, Horton told himself, an overriding fear—

rather a shocked and wondering fear. Almost, he thought, as if the sphere was being very circumspect to hold down their fear.

“It’s not water,” said Horton. “I was there today. It is heavier than water. Like mercury, but it isn’t mercury.”

“Then a part of it could make itself into a ball,” said Elayne.

“Alive the damn thing is,” squeaked Carnivore. “It lies there, knowing of us, spying on us.

Shakespeare say something wrong with Pond. He afraid of it. He go nowhere near it. Shakespeare be most accomplished coward. He say at times that in cowardliness lies a depth of wisdom.”

“There is a lot going on,” said Nicodemus, “that we don’t understand. The blocked tunnel, the creature encased in time, and now this. I have a feeling that something is about to happen.”

“How about it?” Horton asked the sphere. “Is there something that is about to happen? Have you come to tell us?”

The sphere made no sound. It did not stir. It simply sat and waited.

Nicodemus took a step toward it.

“Leave it alone,” said Horton, sharply.

Nicodemus halted.

The silence held. There was nothing to be done, nothing to be said. The Pond was here; the next move was up to it.

The sphere stirred, quivering, and then it was retreating, rolling back into the darkness until there was no sign of it, although long after it had disappeared, it seemed to Horton that he could still see it. It sloshed and rustled as it moved and this sound finally died out with distance and the stench, to which they had grown somewhat accustomed, began to clear away.

Nicodemus came back to the fire and squatted down beside it.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“A look it wanted of us,” wailed Carnivore. “It came to have a look.” 61

“But why?” asked Elayne. “Why would it want to have a look at us?”

“Who can know what a Pond may want,” said Nicodemus. “There’s one way to find out,” said Horton. “I’ll go and ask the Pond.”

“That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard,” said Nicodemus. “This place must be getting to you.”

“I don’t think it’s crazy,” said Elayne. “The Pond came visiting. I’ll go with you.”

“No, you won’t,” said Horton. “I’m the only one to go. You all stay here. No one goes with me and no one follows. Is that understood?”

“Now, look, Carter,” said Nicodemus, “you can’t just go rushing off. . .“

“Let him go,” growled Carnivore. “It is nice to know that all humans aren’t like my cowardly friend there above the door”.

He lurched to his feet and threw a rough almost mocking salute to Horton “Go my warrior friend Go to meet the foe.”