He didn’t have to go back to the campfire, he remembered. There was nothing there except the saucepan and the skillet. While he had gone to the spring, Enid had packed the rest of the provisions into the traveler — the food, the blankets, the rucksack, everything they had. All he had was the rifle and the cartridges it carried.

Realizing this, he felt a terrible nakedness. He was on his own. Enid would do her best to come back and pick him up. But would she be able to? He knew nothing about the capabilities or the operation of a traveler or how proficient Enid might be in its operation.

The monster moved, but not toward him. It moved slowly, tentatively, out toward the plain, as if it might be uncertain what to do. Maybe, Boone told himself, it was worried. It had botched its job, that much was certain. It had failed at Hopkins Acre and here it had failed again.

The monster moved beyond the fire and went out onto the plain, a twinkling object of sunburst glory against the drabness of the level land and the dusty buttes.

Keeping a wary eye on it, Boone walked to the fire and piled more wood on it. Before too long he would have to climb the butte and bring in more wood from the clump of juniper.

Elsewhere he might find a more convenient campsite, but he could not go too far. When Enid returned — if she returned — she would come here. When the traveler reappeared, he would have to be here, waiting for it.

He knelt beside the fire, laying down the rifle, and went through his pockets, taking inventory. He pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and spread it out, laying on it the items that he found in other pockets. A lighter, a pipe, a half-empty packet of tobacco, a jackknife that he had carried for years for sentimental reasons, a small notebook, a ball-point pen, a pencil stub, a couple of paper clips, a handful of coins, his billfold with a few bills, credit cards, his driver’s license — and that was all. He had traveled light when he had gone to the Everest with Corcoran, leaving the rest of the junk he would normally carry on his person in the drawer of the nightstand beside the bed. But he had two essentials: a lighter, which he would have to use sparingly; and a knife — a poor, cheap knife, but still a knife, a cutting edge.

He restored the items to his pockets, then rose, dusting off his trousers.

The monster, he saw, had changed directions. It had circled and now was moving back toward him. Boone picked up the rifle, hoping that he would not have to use it. He had only six cartridges and none of them could be wasted. But where did one shoot a robot to bring it down?

From the other side of the spur of sandstone that extended out beyond the pocket where the bull stood at bay came occasional bellowing. The wolves must be at the bison once again.

It was unreal, thought Boone — all of it unreal. Even knowing it was happening, he still found some intellectual difficulty in believing it. Any minute now it would go away and he would find himself in a world he knew, among friends and without any thought of a killer robot, an embattled bull, or a wolf nose to nose with him beside a dying campfire.

The monster was much closer now, heading straight for him. It was much bigger than he had thought it was and still not quite believable. The monster seemed in no hurry. The bellowing from the direction of the sandstone spur became thunderous, filled with rage and rising desperation.

Boone shifted his feet, planted them solidly. He raised the rifle, but did not snug it to his shoulder. He was ready now, he told himself, set for whatever happened. The great eye first and, if it seemed necessary, the center of the web.

The bull burst into view in a mad gallop around the sandstone spur. He was no longer bellowing. His head was carried high, the sun glinting off the six-foot spread of horn. Behind him loped the wolves, not trying to close in, taking their time. They knew they had him now; out in the open they could come at him from all sides and pull him down.

Suddenly the bull shifted direction and his head came down. The monster tried to dodge away, but its movement was too late. The full impact of the bull’s charge caught the monster low and lifted it. A vicious twist of the bison’s head speared it in midair on one sweeping horn.

It spun in the air and the bull’s head twisted the other way. One horn came clear and the second caught it as it came down. The gleaming eye burst into shards, the web hung loose and twisted. The monster fell to the ground and the bull rushed over it, the driving hoofs striking and shattering it still further.

The bull stumbled and fell to his knees. With a great effort he regained his feet and swung away, bellowing in blind fear. Behind him lay the monster, a heap of shattered wreckage. The bull came to a stop, swinging its massive head from side to side in an effort to locate its tormentors. The wolves, which had retreated when the bull had struck the monster, halted their flight, turning about and waiting, tongues lolling out of the sides of their mouths. They danced in anticipation. The bull was quivering — quivering all over — weak and ready to collapse. One hind leg buckled and he almost went down, but stiffened the leg and stayed erect.

Boone lifted the rifle, lined up the sights for a heart shot, and pressed the trigger. The bull fell so hard he bounced. Boone jacked another cartridge into the breech. He said to the bull, “I owed you that cartridge. Now they won’t eat you alive.” The wolves were scurrying, frightened by the sound of the shot. In a little while they’d come sneaking back again; there would be feasting this night out beyond the campfire.

Boone walked slowly over to the monster, kicking aside broken fragments of it that lay in his path. It was a tangled mess. Looking down upon it, Boone was unable to reconstruct in his mind the shape that it had taken. The shock of the bull’s charge and the ripping thrusts of the horns had scrambled the robot. The gleaming eye had disappeared; the web was torn beyond recognition. Lying in distorted fashion were twisted lengths of metal that at one time could have been operable appendages.

The monster spoke inside his mind.

Mercy, it said.

“The hell with you,” said Boone, speaking before astonishment could dry up his speech.

Don’t leave me here, the monster pleaded. Not in this wilderness. I did no more than my job. I am a simple robot. I have no basic evil in me.

Boone turned about and shuffled back to the campfire. Quite suddenly he felt drained. The tension had snapped and he was limp. The monster was dead and yet, out of the midst of its death, it spoke to him. He stood at the campfire undecided for a moment and then went up the slope to the clump of juniper. He made three trips, hauling in a good supply of wood. He broke it into proper lengths and stacked it in a neat rank. Then and not until then, he squatted beside the fire and let his mind dwell upon his predicament.

He was marooned in primitive North America, with no other human being closer than hither Asia, across a land bridge that would, in later years, become the Bering Strait. If he finally were condemned to stay within this time frame, he quite possibly could walk those thousands of miles to hunt out other humans — and to what end, he asked himself. The chances were that they would either kill him or make of him a captive.

There was a better way — to wait for someone from Hopkins Acre to come hunting him.

Enid, he was sure, would return if it were possible. Jay, he was certain, would move heaven and earth to rescue him, but Jay would need the help of others.

At the best, he admitted, his circumstance was not too hopeful. On the face of it, he probably would not be important to the people of the future. He was, after all, no more than an intruder, perhaps an unwelcome intruder, who had come blundering in on them.

The monster spoke to him again, a faint and distant voice.

Boone! Boone, please have mercy on me!

“Go chase yourself,” said Boone, muttering to himself rather than to the monster, for he had no faith in the monster’s voice. There probably was no voice; the words were no more than his own perverse imagination.

The wolves had come back to the bull — seven of them now, where he had never seen more than six before — and were tearing at the carcass.

“Good eating to you,” he said to them. Both the hide and the meat of the ancient animal would be tough. It would take some effort to rip through the hide to get at the flesh, which would not be the best of eating. But to a wolf it would be meat to fill an empty gut.

Before the day was over, Boone would need some of the meat; he had nothing else to eat.

It would be dangerous to walk out to the carcass and drive the wolves away so that he could slice out some meat. The only tool he had was a jackknife of the very cheapest sort, put together so shoddily that any undue pressure might break it all apart. He’d have to wait a while until the wolves were less hungry and therefore less possessive. By that time, perhaps, they would have so torn the hide as to expose areas of flesh from which he could hack a chunk for his own consumption. He’d be, he decided, the scavenger to the wolves.

He rose from his squatting position before the fire and began walking, beating out a path from the fire to the sandstone spur and back again. Pacing, he tried to formulate a plan for his survival. His ability to step around a corner worked only under extraordinary stress. More than likely, after an indeterminate time, it would bring him back to exactly where he was. It had been only by a fluke that his strange ability had taken him and Jay around a comer into Martin’s traveler. He couldn’t count on the same thing happening again.

He still had five cartridges in the rifle and with each of the cartridges he could bring down a more than adequate hunk of meat. Once it was down, however, he either would have to defend it or hide it against the scavengers, and it soon would deteriorate beyond any possible use. He could smoke it, of course, but he was not up on the procedure for the smoking of meat; he could salt it, but he had no salt. He was innocent of all the proper techniques to wrest a living from a land like this. He could, perhaps, find fruit or roots that could aid in his survival, but how could he know which of them would be safe to eat and which would poison him? So the problem, boiled down, came to how he could, day after day, hunt down and collect enough protein to keep his body functional.

That meant weapons that he could devise. And if that was to be the plan, he must get at it immediately, gaining some expertise in their manufacture and use before the last cartridge had been fired. The first step would be to find stone that could be worked. The sandstone ledges jutting out of the butte held nothing he could use. But there were other places where he might find the necessary stone.

Finally he halted his pacing and squatted down beside the fire. The wolves were feasting, burrowing into the ripped-open body cavity of the bull. From time to time they raised their blood-smeared muzzles to stare at him and then went back to feeding. In another couple of hours, it might be safe for him to walk out and claim his portion of the kill. The sun stood close to noon or a bit beyond. The vultures were gathering. A dozen or more of them circled high in the sky, dropping lower with each circle that they made.

The monster spoke again. Boone, be reasonable. Listen to me.

“I’m listening,” said Boone.

I am robbed of all my senses. I cannot see and I cannot hear. All I can perceive is what you say to me and so far all that you have said has been most unkindly. I am nothing. I am a nothingness wrapped in nothingness. And yet I am aware of self. I could go on like this for uncounted millennia, knowing I am nothing, unable to reach out. You are my only hope. If you do not have mercy on me, I shall exist this way forever, buried by sand and dust with no other being aware that I am here. I shall be the living dead.

“You are eloquent,” said Boone.

Is that all you have to say?

“I can think of nothing further.”

Dig me out, the monster pleaded. Dig me out of the wreckage that I am and keep me with you. Take me when you go. Anything, just so I am not alone.

“You want me to rescue you?”

Yes, please rescue me.

“That might be only a temporary solution to your problem,” Boone told the monster. “By your own act, I may be sentenced to stay here in this wilderness, as you term it. I may die here and you will be left alone again, facing the same fate that you face now.”

Even so, for a time we would be together. We would not be alone.

“I think,” said Boone, “I’d prefer being alone.”

But there is always hope. Something could happen that would save us both.

Boone did not answer.

You do not answer, said the monster.

“There is nothing more to say. I’ll have none of you. You understand that? I’ll have none of you.”

To have mercy on an ordinary enemy — yes, that would be nobly human. But this was no ordinary enemy. Trying to figure out, for his own peace of mind, what kind of enemy it was, he found he could put no name to it.

It could all be a trap, he told himself, and felt the better once he had thought of that. Out there, somewhere in that tangled mass of wreckage that had been the monster in its totality, lay one small component that could be the monster’s brain or a fantastically complex computer that was the monster’s essence. Should he paw among the wreckage to find and retrieve the essence, he well could become the victim of the monster, seized by a still-operative component that would make an end of him.

No, thank you very much, he said to himself; I am right, I’ll have none of it.

The wolves had finished with their more voracious eating. Several of them had stretched out on the ground, looking uncommonly satisfied, while others still worried at the meat, but with no great urgency. The vultures were much lower in the sky. The sun had moved a considerable distance down the west.

Boone picked up his rifle and walked toward the kill. The wolves watched his advance with interest; when he moved up close, they moved away, then took a stand, doing a little growling at him. He waved the rifle gently at them, and they moved off a little further. Some of them sat down to watch.

Reaching the bull, he leaned the rifle against it and opened his jackknife. It seemed a feeble tool. The gut cavity of the bull had been ripped open, and some of the skin had been torn free of one of the hams. The flesh on the ham, Boone knew, would be tough meat. But there was little possibility that the knife blade would cut through the bull’s tough hide to reach the better cuts. He’d have to take what he could.

He seized the torn hide with both hands and jerked with all his strength. The hide peeled back reluctantly. He set his feet and jerked again. It peeled off farther this time. The knife, to his amazement, did a better cutting job than he had thought it would. He sliced off a large cut of meat, laid it to one side, and then cut off another — far more than he could eat at one sitting, but this probably would be the only chance he had. Other wolves would drift in, drawn by the scent of blood, and vultures would drop down. By morning’s light, there would be little left.

A huge wolf, bigger than any of the others, advanced toward the kill, snarling as it came.

Others rose to their feet to follow. Boone picked up the rifle, shook it at them, roaring viciously. The big wolf halted and so did the others. Boone laid down the rifle and cut another slab of meat.

Never taking his eyes off the wolves, Boone collected the meat and began backing off. He moved slowly. Move too fast, he told himself, and the wolves might rush him.

The wolves watched, not moving, interested in what he would do next. He kept on backing off. When he was better than halfway to the fire, they rushed forward, closing in on the dead bison, snapping and snarling at one another. They paid him no further attention.

Back at the fire, he found a clean, grassy area and dropped the meat on it. Ten times more than he could eat at one time. He stood looking at it, considering what to do.

It wouldn’t keep. In a couple of days it would be going bad. The thing to do, he thought, was cook it all. Cook it, eat what he needed, wrap the rest in his undershirt, bury the parcel in the ground, then sit on the hole where he had buried it. Unprotected, it would be dug up by the wolves, once they had finished off the bull. With him sitting on it, it would be safe. Or he hoped it would.

He set to work. Selecting stout limbs from the pile of juniper he had stacked for firewood, he trimmed them to proper lengths, sharpened their ends. He cut the meat into smaller pieces, thrust the sharpened ends of the limbs through them, impaling several gobbets of meat on each of the stakes. The fire had burned down to a bed of coals. He raked still-flaming chunks of wood to one side and used them to start another fire. He jammed the stakes into the ground, canting them to extend, with their freights of meat, above the coals.

He sat down and watched the cooking, adjusting the stakes from time to time. His mouth watered at the smell of the cooking meat. But mouth-watering as it might be, it wouldn’t be tasty. He had no salt with which to season it.

The wolves were still quarreling over the carcass of the bull. A few of the vultures had dropped down, but had been chased off by the wolves. Now they sat, hunched, at a respectful distance, waiting for their chance at meat. The sun was just above the horizon.

Night was coming on.

Out there on the plain lay the carcass of a bison that had been known in Boone’s time only as a fossil. Further out would be other living fossils — mastodons, mammoths, primitive horses, and perhaps camels. Even the wolves feasting on the bison might be fossils.

Crouched beside the bed of coals, Boone kept close watch on the cooking meat. Pangs of hunger assailed him. Since the almost inedible oatmeal in the morning, he had eaten nothing.

He had fallen on hard times.

When he had jumped into the traveler with Enid, he recalled, the thought had crossed his mind that they would go into the future, instead of to this world of extinct beasts and living fossils. Then the urgency of those last seconds at Hopkins Acre had driven the thought from his mind.

There would have been something to interest him in the future, but there was very little here. He thought about the future he had heard of at Hopkins Acre — a world almost empty of visible humanity, although humankind still was there as incorporeal beings, pure intelligence, with the survival factor that had made men the masters of the planet finally refined into small quantitive qualities that were no more than dust motes, if even that.

Change, he thought. Earth had undergone change during the nearly five billion years of its existence. What seemed at first small factors became in time significant in a process that no intelligence could pinpoint before it was too late to take measures to counteract.

Even given intelligence, the great reptiles could not have guessed what was happening to bring them to extinction sixty-five million years ago. Other forms of life had suffered extinction that could not be foreseen. He had read that the first great extinction had come two billion years ago when the first green plants converted carbon dioxide to oxygen, changing Earth’s atmosphere from a reducing to an oxidizing medium, bringing death to most earlier, more primitive forms, to whom oxygen was poison.

There had been many times of dying; the species that had died in the past were a hundred times more numerous than those still living. Finally, up there in the future, it seemed the human race was dying. Perhaps it would still exist, but in a form that might cancel it as a factor in the further evolution of Earth.

Enid had told him that trees would supersede mankind, taking the place of man, once man was finally done. The idea was ridiculous, of course. By what process or capacity could trees take the place of mankind? Yet if anything were to replace humanity, it was perhaps fitting that it should be trees. All through history, trees had been friend of man — and man had been both friend and enemy to trees. Men had cut down the great forests wantonly; yet other men had cherished or, at times, even worshipped trees.

One of the stakes that held the gobs of meat above the coals tilted, its base shifting in the ground, and fell into the fire. Cursing, Boone snatched it off the coals. Holding the stake with one hand, he brushed the meat free of ash with the other. It must be done enough for eating.

Gingerly, he slid one of the gobbets off the stake, bouncing it in his hand. When it was cool enough, he took a bite of it. For lack of salt it was tasteless, but its warmth and texture felt good in his mouth. He chewed it. It took a lot of chewing, but his stomach seemed very glad of it. Once he had eaten all he could, he laid the stake down on a patch of grass and took off his jacket, shirt, and undershirt. Stretching the undershirt out on the ground, he took up the other stakes and stripped the meat off them into a pile on the shirt. Threading the rest of the uncooked meat on the stakes, he set them above the coals, put on his shirt and jacket, and settled down to wait for the remainder of the meat to cook.

Darkness was creeping in. He could barely make out the wolves that still were clustered about the bison. In the east, the sky was flushed with the rising of the moon.

He watched the meat above the coals until it was done, pushed off the gobbets onto the undershirt, wrapped the meat well in it, used his knife to dig a hole, placed the meat into the hole, filled the hole even with the ground, tamped it down, and then sat upon the hole.

Anything that wants that meat, he told himself, will have to go through me to get it.

He felt an expansiveness and a certain pride in himself. Whatever might happen in the days to come, he had done well so far. He had food for several days. Perhaps he should not have wasted the bullet, but he could not bring himself to regret doing it. He had given the bull a quick and decent death. If he had not, the wolves would have pulled the old bull down and started tearing him apart while he was still alive.

Maybe it made no difference, the wasting of the bullet. Any time now Enid would be back to pick him up. He thought about it for a time, trying to make himself believe it, but not successfully. There was a good possibility she would return, but an equally good possibility that she wouldn’t.

He turned up the collar of his coat against the chill of night. Last night he’d had a blanket, but now he had none. He had only the clothes he stood in. He nodded, dozing, and woke with a start. There had been no reason to awake; nothing was amiss. He went back to sleep, the rifle cradled in his lap.

He stirred again, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and he was not alone. Across the fire from him sat, or seemed to sit, a man wrapped in some all-enveloping covering that might have been a cloak, wearing on his head a conical hat that dropped down so far it hid his face. Beside him sat the wolf — the wolf, for Boone was certain that it was the same wolf with which he’d found himself sitting nose to nose when he had wakened the night before.

The wolf was smiling at him, and he had never known that a wolf could smile.

He stared at the hat. Who are you? What is this about?

He spoke in his mind, talking to himself, not really to the hat. He had not spoken aloud for fear of startling the wolf.

The Hat replied. It is about the brotherhood of life. Who I am is of no consequence. I am only here to act as an interpreter.

An interpreter for whom?

For the wolf and you.

But the wolf does not talk.

No, he does not talk. But he thinks. He is greatly pleased and puzzled.

Puzzled I can understand. But pleased?

He feels a sameness with you. He senses something in you that reminds him of himself. He puzzles what you are.

In time to come, said Boone, he will be one with us. He will become a dog.

If he knew that, said the Hat, it would not impress him. He thinks now to be one with you.

An equal. A dog is not your equal.

Sometimes dogs come very close to us.

But they are not one with you. There was another step to take, but it was never taken.

Long ago man should have taken it. Now it is too late.

Look, said Boone, he is not one with me. The wolf is not the same as me.

The difference, Boone, is not as great as you may think.

I like him, said Boone. I have admiration for him and a certain understanding.

So has he for you. He sat nose to nose with you when he could have slashed your throat.

That was before you killed the bull. He was hungry then. Your flesh could have filled his belly.

Can you tell him, please, that I thank him that he did not slash my throat.

I think he knows that. It was his way of saying he wants to be a friend of yours.

Then tell him I accept his friendship, wish to be a friend of his.

But Boone was talking to an emptiness. The Hat was no longer there. The place he’d sat was empty.

He was no longer there, Boone told himself, because he had never been there. It was all illusion. There was no one but the wolf.

When he looked, the wolf was gone as well.

Boone got to his feet. He was stiff with cold. He fed the fire more wood and stood close against it, soaking up its heat as new, vigorous tongues of flame flared up and ran along the wood.

He had slept for a long time. The moon had slanted far into the west. Moonlight reflected off the shattered skeleton of the monster. It had been a long time since the monster had bespoken him — if, in fact, it ever had bespoken him. Like the Hat, it could be fantasy.

A change had come over him, he thought. Short hours ago he had been a hard-bitten newsman who dealt only with facts. But now he fantasized. He talked with a hat, squabbled with a dead monster, and saw in a wolf a friend. Loneliness, he supposed, could drive a man to strangeness, but this soon? Here, however, the loneliness might be different than ordinary loneliness, compounded by the consideration that in all probability he was the only human within the span of two great continents. In his time many scientists believed that the first human had not set foot upon the western hemisphere for at least 10,000 years after this period. Somewhere in the vastness of Asia, barbaric tribes ranged the land, and farther to the west were other men who, in another 20,000 years or so, would begin to paint the first crude drawings of the fauna of their day in the caves of eastern Europe. Here he was a misplaced human, alone among wild beasts.

Warm now, he moved back and began to pace round and round the fire. He tried to think, but there was no beginning to his thoughts, nor was there any end. Like his walking around the fire, his thoughts went round and round.

The wolves were quarreling over the bison, although the quarreling was low-key; they were not putting their hearts into it. Far off, some animal was bawling, a steady, monotonous complaint. Up the slope in the juniper thicket, a bird chirped sadly. The moon hovered just over the western horizon, the east began to brighten, and another day was dawning.

When light came, he dug up the undershirt and took out some meat. Hunkered beside the fire, he chewed and chewed to break up the toughness of the fibers sufficiently to swallow safely. Finished, he went to the spring to get a saucepan of water, then up the hill to fetch wood for the fire.

The realization dawned on him that the days could be difficult to fill. He tried to think of chores that he could invent to keep himself busy. He could think of none that made sense enough to do them. Later he could set out to spy the land, but there was little point in that.

Later he might have to do it, but now he had to be here when Enid returned or someone else showed up.

Going to the sandstone spur behind which the bull had been brought to bay, he lugged back to the camp slabs of stone fallen from the spur, as heavy as he could manage, and piled them on top the hole where the meat was buried. Quite possibly roving scavengers, sniffing out the meat, could move the stone to get it. But his wolves were too well fed to go to all that bother.

He set out to climb the butte, toiling up its face. Finally he reached the crest and looked out across the country. There was not much to see. Some miles off, a herd of herbivores were grazing, most likely bison. Skittering bands of other animals fled across the land like shadows. Tentatively, he identified them as pronghorns. What looked to be a large bear waddled along a dry stream channel. Otherwise, what he saw was a lot of empty land, cut here and there by dry watercourses and with the everlasting buttes rearing up from it. Here and there along the watercourses were groves of cottonwoods and some of the buttes showed dark splotches that could be thickets of shrubs or clumps of trees.

When he returned to camp, the wolves had left the bison carcass, now little more than bones and scraps of skin flapping in the breeze. A dozen or more vultures hopped about, pecking viciously at one another to guard the territory each had staked out, stripping off the last nourishment remaining on the skeleton.

Boone settled down to wait as best he could. Four days passed and there was no traveler.

Boone did his chores. Several times he inspected the wrecked monster, circling it, keeping at a safe distance. He tried to reconstruct it in his mind, to connect the broken parts to one another. He could have done a better job of that if he had allowed himself to get closer to it, picking up some of the broken parts and inspecting them. But he shied away from that. The monster did not speak to him, and finally he became convinced it had never spoken to him, that his memory of its talk was a mental aberration.

By the end of the fourth day, several meals of the meat he had cooked still remained, but it was becoming tainted. He still remained too civilized for his system to tolerate tainted food.

On the morning of the fifth day, he tore a page out of the notebook he carried in his breast pocket and, using the pencil stub, wrote a note:

Gone hunting. Will be back directly.

He placed the note on top of the pile of rock that protected the buried meat and weighed it down with another stone.

Setting out with the rifle, he felt a lifting of his spirits. Finally there was something to be done, a chore that had to be done, that was not simply work made to fill the time.

After a mile or so, the wolf showed up, trotting out from the butte to join him. It fell in to his right, a hundred yards distant and slightly behind him; it seemed friendly and glad to be with him once again. He spoke to it, but the wolf disregarded the speaking and kept on with him, pacing him.

An hour or so out, he spotted a small band of pronghorns, grazing at some distance. To his left lay a dry stream bed. He slid into it, treading along as noiselessly as he could. The wash tended to the right, the direction that would bring him closer to his quarry. The wolf had descended into the dry wash with him and was trailing along behind. Twice Boone halted and crept carefully up the wall of the wash to check the pronghorns. They still remained where he had first spotted them, feeding on sagebrush and occasional patches of grass. They seemed undisturbed, but the range was too great; he had to move closer. He slid back into the wash and continued on his way, cautiously, being careful where he set his feet. The click of a pebble could trigger the pronghorns into flight. As if sensing the stalk, the wolf slunk along behind him. Ten minutes later Boone crawled up the incline of the wash again. The pronghorns were much closer than he had calculated they would be. He slid the rifle into position, selected the animal he wanted, lined up the sights, and fired. The pronghorn leaped high into the air and fell heavily. The rest of the band took off, bounding away, only to stop a few hundred yards off, switching about and looking back. When Boone climbed out of the wash, they took off again.

With the wolf sitting to one side, Boone shouldered his kill and set out for camp. The wolf trotted along to one side of him, bearing the smug expression of a job well done.

At camp Boone laboriously skinned the pronghorn, stretching out the hide on which to place the cuts of meat. Gutting the animal, he retained the liver, then dragged the rest of the entrails and internal organs out to the bison skeleton. The wolf got to work on the offering.

Boone sliced the liver, impaled it on a stake and slanted it over a bed of coals. Then he set to work dismembering the kill. He saved the loin and one ham; what was left he carried beyond the camp and dumped. The wolf deserted the entrails and moved over to the more substantial feast.

At the campfire, Boone feasted on fresh meat and began the cooking of what was left to store against the next few days. This could not go on, he told himself. He was living hand to mouth, and his ability to continue even this sort of existence was limited to the four cartridges that remained in the rifle’s magazine. Before they were gone, he had to acquire another capability to feed himself. He needed wood for a bow, tendons for strings, straight sticks for arrows, stone to make the arrowheads and from which he could chip a knife, for the cheap jackknife would not stand up for long under the use to which he had to put it.

His knowledge about the making of a bow was almost nonexistent. Still he knew the basic theory and could manage. He could make a poor bow and it would do until, by trial and error, he could make a better one.

Tomorrow, he decided, he would set out in search of wood and stone. He considered briefly a search for wood for the bow in the juniper grove from which he had gotten firewood. Almost instantly, he gave up the idea. Juniper, at its best, was poor wood; and he doubted that in the entire grove he could find a piece that could be used to make a bow.

Two more wolves had showed up. Watching them, Boone tried to pick out his wolf and was unable to decide which of the three it was. By the time the sun had set, all the meat he had left out for the wolves had disappeared, and the wolves were gone.

But early in the evening, shortly after the fall of night, the wolf came back and sat across the fire from him.

Boone talked to it. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I am going on a trip to find wood and stone. I’d be glad if you’d come along with me. It could be a hard trip. I have no way to carry water, but I’ll carry meat and will share it with you.”

It was ridiculous, he thought. The wolf could not understand a word he said, and yet talking to it made him more secure. It was good to have anything to talk to; a wolf was better than nothing. It was something that could share the fire with him.

He woke in the night and the wolf still was with him. It watched closely and companionably while he built up the fire. He went to sleep again with the wolf still watching him.

In the morning he wrote another note, a longer one this time:

I am leaving on a trip that may take several days, but I will be back. Please wait for me. A wolf may be traveling with me. If he is, do him no harm. He is a friend of mine.

He weighted it down on the rock pile and he and the wolf started out. They traveled west, heading for the butte on which Boone had detected dark splotches that he had thought might be small trees. It seemed no more than a good day’s time away.

It was much farther. Late in the afternoon, Boone realized they’d not reach it by dark. He was tired and thirsty. They had come across no water. Perhaps, he told himself, they’d find water on the butte. He could get through the night without it. Dropping into a dry wash, he walked along it until he came to a place where it curved sharply, forming a pocket with high walls.

Collecting wood fallen from the cottonwoods, he built a fire. He selected three pieces of the meat and tossed them to the wolf. While the wolf gulped them down, he squatted by the fire and ate. The meat was tender and he had no trouble chewing it. The wolf finished and waited expectantly for more. He tossed over another chunk.

“That’s all you get,” he stated. “Share and share alike, and you’ve had more than I had.”

Bone tired, he fell asleep soon after dark, the wolf stretched out across the fire from him.

Dawn was near when he woke. The fire was out and he did not bother to start it again. He gave the wolf some meat and ate some himself. The sun was not yet up when they started out.

They reached the butte well before noon and began the climb. This butte was much larger than the one where he and Enid had camped; the climb was long and hard. The wolf found water halfway up. He came back with his muzzle wet and dripping.

“Water,” said Boone. “Show me.”

The wolf stood puzzled.

“Water!” said Boone. Sticking out his tongue, he tried to make lapping motions.

The wolf trotted off to the right, stopping now and then to look back. Was it possible, Boone asked himself, that it had understood? It was insane to think so, and yet he had shared the meat — would the wolf share water?

He had been thirsty for hours, it seemed; he had tried to wipe it from his mind, but now that he knew there must be water near, the thirst came raging back. His mouth and throat were dry and it was hard to swallow.

Ahead of him, a great outcropping of stone humped out of the slope. He tried to hurry, but the way was steep and the sun-dried grass was slippery. He went down on his hands and knees, scrabbling along, sobbing with his need of water.

The stone, he saw, was limestone, not sandstone. The limestone, he thought, must lie atop the sandstone strata that protruded from the other butte. Limestone would not serve as tool material, but in between its layers might lie veins of chert or quartz.

The wall of rock reared above him. Stunted cedar trees clung here and there upon its face.

He crawled along the steep incline that came up to the base of the wall. Loose rock shifted under him. He had lost all track of the wolf, but he imagined that he heard the sound of running water.

He slipped, rolled, slid again, and suddenly stopped. Something gripped his right leg and an agonizing pain shot through it, a pain so terrible that it left him sick and gasping, gone in the gut, his dry throat retching, and nothing to come up.

He lay for a long moment while the pain slowly ebbed away, then tried to sit up. He couldn’t; whatever pinned his leg held him tight against the ground, angled down along the slope. He tried to squirm around to see what was wrong with the leg and, as he moved, the leg screamed at him. Faint with the pain, he fell back upon the ground. When some of his strength came back, he tried once more, very cautiously. He was able to angle his head around so he could see back along his body. The leg was caught in a narrow crevice. The underlying limestone was close to the surface, barely covered by the rock fragments that had fallen from the face of the cliff. His right leg had plunged into a narrow crevice and he was trapped, held in the crevice almost to the knee.

What a silly thing to happen, he thought. He felt panic creeping up on him and pushed it back. All he had to do, he told himself, was to work his leg as gently as possible out of the rocky fissure that held it.

He tried to work the leg free. The muscles responded. He could move it, although it protested. Maybe a sprain; it didn’t feel like a break. Probably gashed up quite a bit.

The wolf came inching down the steepness of the slope and stood with feet braced, looking at him and whining.

“It’s all right,” Boone croaked at him. “I’ll get out of here in a while. Might take some figuring.”

But he didn’t get free in a while. No matter what he did, the leg stayed clamped in the fissure. The way he was sprawled out on the steep slope made the job hard. When he tried to maneuver his body into a more advantageous position, the agony of the leg left him weak and sweating. Finally he gave up, too weak, too pain-ridden, to go on. I’ll rest a while, he told himself.

Rested, he tried again. But now it was nearly dark. The wolf had wandered off somewhere and he was alone. Once again he tried gingerly to work the leg free; when that didn’t work, he lunged in a desperate effort to pull loose. The fire of pain slashed through him. He gritted his teeth and lunged again. The leg still held. He did not try a third time. He lay exhausted. He heard, distinctly now, the sound of running water. The pain of the leg screamed at him; the deep dryness of his thirst choked him.

He tried to reason with himself. He laid out a plan, but the plan did not progress far. He reached for the bundle of meat that he carried slung on his shoulder. The bundle was not there. Neither was the rifle.

Boone set his jaw grimly. He’d been in bad places before and he’d lived through them all.

Among other things, he could step around a comer and be free. He tried to step around the comer. He squeezed his eyes shut, he tensed himself, and he drove his brain.

“The corner!” he screamed. “The corner! Where is that goddamned corner!”

There was no corner. He continued where he was. He let the tenseness ebb away and collapsed upon the ground.

He awoke much later. The stars were shining in the sky. A cold wind blew up the slope and he was half frozen. For a moment he did not know where he was, then it all seeped back. He was trapped upon this butte. He would never get away. He’d die here. He lay there, cold and hurt, his throat constricted by a raging thirst. Perhaps a little later he would do something about himself, but not now.

A gray shadow moved in the starlight. It was the wolf. It looked at him and whined.

“Promise me one thing,” Boone said to it. “One thing is all I ask. Be sure I’m dead before you start to eat me.”

7.

Enid

It all had gone wrong, Enid thought. She never should have tried to operate a traveler. She should have known that she was not competent. And yet what could she have done? Back at Hopkins Acre, she had been left alone to wait for Boone, and there had been no chance to lay a course. She had simply told the traveler go — that was the one thing left to do. Then, later, the same sort of situation had arisen. Boone had yelled for her to save the traveler and she had fled. Now here she was, almost a million years into the future beyond the era where Boone was stranded — and she had not the least idea how to go back and pick him up.

It was Horace’s fault, she told herself. Horace, who was so big on planning and who had planned so poorly. Each traveler should have had one person who was a skilled pilot —although, come to think of it, there had not been three of them who were skilled sufficiently.

David was quite proficient. And Horace, although at his best he would be sloppy. Emma and Timothy would know nothing about it. When it came right down to it, there had been only two who could have run a traveler.

If the monster had not interfered and they had been given a chance to go about the planning decently, it all might have gone quite well. They would have decided where they would go when they left, and David, more than likely, would have programmed each of the travelers to go to the selfsame place and time. They would have known where and when they were going and they all would have gone together. If her traveler had been programmed, she would have had no trouble. It had been this repeated running in the dark that had been her undoing.

She looked again at the panel and the time designation was clear enough. But the spatial designation was all Greek to her. She knew when she was, but certainly not where. That first time, it had been Boone who had figured out where they were, although only the general area.

The spatial designation had been on the panel, of course, but she could not read it. What she should have done, she realized now that it was too late, would have been to jot down the readings.

Locked somewhere within the recorder on the panel, the spatial designation of that place she and Boone had touched down still would be recorded. All she had to do was call it up, but she didn’t have the least idea of how to call it up.

She slumped back in the seat, still staring at the panel. Why hadn’t she, in all the time they’d spent at Hopkins Acre, asked David to teach her how to operate a traveler? He would have been glad to show her — she was sure of that — but she had never asked him because it never had occurred to her, not even once, that at some time she would have to use one.

She stared out of the vision plate, but the view was a restricted one and there was not much to see. She seemed to be located on some high point, for she looked out over a vista of rugged hills, with a river glint among them.

So she had gone and done it, she thought. At times, Horace and Emma had called her feckless and maybe they’d been right.

She had left a decent man stranded in the very distant past and there was no way she could return to rescue him. She was afraid even to try. She had made two blind jumps, one into the deep past, the other much deeper in the future. Henry had tracked them down in Dark Age Europe, but that, compared to this, had been a rather simple chore. She had left a trail, perhaps, that he could follow with any luck at all. One trail, but two — what could he do with two? She knew without question that she must stay where she was. If she made another jump, more than likely she would be lost forever. Even now, she thought, even with no more than two jumps, she still might be lost forever.

She rose from the pilot’s chair and made her way to the port. When she opened it, she heard a strange sound, a little like the buzzing of a swarm of bees. When she stepped away from the traveler she saw what it was.

The traveler lay on a slope, some little distance below the top of a high ridge. On top the slope moved a band of people, and it was from them that the sound was coming — a thin babbling of many voices, all talking at once.

To her left and right, so far as she could see in either direction, the line of people moved along the ridge. The line was uneven. In some places the people were all massed together, then there would be a place where there were small groups of them or a few walking by themselves. All were in motion, right to left, in the same direction, but moving slowly.

Moving, not with them, but beside them, as if they were outriders of the procession, were strange and varied figures. Some of them had the appearance of being human; others did not appear human in the least; but all of them were alive and moving — crawling, humping along, rolling, scurrying frantically, striding, floating. A few were flying.

She drew her breath in sharply when she recognized what those outriders were. Some of those who had human appearances were robots, and undoubtedly others that did not appear to be human were robots as well. The rest of them were aliens. In the time that had been her home, there had been many aliens who had formed weird and not always understandable relationships with humans, but her own people, the outlanders, had as little as possible to do with them.

Enid moved out a short distance from the traveler and climbed a few steps up the slope that ran to the ridge where the procession walked its slow and awkward way. The land was high and dry. It had a sense of bigness and it seemed to stand on tiptoe to reach the very sky, which was deep and blue — the bluest sky she had ever seen, without a cloud to fleck its surface. There was a wind that blew strong and steady, rippling the cloak she wore. It had the breath of chill in it, as if it might have blown for a long distance over a cold and empty land, but the sun that stood at noon was warm. A smooth sward of grass grew beneath her feet, short and well-behaved grass that had no wildness in it. Here and there along the ridgetop grew occasional trees, each shaped and sculptured by the wind that must have blown there for centuries to bend them to its will.

No one noticed her. Not for a moment did her presence interfere with what was taking place.

A rite, she wondered, a religious pilgrimage, a celebration, perhaps, of some old mythology?

But these, she thought, were no more than feeble guesses. Conceivably, there might be danger if she intruded, although, from where she stood, the procession seemed immune to intrusion. There was about it a solid sense of purpose.

A voice spoke at her elbow. “Have you come to join us, lady?”

Startled, she spun about. The robot stood close beside her. Any noise of his approach had been blotted out by the wind. He wore a human form and was extremely civilized. There was no crudity about him. He was a machine, of course; that could be seen by a single glance.

But in a strange way, he was nobly human. His face and body were human in the classic meaning of the term, and he was tastefully decorated, the metal of him incised in discreet little patterns that made her think of the exquisite etching on the barrels of the most expensive shotgun in Timothy’s collection. Over his shoulder he carried a scraped, dressed-out hog, and underneath one arm he bore a large and bulging grain sack.

“I beg your pardon, lady,” said the robot. “I had no wish to startle you. As I came up behind you I sought to make some sound to announce myself, but the wind, you know. You hear nothing in this wind.”

“I thank you for your thoughtfulness,” said Enid. “You did startle me, but not too violently and only momentarily. And, no, I did not come to join you. I have no idea of what is going on.”

“It is all a matter of hallucination,” said the robot, speaking bluntly. “What you see is a Pied Piper’s march. Are you, perchance, acquainted with the ancient story of the Pied Piper?”

“Why, yes, I am,” said Enid. “I read it in one of the books that my brother picked up. It is a story about a piper whose piping lured all the children from a village.”

“This is the same,” the robot said. “A Pied Piper’s march, except there isn’t any piper. It is the fault of all these aliens.”

“If there isn’t any piper, whom might they be following?”

“In their hallucinations, which I am convinced are supplied by the aliens, they follow dreams. Each follows a dream uniquely his own. I have told them and told them, and so have all the other robots, but they pay no attention to us. They disregard us and follow filthy aliens.”

“Then why are you here? You are not alone; there are other robots here.”

“Someone must take care of the humans. Someone must protect them against themselves.

They left without provisions to feed themselves, without food or water, without sufficient clothing to protect them from the cold and damp. You see this shoat upon my back, this bag of meal beneath my arm? I scrounge the countryside, gathering what I can. It is not a job, I can assure you, that a robot of my integrity and sensibility could easily bring himself to do.

And yet I must, for these foolish humans of mine are caught up in their silly dreams and pay no attention to their needs. There must be someone who will look out after them.”

“What will be the end of it?” asked Enid. “What will happen to them? How will it all end?”

“I know not,” the robot said. “I can hope only for the best. This may, at other times, have happened otherwhere, but this is the first time it has ever happened here. Much as I love my humans, begging your pardon, there are times when they can be the most thoughtless, most unreasonable forms of life existent. My age runs to many centuries, lady, and I have read the histories that cover untold centuries. The human race, according to the old historians, always has been thoughtless and unreasonable; but it seems to me that now they are gaily unreasonable, whereas before they were stupidly and perversely unreasonable. To be gaily unreasonable, to take joy from unreason, seems to me to be the worst form that perversity can assume.”

“I’d have to think about that,” said Enid. “I suppose you could be right.”

Perversity, she thought. Could that have been what happened to the human race — a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years? Could the human race, quite out of hand and with no sufficient reason, have turned its back upon everything that had built humanity? Or was it, perhaps, no more than second childhood, a shifting of the burden off one’s shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?

“It would be quite safe, I am sure, if you are of the mind to go up the hill and have a look at them,” the robot said. “I am sure there is no danger. They are not dangerous folk, only silly ones.”

“I might like to do that.”

“Or better yet, if you have the time, you might like to join with us — with my humans and perhaps a few assorted and disgusting aliens — when we break fast this night. There’ll be roast pig and fresh baked bread and probably other edibles that my fellows will bring in. You need have no fear of intruding; you’ll be with the family only. Come nighttime and all the different families will gather by themselves and eat the food their robots will bring in. You might like to meet my family. Other than for this silly exhibition, they are very beautiful. I have hopes this madness soon will run its course.”

“I would like to do that,” Enid said. “I am glad you asked me.”

“Then come along with me and I will seek them out. They must be somewhere in the line, not too distant from us. Then I’ll hunt out a place for camping and make ready for the feast —perhaps at a spot some distance ahead so that they will be not too far off when this insanity is suspended in the face of dark.”

“They don’t march all night?”

“No, of course not. They have not taken leave entirely of their senses.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Enid. “But I don’t want to join the march. I’d be out of place there.

Going with you, I might be able to help you set up camp.”

“No need of that,” the robot said. “There are others of us and all of us are good workers.

But I’ll be glad to have you come with me. Since we are going to be together for a while, you might call me Jones.”

“I am glad to know your name,” she said. “You might call me Enid.”

“I’ll call you Miss Enid. Young females are entitled to the ‘Miss.’”

“I thank you, Jones,” she said.

All this time they had been walking up the hill together and now were close to the line of march. The procession, Enid saw, was following a faint track that ran along the ridgetop, the sort of path that ordinarily would have seen but little use, followed only now and then by lonely wayfarers hurrying along in the hope of reaching shelter by the fall of night.

The procession stretched in both directions as far as she could see. There were occasional empty gaps in it, but in no case were the gaps so large as to wipe out the sense that this, indeed, was one vast procession.

Each and every person walked as if walking alone, paying no more than courteous attention to those who were moving with them. They walked with their heads held high and confident, looking ahead rather than upward, as if there were something that they would see at any moment and they were entirely confident that they would not be disappointed. Their expression was serenely expectant and there was about them a subdued rapture — although, she told herself, in no way a holy or religious rapture. This was not, as she first had thought it might be, a religious procession.

There were no children. There were teen-agers and the middle-aged, the old and the very old who hobbled on canes or levered themselves along on crutches.

With them ran, scurried, humped, and hobbled a great array of aliens — not as many as there were humans, but enough to make a continuous impression on the watcher. There was a wraithlike creature that floated, bobbing along, now on the same level as the human marchers, now above them, changing its shape constantly. There was a three-legged creature that stalked along as if mounted on stilts, with a body that had no features on it, but looked like just an ordinary box. There was another that was at once a wriggler and a ball

— a wriggler that twisted along like a slithering snake, twisting its way among the humans’

marching feet and legs, then at intervals rolling itself into a ball that moved gently and serenely. There was a head, a head alone that was mostly one eye and a mouth, scampering all about, as if it might be in a hurry without knowing where to go. There were many others.

The humans paid no attention to the aliens — it was as if the aliens, to them, were simply other humans. The aliens, in turn, paid no attention to the humans, as if they were well acquainted with these humans, who were nothing to be wondered at.

Enid had the impression that all of them, humans and aliens alike, were watching for something, but that there was no single sign they watched for, as if each sought a personal revelation.

She looked about for Jones, the robot, and could not locate him. There were other robots, but few of them mingled with the humans and the aliens in the line of march. Mostly they stayed off to the side of the procession. She kept on looking for Jones, but there was no sign of him. Perhaps, she told herself, she should hurry forward along the line of marchers, in the hope that she could catch up with him. She was hungry, and hot pork and new-baked bread sounded awfully good. It had been silly of her to have lost contact with him. She started trotting along the side of the line, but after a few steps she stopped. She had not observed the direction Jones had taken; she might be moving away from him rather than closer. A voice spoke, almost in her ear, a twangy, nonhuman voice that used human words.

It said, “Kind human, would you perform a small task for me?”

She jerked herself around, involuntarily jumping to one side as she turned.

It was an alien, as she had known it would be, but slightly more humanoid than most aliens were. Its head, bent forward on a long and scrawny neck, was a cross between that of a winter-gaunted horse and a woebegone hound dog. It stood upon two badly bowed legs and its torso was a warty bloat. Its two arms were long and limber, twisting like a pair of performing serpents. The ears flared out like trumpet bells. Two groups of eyes were mounted on its forehead; each with several irises. The mouth was wide and the lips were slobbery. A pair of gills, one on each side of the scrawny throat, bellowed in and out as it breathed.

“I am to you,” it said, “a disgusting sight, no doubt. As humans once were to me before I became accustomed to them. But my heart is kind, and my honor of the best.”

“I have no doubt of that,” she said.

“I approach you,” said the thing, “because, of all the humans here, you seem not preoccupied with what is going on, impelling me to believe that you’d be willing to waste a small amount of time on me.”

“I cannot imagine anything that I could do for you,” she said.

“But of a surety you can,” it insisted. “A very simple task which, because of the perplexity of the chore, I cannot do myself. I have not enough … ” The woebegone horseface hesitated, as if searching for a word. “Let us say that someone was tying up a package with a piece of string and was having difficulty because of lack of hands when it came to the tying of the knot. And that person says to you, will you hold your finger so upon the crossing of the string so I can tie the knot. In a somewhat different manner, that is what I would ask of you.”

“Because of the lack of hands?”

“Not because of the lack of hands, but the lack of another facility for which I have no word that you could understand. This is my fault and not yours.”

Enid looked at it, puzzled.

“You still fail of understanding?”

“I’m afraid I do. You must tell me more.”

“You see all those humans out there, processioning in all seriousness, all of them striving, all of them seeking, but seeking different things. A marvelous painting, perhaps, that one can put upon a canvas. Or a piece of music that will be listened to by many other music lovers. Or an architectural model that someone out there has been striving to draft for years.”

“So that is it,” said Enid. “That is what they are looking for.”

“Yes, assuredly. I had thought you knew.”

“I knew they were looking for something. I did not know for what.”

“It is not the humans only who are looking.”

“You mean that there is something you seek? And you need some help? Sir, I cannot comprehend in what manner I can help you.”

“I have sought an idea, trying time after time to run it to the ground, and each time a little short. So when I learned of this processional and its seeking out, I said to myself, if it works for humans, surely there must be a modicum of hope it also would work for me.”

“And has it worked?”

“I think it has. I think I have it all in mind, but I cannot tell unless I find someone to hold a finger where the two strings cross.”

“Except it’s not a finger. And it’s not a string.”

“That is correct, fair lady. You catch on rapidly and you listen closely. Will you listen further?”

Enid looked around quickly. There still was no sign of Jones, the robot.

“I will listen further, closely.”

“First of all,” said Horseface, “I must be honest with you. I must tell you sorrowfully of my fraudulence. All the other aliens here attending this procession make up a group of special selection. They have been brought along because they have the power to elevate human sensitivity to high hallucinatory levels. Given such soaring hallucinations, the participatory humans then can grasp the pattern of the great art toward which they strain. Furthermore, there are among these sundry aliens some who have the power to guide the humans in a materialization of their visions — to create a painting from the mind without any painting being done — a short cut, one might say, between conception and execution. Or the power to create music, the realistic sound itself, without the aid of score or instrument.”

“But that’s impossible,” cried Enid, suddenly envisioning a shower of painted canvases falling from the sky to the sound of music coming out of nowhere.

“Not impossible in every case,” said Horseface.

“This is all very honest of you,” said Enid. “But you told me that you are fraudulent. Why?”

“Because I joined this procession, not to work for the humans, but rather for myself. I had thought perhaps that the fervor of this assemblage would spur and supplement my ability.”

“What you are trying to say is that you were in this procession for yourself, in the hope that it would give you the edge you needed to develop the idea that you have. And that while it apparently has given you that edge, you still are unable to accomplish it for the lack of someone to hold a finger on the string.”

“Admirably you outline the situation in most exact detail. Having understood, are you of a mind to help me?”

“Tell me first what this object is you have the need to develop.”

“That, alas, I cannot do since it involves concepts not understandable to a human without much instruction being given.”

“It would not be detrimental? It would be of harm to no one?”

“Look at me,” said Horseface. “Do I appear as one who would be willing to do harm?”

“Looking at you, I cannot tell.”

“Then please take my word. The object would be of harm to no one.”

“And if I am able to help you, what would I get out of it?”

“We’d be partners in it. You’d own half of it, have equal rights in it.”

“That is generous of you.”

“Not at all,” said Horseface. “Without your help, it will never come to be. So now will you permit me to explain what you must do to help me?”

“Yes, I think I will.”

“Then close your eyes and think at me.”

“Think at you?”

“Yes, think at me. I’ll think back at you.”

“I’ve never, in my life, thought at anyone.”

“It is not difficult,” said Horseface. “You close your eyes and, concentrating all your mind, think of me.”

“It sounds terribly silly,” said Enid, “but I suppose it’s worth a try.”

She closed her eyes and concentrated about thinking at him, but had a feeling far back in her mind that she was making a bad job of it since she did not know how to think at someone.

But she felt him thinking at her. It was a little terrifying, though somewhat like hearing Henry in her mind; she hung in there and did not try to pull away. There was nothing she could lose, although she doubted very much she had anything to gain. It was all an exercise in absolute futility. But a picture formed inside her mind that she could not have possibly thought up by herself. It was a picture of a complicated structure made up of and hung together by many colorful lines. The colorful lines all were thin and had a rather dainty look about them, but the structure, which she could not see too well because there was too much of it, had the feel of being most substantial. She seemed to be standing in the very center of it, with it stretching so far to every side of her that she could not see the end of it.

“Now, right here,” said the invisible Horseface, speaking in her mind, “is where you lay your finger.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Right here,” he said, and when he said it she saw exactly where she should lay her finger and she laid it there, pressing down hard as one would press hard upon the crossing of two strings that tied up a package.

Nothing happened, nothing that she noticed right away. Somehow, however, the structure all around her seemed to become more solid, and the wind had quit its blowing. All this time she had been keeping her eyes on her finger to make sure she was holding tight against the string that wasn’t there. Horseface spoke to her, not speaking in her mind, but aloud. “All right,” he said, “the job is done. There is no longer any need of holding the finger.”

She looked up and there he was, some little distance from her, climbing up the bare bones of the structure as if it were a ladder. She heard a shout beneath her and looked down. The procession was all spread out below her, and all the people were looking up at her, shouting, waving their arms, crying in amazement.

Frightened, she reached out and grasped one of the colorful bars that went into the making of the structure. The bar she grasped was lavender and it tied into two other bars, one of them lemon yellow and the other a deeply glowing plum. It was solid in her grasp. Wondering where her feet were, she glanced down and saw that they were planted firmly on another bar, a red one as substantial as the lavender one she gripped. All around her, everywhere she looked, were other bars; the structure quite surrounded her. She looked out through it at the hills and valleys and saw that the ridgetop, with its snaking procession, was only a small part of the landscape that lay beneath her.

The structure tipped smoothly over on one side and she found herself spread-eagled over the landscape, facing down toward it. She gasped and felt panic reaching out for her, but the panic went away when she realized she was as comfortable in that position as she had been in the other. Her orientation, she realized, was keyed into the structure, not the land that she had left. She looked around quickly to try to locate the traveler, but she couldn’t find it.

The structure tipped back to where it had been before. It had started to grow little dangles and spangles all over it with no specific pattern. Horseface was clambering down toward her, like an awkward spider swarming down a web. He reached her level and stood peering at her.

“What do you think of it?” he asked “Is it not beautiful?”

She gulped. “This was what you were trying to make?”

“Of course,” he said. “I thought that you would know.”

“What is it?” she asked. “Please tell me what it is.”

“It is a net,” said Horseface, “useful for the fishing of the universe.”

Enid crinkled up her face, staring at what he called a net. It was a flimsy thing and it had no shape.

“Certainly,” she said, “you would not go fishing the universe in so slight a thing as this.”

“Time means nothing to it,” said Horseface, “nor does space. It is independent of both time and space except as it makes use of them.”

“How come you know so much about it?” demanded

Enid. He did not look to be the sort of creature that would know too much of anything. “Did you study somewhere? Not on this Earth, of course, but … ”

“I studied at the tribal knee,” said Horseface. “There are old stories and very ancient legends.”

“You can’t depend on legends with a thing like this. You must have the knowledge, know the theory and the basic facts.”

“I made it, did I not? I told you where to hold your finger on the string?”

Enid said, weakly, “Yes, you did.”

It was changing as she watched it, losing some of its flimsiness, gaining strength and form, although not as yet an impressive strength and form. The ornaments with which it had been sprinkled changed from spangles, growing into objects, no longer merely glinting ornaments, but objects that had some relationship with this slab-sided structure Horseface called a net, although she could not figure out, for the life of her, what the relationships might be. What bothered her the most was that he called it a net and it certainly had no resemblance to a net. She tried to think of something that it might resemble and came up with nothing.

“We will travel in it,” Horseface told her, “from one planet to another, without a tick of time, without a touch of space.”

“We can’t cross space in it,” said Enid. “There is nothing to protect us. We’d die in the cold and emptiness. Even if we could, we’d arrive at some unknown planet and plunge into an atmosphere that would choke us or fry us or … ”

“We would know where we were going. There’d be no unknowns to us. There are charts to follow.”

“Where do such charts come from?”

“From long ago and far away.”

“Have you ever seen them? Do you have them now?”

“There is no need to possess them physically or to see them. They are a part of my mind, a genetic part of me, passed on to me by my forebears.”

“You’re talking about ancestral memory.”

“Yes, of course. I thought that you would guess. Ancestral memory, ancestral intelligence and knowledge, the knowing of what went into the net, or should go into the net.”

“And you claim this net of yours can do many wondrous things?”

“How wondrous not even I can know. Time means nothing to it nor does … ”

“Time,” said Enid. “That is what I am getting at. I lost a friend in time. I know the time factor, but not the space.”

“Nothing to it,” said Horseface. “It is a very simple matter.”

“But I told you I don’t know … ”

“You think you do not know. But the chances are you do. All you need to do is bespeak the net. Let it pry into yourself. It can find the forgetfulness.”

“But how can I talk with it?”

“You cannot talk with it. It can talk with you.”

“How do I let it know that I want it to talk to me? How can I be sure we can communicate, the net and I?”

“You thought at me when you said you couldn’t and you thought upon the knot … ”

“Now that it’s all done, now that you have your precious net, can you tell me what I really did? There wasn’t any knot and there wasn’t any finger.”

“My dear,” he said, “there is no way I can tell you. Not that I would not if I could, but there is no way. You may have called into play some ability you are not aware you have and which I was not sure you would have. Even when I talked about the laying of the finger, I was not entirely sure that it would work. I only hoped it would.”

“Well, then, let’s forget the jabber. There is no way of getting sense from you. I want very much to get back to my friend again and to do that you say I talk with this silly net. Please tell me how to start.”

“Most assuredly I will,” he said. “All in proper time. But first there is an errand must be run and once the errand’s done … ”

He reached out and took hold of one of the ornaments scattered all about the net.

“Duck your head and hang on tight,” he said.

Nothing happened and she raised her head and opened her eyes. The planet was pink-and-purple and the sky was golden-green.

“You see!” Horseface said triumphantly. “We are here and nothing happened to us.”

Enid drew in a cautious breath, shallow at first and then more deeply. The air seemed to be all right. She did not choke on it; it did not strangle her and it had no bad smell.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Are you indisposed?”

“Not at all,” said Enid, “but the sky can’t be that color. There is no such thing as a deep green sky. The land is bad enough, although it can be pink and purple, I suppose, but the sky cannot be green.”

Although, she told herself, the sky was green. She was alive, and everything was all right, perhaps, because she didn’t know anything at all about what was going on.

Horseface started clambering down the net, the lower comer of which hung just above the ground.

“I won’t be long,” he told her. “I’ll be back directly. You wait here for me. Don’t go wandering off. Stay close.”

The land was pink-and-purple. There were purple grasses and pink trees and, despite its coloring, the land was as flat and as drab and uninteresting as any she had ever seen. It stretched out on all sides to a hazed horizon that was a sickly blend of pink and green and gold and purple. Except for occasional trees and a number of scattered mounds, the land was empty. Nothing moved upon it, not even a flittering bird or butterfly. It was empty with a vengeance.

“What is this place?” she asked of Horseface.

“Its only designation,” he said, “is a symbol on a chart. I would have no idea how to pronounce the symbol. Maybe it is a designation that is not meant for anyone to speak.”

“And how did we get here in so short a time and without any … ”

“We were translated here,” he said and, having reached the ground, turned his back on her and said no more, going across the land in a loping fashion, with his grotesque shadow bouncing and bobbing, much blurred at the edges. The bloated red sun in the green haze of the sky shed too little light to make a sharp and proper shadow. The entire planet, Enid thought, was a mite too garish and not in the best of taste.

She climbed down a short way, then stopped to look the place over a little more closely.

Horseface had disappeared into the distant haze, and she was alone. Below here, there was no sign of life she could detect except for the grass and trees. There was only the level sweep of the land and the scattered mounds.

She slid to the ground, surprised to find it solid under her feet. From the look of it, she had expected to find it spongy. She moved away from the net and began walking toward the nearest mound. It was a smallish one, looking like a pile of rocks. She had seen such piles on Earth where the husbandmen dug the stones from the ground and piled them to clear more land for planting. But those piles had been made up of dull-colored stones of all sizes, from pebbles to weighty boulders. Here the rocks seemed to be all small and many glinted in the sun.

When she reached the mound, she knelt down beside it and picked up a handful of the pebbles. She raised her hand and opened it, spreading out her fingers to make a flat palm, with the pebbles lying before her eyes. The stones, catching the light of the red sun, blazed back at her.

She held her breath, and her body tensed, then slowly relaxed. She knew nothing about gems, she told herself; she couldn’t have distinguished a shattered piece of quartz from a diamond. And yet it was unbelievable that all the brilliance and fire of the stones could come from no more than common pebbles. A reddish one, a little smaller than a hen’s egg, flashed brilliant red from a corner where a sliver had been broken off. Beside it, a pebble split in half seemed to quiver with a throbbing blue. Others gleamed with the glow of green, rose, amethyst, and yellow.

She tipped her hand and let them go, scintillating as they fell. If they were truly gems, they would bring a fortune back in certain periods of mankind’s development. But not in the time from which the family had fled. In that time, all precious things, all rarities, and all antiquities had lost their value. There had been no money and no jewels.

She wondered if Horseface had known of these piles of gems, heaped so carelessly and in such quantities by an unknown people. But no, she told herself — Horseface was seeking something here, but it was not these stones.

She started walking toward a second pile of pebbles, but did not stop when she reached it.

There were other such piles, all alike except for some variation in size. She knew now what they were and what she’d find in them. Perhaps it was time to travel just a little farther to see what might lie beyond.

Although not aware of it at first, she must have been climbing a slight slope, for quite suddenly she came to where the land broke and fell away into a tangle of grotesque formations, cliff faces of raw earth, deeply eroded stream beds, and a group of pyramids, all straight lines that tapered to points.

She stood at the edge of the land where the slope broke and stared fixedly at the pyramids, remembering something she had once read — that there was no such thing in nature as a straight line; such straightness must suggest artificiality. The pyramids did have the look of architecture. The edges that marked the comers were definite, and the sides that led up to the apex were smooth.

As she looked, she saw the sparkle in them. But that would be impossible; to build such pyramids so exactly as they should be with pebbles or gems would be ridiculous, if it could be done.

She moved up the slope. As she came closer, there could be no doubt at all — the pyramids were built of gems, or what she guessed were gems. From close up, the whole structure before her quavered with a myriad of multicolored sparkles.

She advanced to the pyramid, blinking as it flashed red and green and purple in the light of the sun. She did not care for the purple — she had seen enough of purple, pink, and sickly green on this planet. But there was a yellow — a primrose yellow, clean and bright — that seemed to stop her heart and made her suck in her breath. It came from a stone larger than an egg and smooth, perhaps polished by some ancient river flowing over it.

Before she could think to stop herself, her hand went out and her fingers tightened around the stone. As she lifted it, the entire slope of the pyramid came down as if it were liquid. She skipped aside to escape the rush of rolling pebbles.

Something squeaked nearby. When she looked to see what it was that had made the noise, she saw them at the sagging corner of the pyramid, peering at her out of their popeyes. Their round, soft, fuzzy mouse ears quivered and they stood on tiptoe, horrified at what had happened to the pyramid.

They had popeyes, mouse ears, and a softness about the triangular faces, but their bodies were angular and harsh, with a vague hint of spiders carved out of wood. Carved, Enid thought, out of the seasoned driftwood that could be found beached along the shores of old rivers, gray, knobbed, and twisted wood with all the twists worn smooth and shiny as if someone had spent long hours giving it a polish.

She spoke to them in a kindly fashion, frightened and repulsed by the driftwood bodies, but drawn to them by their fuzziness efface, by the large and liquid eyes, and by the quiver of the ears.

They spooked away, their spraddling driftwood legs prancing, then switched around again to stare at her. There were a round dozen of them. They were the size of sheep.

She spoke again, as softly as before, and held out her hand to them. The movement of her hand did it — they swirled about and ran, in dead earnest this time, making no motion as if to halt and look at her again. They fled down the tortured slope and disappeared into one of the deep erosion gashes and she lost sight of them.

She stood there, beside the pyramid that was no longer neat. The green sky lowered over her and she clutched in one hand the large pebble with its glow of cowslip yellow.

I’ve made a mess of it, she thought, as I’ve made a mess of everything the last few days.

She walked around the corner of the shattered pyramid and stopped in astonishment.

Spread out on the purple grass were rectangles of white fabric, and grouped among the spread-out rectangles were colorful hampers made, perhaps, of metal. And the thought came to her — the poor things were having a picnic when she had so rudely interrupted them.

She walked forward and nudged one of the pieces of fabric with her toe. It lifted off the ground, falling back in folds. As she had thought, it was fabric. Tablecloths, to be spread down upon the grass, forming a clean surface on which the food would have been spread out.

It was strange, she thought, that the concept of a picnic should have come into being on this planet as well as on the Earth. Although here, of course, all this might mean something else entirely — it might not even be concerned with eating out of doors.

She dropped the yellow stone into a pocket and bent to examine the contents of the hampers. There was no doubt that this picnic, if that was what it might be called, had to do with eating. There was no question in her mind that what she saw was food. There were fruits, apparently freshly picked from tree or bush. There were evidences of cooking — blocks and bricks and loaves — and in one of the hampers was placed a huge bowl of what probably was a salad, a tangled mass of leaves and gobs of quivering slimy matter. A fetid effluvium rose from the bowl.

Almost gagging from the smell, she stood up and stepped back, taking several deep breaths to clear her nose. Then, as she glanced around, she saw the box.

It was a small black box, perhaps a foot square and six inches in depth, lying on the ground just beyond what she had decided was the tablecloth. Most of it seemed to be of metal, but the side facing her was of what appeared to be a gray, opaque glass or crystal. She could see no way to open it. And she had no time to experiment with it. Horseface would soon be returning, and she didn’t want him to find her gone.

She was still staring at the box when the face of it suddenly lighted, to show an image of Horseface toiling across the grass, bent almost double by the weight of a huge chest that he carried on his back.

Basic television, she thought, and another parallel with Earth. A picnic and a television receiver. On the plate, Horseface had slipped the chest from his back and set one end of it on the ground while he wiped his steaming face. The chest was apparently a heavy load to carry.

Had the driftwood spider-things been watching him all the time and could they have known of her as well? They had seemed genuinely surprised when they peeked around the pyramid to see her.

As she thought of them, she saw them in the plate. The image of Horseface flipped off, and there they were, toiling down the narrow bottom of a dry canyon. There seemed to be something grimly purposeful in their traveling.

We’d better get out of here, she told herself. Somehow she had the feeling that the sooner gone the better. She’d go back to the net and wait for Horseface. As soon as she thought of him, he was on the plate, again trudging along under the weight of the chest.

Strange — as soon as she thought of someone, he was on the screen. Mental tuning? She could not know. But this box was more than simple television. It was, perhaps, a spying apparatus that could penetrate into unguessed places and unknown situations.

She lifted the box, which was not heavy, and started rapidly down the slope, suddenly realizing that she might have betrayed a trust in leaving the net unguarded. When she finally saw it still there, a flood of relief flowed through her and she began to run.

She glanced to her right to see Horseface still plodding toward the net with the chest upon his shoulder. She felt an unexplained urgency to leave this planet quickly and assumed that Horseface must share her feeling, perhaps with good reason. The chest could not be his. He was stealing it.

She reached the edge of the net and tossed the television box onto it. The box was large enough to fit firmly there. Now Horseface was running heavily toward her, gasping and panting, with the chest bouncing on his shoulder.

She leaped on the net, balancing on it, reaching out to seize the chest and steady it as he hoisted it from his shoulder, thrusting it toward the net. She caught hold of a leather handle on one end of it and braced herself, hauling on the handle to make sure the chest stayed on the net and did not slide off it.

It struck the net and bounced, beginning to slide toward the edge. She dug in her heels and hauled at the chest, pulling it sidewise to stop the slide.

Out of the corner of an eye she saw the writhing of something deep purple rear out of the purple grass, and tentacles reached out. Horseface bleated in terror and ducked away, leaping for the net. His hands caught the edge, and he pulled himself part way up it, his legs dangling in the air. Enid grasped one of his arms and hauled. The purpleness fell toward them. Enid stared, stricken, at the gape of mouth, the sharp and gleaming teeth, the writhing of tentacles, and the malicious glint of what could have been an eye. Under them, the net jerked violently as a tentacle grasped its trailing edge.

Feet set, Enid heaved on Horseface and he came into the net, sliding along it. The net was rising, the purpleness dangling from it, clear of the ground now, but almost indistinguishable against the purple of the grass. The tentacle still grasped the net. Enid’s hand fumbled blindly in her pocket for the yellow gemstone. She raised it and slammed it down against the tentacle. The purpleness shrilled in pain and the tentacle fell away. She watched but did not see the purpleness hit the ground. It was a purpleness blending into purpleness, and there was nothing to be seen.

Horseface was crawling swiftly up the net. He had grasped one of the leather handles of the chest and was hauling it behind him.

The net was rising in the air, and Enid began crawling on it, getting away from the edge.

The televisor was sliding toward her and she reached out to grasp it. It flickered at her; when she looked down at it, Boone was there. He was in a place of grayness and seemed to be gray himself and there was a gray wolf with him.

“Boone!” she cried at him. “Boone, stay there! I will come to you!”

8.

Corcoran

Corcoran stepped out of the traveler into a marvelous late-April springtime. The traveler lay in a small mountain meadow. Below it was a narrow valley with a silver streak of water. Above it towered the knife-edge hills. New leaves with the soft greenness of early growth clothed all the trees, and the meadow wore a carpet of pastel-blooming wildflowers.

David came up to stand beside him. “We traveled a bit further than I had intended,” he said. “I had no time to set a course. I just got out of there.”

“How far?” asked Corcoran. “Not that it matters very much.”

“Actually, I don’t suppose it does,” said David. “Closer, however, than I’d really like to the era from which we came. We’re now, in round figures — take or give a few hundred either way

— 975,000 years beyond the beginning of your reckoning. As to where, probably somewhere in what you would call the colony of Pennsylvania. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”

“In my day,” said Corcoran, “it was no longer a colony.”

“Give me a little time to figure it and I can pinpoint where we are within a mile or two and the time within a year or less, if you are interested.”

Corcoran shook his head. He pointed at the ridgetop up the slope from the meadow where they stood.

“Something strange up there. A certain irregularity. Could it be a ruin?”

“Could be,” said David. “Up this far in time, the entire Earth is littered with old, forgotten places. Worn-out cities, roads that outlived their usefulness, and shrines and other places of worship, deserted when religions changed. You want to climb up and see?”

“We might as well,” said Corcoran. “From up there, we could spy out the land.”

That the hilltop, indeed, was crowned by a ruin became apparent when they were no more than halfway up the slope.

“Not much left of it,” said David. “A few more centuries and it will be a tell — a mound. A lot more like it, scattered all about. What it was, no one will ever discover. Up here there are no archaeologists. The race has lost all interest in what it was. The bulk of history weighs too heavily. Somewhere, I would suppose, there is tucked away a written account that would tell us what this ruin was and give a full history of it. But no one will read it. There are now no historians.”

Almost at the summit, they came up against a wall, or what was left of it. It was tumble-down, no part of it rising more than ten feet or so. To come up to it, they picked their way carefully through fallen blocks of stone, many of them half-buried in the ground.

“There has to be a gate somewhere,” said Corcoran.

“It’s bigger,” said David, “than it seemed looking at it down in the meadow.”

Following the wall, they came upon the gate. An old man sat flat upon the ground to one side of it, leaning back against the wall. His tattered clothes fluttered feebly in the little breeze that blew across the ridge. He wore no shoes. His white beard came down across his chest, and his hair, as white as the beard, bunched about his shoulders. All that showed of his face was forehead, nose, and eyes.

They stopped stock-still at the sight of him. He stared back at them with no great surprise.

He made no motion; all he did was wiggle his naked toes at them.

Then he spoke. “I heard you coming from a long way off. You are clumsy creatures.”

“I’m sorry we disturbed you,” said Corcoran. “We had no idea you were here.”

“You were not disturbing me. I allow nothing to disturb me. For years there has been nothing that disturbed me. I was a prospector at one time. I roamed these hills with sack and spade, seeking out whatever treasure I might find. I found some, but not much, and finally it occurred to me that treasure is worthless. Now I converse with trees and stones, the best friends that a man can have. There are too many people in the world, worthless kinds of people. All they do now is talk among themselves, with little purpose other than their love of the sound their voices make. Everything is done for them by robots. I have no robot; I live without the benefit of robot. And the little talk I have is with trees and stones. I don’t talk much myself. I am not in love with the sound of my voice as so many others are. Rather than talk, I listen to the trees and rocks.”

All the time he had been talking, his body had been sliding down the wall against which he leaned. Now he hunched himself upward into a more erect position and shifted his conversational gears.

“At one time,” he said, “I roamed the stars and talked with aliens, and the talk of aliens, I can tell you, is all gibberish. My team and I evaluated new planets and wrote weighty reports, all filled with hard-won data, to be delivered when we returned to the planet of our origin. But when we returned to Earth, only a few remained who had any interest in what we had found.

The people had turned their backs on us. So I turned my back on them. Out in space, I met aliens. I met too many of them. There are those who will tell you that aliens are brothers under the skin to us. But I’ll tell you truthfully that most aliens are a very nasty mess … ”

“In all the time that you were in space,” asked David, interrupting, “or here on Earth, for that matter, did you ever run into any talk about aliens who were called the Infinites?”

“No, I can’t say that I ever did, although I haven’t more than passed the time of day with anyone for years. I’m not what you would call a social person … ”

“Is there anyone else, not too far away, who might have heard of the Infinites?”

“As to that,” the old man told him, “I cannot say, but if you mean is there anyone who might be more willing than I am to talk with you, you’ll find a group of ancient busybodies a mile or so down the valley below this mountain. Ask them a question and they’ll answer. They talk unceasingly. Once they hear a question or get their teeth into any proposition, they will never let it go.”

“You don’t do so badly yourself,” Corcoran said. He turned to David. “Since we’re here, maybe we should take a walk through the ruins before we hunt up the people in the valley.”

“There is nothing to see,” the old man told him. “Just a heap of stones and old paving blocks. Go if you wish, but there is nothing worth the looking. I’ll stay here in the sun. The trees and stones are friends of mine, and so is the sun. Although there can be no talking with the sun. But it gives warmth and cheer and it asks nothing in return, and that is a friendly thing to do.”

“We thank you, then,” said David, “for the time you have given us.”

Saying that, he turned about and started through the gate. There was no trail or road, but there were open places in the clutter of fallen stones. The old man had been right; there was not much to see. Here and there old walls still stood, and skeletons of ancient structures still clung to some of their former shapes, but nowhere was there a hint of what the ruin might have been.

“We’re wasting our time,” said David. “There is nothing here for us.”

“If we didn’t waste our time,” asked Corcoran, speaking tartly, “what would we do with it?”

“There’s that, of course,” said David.

“There is one thing that bothers me,” said Corcoran. “Here we are, almost a million years beyond my time. There is a million years between you and me. To you I should seem a shambling, uncouth primitive; to me you should seem a sleek sophisticate. But neither of us finds the other strange. What goes on? Didn’t the human race develop in all those million years?”

“You must take into account that my kind were backcountry people,” David said. “The hillbillies of our time. We clung desperately to the old values and the old way of life. Perhaps we overdid it, for we did it as a protest and might have gone overboard. But there were sophisticates up here. We built a great technical civilization and explored space. We came to terms with politics. No feuding nationalists were left. We arrived at a full social consciousness.

No one in the world we stand in now lacks a place to sleep, food to eat, or medical aid, although now there is seldom need of it. The diseases that killed you by the millions have been wiped out. The human lifetime has been more than doubled since your time. Given a good look at this society, you might be tempted to call it Utopia.”

Corcoran snorted. “A hell of a lot of good Utopia did you. Your time achieved Utopia and now you are going to pot. I wonder if Utopia might be what is wrong with you.”

“Perhaps it is,” said David, speaking mildly. “Rather than the fact of Utopia, however, the acceptance of it.”

“You mean the feeling that you have it made and there is nowhere else to go.”

“Maybe. I’m not sure.”

They walked along for a while, then Corcoran asked, “What about the others? Can you get in touch with them?”

“There’s not much that you and I can do, but Horace has Martin’s ship, and it has a communications system. He could do some checking around. He’d have to be careful about it.

There undoubtedly are a number of groups like ours, scattered throughout time. Maybe none of them are any better off than we are. Whoever sent the killer monster against us would have sent monsters out against them as well. If there are some of them left, they probably would be wary about answering any calls.”

“You think the Infinites sent the killers out?”

“I would suspect so. I can’t think of anyone else who would have.”

“But why? The Infinites drove you, helter-skelter, back into time. You can’t pose much of a threat to them.”

“It is possible,” said David, “or the Infinites might think of it as possible, that we could all regroup and at a later date come back and set up a new society. We might not do this until after the Infinites were gone, and in that possibility they might see an even greater threat. If they left any of us behind there always would be the possibility, in their minds at least, that, once they were gone, we’d be likely to undo their work.”

“But their work’s already done.”

“Not until the last human is either dead or has assumed incorporeal status.”

All this time they had been climbing up the slope toward the ridge top. There still was little worth the seeing. The shattered stones lay all about them, and growing among them were bushes and small trees. In occasional patches of soil not covered by the stones, flowers grew and bloomed, many of them wild, but some of them survivors from the gardens of the fallen city — a scattering of pansies, tulips in an angle formed by two still-standing walls, and a gnarled lilac laden with sweet-smelling sprays.

Corcoran halted by the lilac bush. Reaching up, he pulled down a branch, and sniffed the heady scent of the tiny clustered flowers.

It all was the same, he thought. There was little change in this world of a million years ahead. The land was the same. There still were flowers and trees, all of them familiar. The people were little changed, if changed at all. Long as it might seem, a million years was too short a time for noticeable physical evolution. But there should be intellectual change. Maybe there was. He had seen few people of this far future — only the old man at the gate and David and his family.

He stepped away from the lilac tree and continued along a short span of wall only partially fallen. Coming to the end of it, he saw that the ridge top was a short distance off. There was a strangeness about the ridge top — a faint haziness that hung above the serrated line of ruins standing in stark outline against the sky. He slowed his walking, came to a halt, and stood staring up at the haziness that was beginning to assume the form of a gigantic, circular, free-standing staircase winding up the sky.

Then he saw that he was wrong. The staircase was not free-standing; it wound around a massive tree trunk. And the tree — good God, the tree! The haziness was going away and he could see it more clearly now. The tree thrust upward from the ridge top, soaring far into the sky, not topping out, but continuing upward as far as he could see, the staircase winding round it, going up and up until the tree trunk and the staircase became one thin pencil line, then vanished in the blue.

David spoke to him, “Is there something up there?”

Corcoran came back to reality, jerked back by the words. He had forgotten David.

“What was that?” he asked. “I am sorry; I did not hear you well.”

“I asked if there was something up above the ridge. You were staring at the sky.”

“Nothing important,” said Corcoran. “I thought I saw a hawk. I lost him in the sun.”

He looked back at the ridge. The tree still was there, the staircase winding round it.

“We might as well go back,” said David. “There is nothing here to see.”

“I think you’re right,” said Corcoran. “It was a waste of time to come.”

Even looking at the hilltop, David had not seen the staircase tree. And I, thought Corcoran, did not tell him of it. Why the hell should I not tell him of it? Because of the fear that he would not believe me? Or because he had no need to know? The old, old game — never give anything away, but keep your knowledge to yourself against that day you have a chance to use it.

This was another example of that cockeyed ability that had made it possible for him to see Martin’s traveler when no one else could. The traveler had been there, and he knew the tree was there as well; but this was private, privileged knowledge and he’d keep it to himself.

David was starting down the hill and, after a final look to make certain the tree was there, Corcoran followed in his wake. The old man was gone when they reached the gate, and they went down the hill to the meadow where the traveler awaited them.

“How about it?” asked David. “Shall we hunt up that village the old man told us of?”

“I’m willing,” said Corcoran. “We should be doing something to find out what the local situation is. As it stands, we’re operating in a vacuum.”

“What I’m particularly interested in learning,” said David, “is whether the Infinites have made their appearance yet. It was about this time that they first showed up, but I’m hazy on specific dates.”

“You think the people in a small village might know? This area has the look of being out of touch.”

“There’d be rumors. All we need to know is if the Infinites have showed up. The most flimsy rumors will tell us that.”

At the edge of the meadow they found a trail that led down into the valley where a chuckling river flowed. David, in the lead, turned downstream. The going was easy. The valley was open and a fairly well-traveled path ran along the river.

“Can you give me some idea of what we’ll be getting into?” asked Corcoran. “What, for instance, is the economic setup?”

David chuckled. “This will shock you down to your toenails. Basically, there is no economy.

Robots do all the work and there is no money. I suppose that you could say what little economy there is is in the hands of robots. They have taken over everything, take care of everything. No human has to worry about how to get along.”

“Under such a system,” asked Corcoran, “what do the humans do?”

“They think,” said David. “They think long and well and when it comes to talking, they talk most eloquently.”

“Back in my own time,” said Corcoran, “the farmers would go to town and drop in at a cafe for a cup of coffee. There’d be some small businessmen as well, and all of them would sit there and settle the fate of the world, each of them convinced he knew what he was talking about. Of course he didn’t, but that made no difference. In his own niche, anyone can be his own philosopher.”

“But not your people, not everyone … ”

“We were the minority,” said David. “The stupid fools who couldn’t understand and wouldn’t go along. We were the troublemakers, the thorn in the side of decent people, the loudmouths

… ”

“But, as I understand it, you weren’t really troublemakers.”

“No,” said David. “We just set a bad example.”

They were walking up a low hill. When he reached the crest, David stopped. Corcoran came up to him, and he nodded down the hill.

“There’s the village,” he said.

It was a small, neat village. A few of the houses were of respectable size, but the others were rather small. There were not many of them, perhaps more than a dozen, but not more than twenty. A narrow road formed the village street. A bridge spanned the stream, and the road beyond the stream snaked its way across flat bottomland checkered by fields and gardens. Beyond the bottomland, hills rose up again.

“A self-contained community,” said Corcoran. “Isolated. The robots, I imagine, grow the food and tend the herds.”

“Exactly. And yet the humans here, with their scaleddown needs, have everything they want.”

They went down the hill and came to the road that formed the village street. There an old man walked, making his slow and careful way. No one else was in sight.

A robot came out of a small building that stood at the edge of the village. He headed directly for them, striding purposefully. When he came close, he stopped and stood facing them. He was a plain robot, businesslike, and with no fanciness to him.

“Welcome to our village,” he said, without any preamble to cover social niceties. “We are glad you came. Will you step in with me and enjoy a bowl of soup? That is all we have today, that and honest bread, but there is plenty of it. We have been out of coffee for some time, but can offer you a stoup of our finest ale.”

“We accept your hospitality with deep gratitude,” David said, stiffly. “We hunger for companionship. We are on an extended walking tour and have fallen in with few. When we heard of your village, we came out of our way to visit you.”

“There are gentlemen here,” the robot told them, “who will be glad of discourse with you.

We are a contented place and isolated, which affords us time for weighty cogitation. We have thinkers here we would array against any in the land.”

He turned about and led them to the small building from which he had emerged. He held the door to let them in.

A counter ran along one wall, with stools arranged before it. In the center of the room stood a large, round table on which sat several flaring candles. A half-dozen men sat about the table. Large soup bowls had been pushed to one side and replaced with steins. Despite the candles, the room was dark and stifling. In all the building, there were only two small windows to let in the light.

“Gentlemen,” said the robot, in a voice of somber pronouncement, “we have visitors. If you will, please to make elbow room for them.” The men at the table shoved their chairs closer together to make room for their visitors.

For some time after the two sat down, there was silence, with the others at the table looking them over closely and perhaps a bit suspiciously. In turn, Corcoran studied the faces before him. Most of them were older men and most wore beards. But they were cleanly, respectable men. He thought that he could catch the scent of bath soap; their clothing was plain and clean, although patched here and there.

An old man with a shock of snow white hair and a beard of alarming frostiness finally said to them, “We have been discussing the escape of mankind from the treadmill on which we had been placed by our former economic and social circumstances. All of us are convinced the escape came barely in time. This seems to be the one thing on which we are agreed, for each of us has developed divergent viewpoints on how and why it all came about. The world, we are agreed to start with, had become so artificial, so air-conditioned, so sterilized and comfortable, that a human no longer was a human, but a pet, computer-kept. Have either of you, perchance, had any thoughts on this?”

Bingo, thought Corcoran. Just like that. No introductions, no questions about who you are and what you might be doing, nothing about how glad we are that you happened to drop in, no small talk at all, no preliminaries. These men are fanatics, he told himself, and yet there was no sign of fanaticism — no wild gleam in their eyes, no tenseness in their bodies. As a matter of fact, they seemed to be calm and easy men.

“We have thought on it, of course, from time to time,” said David, speaking as quietly as the old man with the frosty beard. “But our thoughts have been more directed toward why mankind, to start with, had gotten itself so trapped. We have sought for cause but there are so many factors and all of them so jumbled that true assessments are very hard to come by.

In the last few months we have been hearing some snatches of rumors about a new school of thought which urges incorporeality as the final answer to all of mankind’s problems. This is new to us. Being out of touch for too long, we may only now have stumbled on a thought that has been spoken for some time. We are hard pressed to arrive at the sense of it.”

All the others at the table leaned forward with interest.

“Tell us what you know of it,” said the frosty beard. “What have you heard of it?”

“Almost nothing,” said David. “Only whispers here and there. No explanations. No details of what is going on. It has left us puzzled. We have heard a strange designation mentioned —Infinites. But we do not know what is meant by that.”

A man with a head entirely lacking hair, but with a huge black walrus mustache, said, “We have heard of it as well, probably not a great deal more than you have heard. Wanderers passing through have brought the word. There was one who held that incorporeality would finally bestow upon mankind the immortality that has been always sought.”

The robot brought two large bowls of soup and set them down in front of Corcoran and David. Corcoran picked up a spoon and tried the soup. It was warm and tasty. Some sort of meat, beef from the taste of it, noodles, carrots, potatoes, and onions. He swallowed a second spoonful with fine appreciation.

A third man, this time one with a wispy beard, was saying, “It is not hard to appreciate why such a notion should have wide appeal. Death has always seemed a shameful thing.

Attempts to arrive at longevity have been a partial protest against the shameful ending of a life.”

“As I understand it, incorporeality would, or at least could, mean the loss of individuality,” a somewhat younger man said disapprovingly.

“What have you got against togetherness?” asked the wispy beard.

“What we are talking about,” said Frosty Beard, “is the human mind. If it were possible to achieve incorporeality, the human mind would survive and the body be discarded. If one were to think about the proposal deeply, he might come to see that the human mind, the human intelligence, is all that really matters.”

The younger man asked, “But what would the mind be without a body? The mind may need a vehicle.”

“I’m not certain the mind needs a vehicle,” said Frosty Beard. “The mind may be something entirely outside the parameters of the physical universe. We have, it seems to me, been able to explain all but mind and time. Facing these, mankind falters.”

The robot brought steins of ale to David and Corcoran. He put down a cutting board and knife and slapped a loaf of brown bread onto the board. “Eat,” he said. “It is good and healthful food. There is more soup, if you wish it. More ale, too.”

Corcoran cut a thick slice of bread for David, another for himself. He dipped the bread into the soup and took a bite. It was excellent. So was the ale. He settled down to enjoyment.

David was speaking again. “There was this matter of the Infinites. We’ve heard the term, but nothing whatever of what the Infinites may be.”

The old man with the frosty beard answered. “Like you, we have heard only rumors. It sounds like a cult, but there are suggestions it is not entirely human. There is a whisper of alien missionaries.”

“There is little evidence to support a full discussion of this matter,” said Wispy Beard.

“Notions arise at times, flourish for a while, and then flicker out. Incorporeality, you say — but how is it to be accomplished?”

“I would think that, if mankind wishes to become incorporeal, a way can be found,” said Walrus Mustache. “There have been many times when man has accomplished matters which it would have been better for him not to have tried.”

“It all goes back,” said Frosty Beard, speaking in a judiciary tone, “to a human characteristic we have pondered on many a long evening — the insatiable push of mankind toward a state of happiness … ”

Corcoran let the talk go drifting on. He mopped up the last of his soup with a swab of bread, then emptied the stein. He straightened in his chair with his gut as full as possible, short of stuffing it.

He glanced around the room and saw for the first time that it was a hovel. It was small and bleak, without ornament, with little thought of comfort, a robot’s idea of a dwelling place, simply an area of space enclosed against the weather. The workmanship was good; it would be good if put together by robotic labor. The table and the chairs were made of solid, honest wood. They would last for centuries. But aside from honest labor and honest wood, there was nothing else. The soup bowls and steins were the simplest pottery; the candles were homemade. Even the soup spoons were fashioned from carved and polished wood.

Yet these men of the village sat at this rude table in this rude hovel and discoursed on matters that were far beyond their ability or power to influence in any way at all, happily mumbling over considerations when they well might have no information on which to fabricate the basis of their talks — although, he told himself, he could be no proper judge of that. But it was, he thought, nothing to be greatly wondered at. It was all done in an ancient and honorable tradition that ranged back as far as history ran. In ancient Athens, idle men had met in the agora to engage in pompous talk; centuries later, idle men had sat on the porches of American country stores and talked as pompously as any old Athenian on matters they did not understand. In English clubs other men had sat over their drinks, mumbling to one another.

Idleness ran to talk, he thought, and men were entranced by the brilliance of their own thoughts. These men here were idle, made so by a computer-robotic society.

David was rising from his chair, saying, “I fear that it is time for us to go. We would tarry longer if we could, but we must be on our way. Thank you for the food and drink and for all the talk.”

The men at the table did not rise. They did not offer hands to say good-bye. They looked up briefly and nodded, then went back to their interminable discussion.

Corcoran rose with David and started for the door. The robot, there before them, held it open.

“Thanks for the soup and ale,” said David. “Any time,” the robot said. “You are welcome any time.”

Then they were out in the street, the door closing behind them. The street was empty.

“We found what we came for,” said David. “We know now that the Infinites are here, that they are in place and beginning their mission.”

“I feel sorry for those men back there,” said Corcoran. “Such pitiful bastards. Nothing to do but sit around and talk.”

“You have no need to pity them,” said David. “They may not realize it, but they have found their happiness. They are truly happy men.”

“Maybe so, but it’s a horrible way for the human race to end.”

“It may be what the race was driving for all the time. Through all of history man was always looking for some method that would do his work for him. First the dog, the ox, the horse. Then machines and after that computers and robots.” Dusk was just beginning to creep into the valley when they reached the meadow where the traveler lay.

As they approached the traveler, a misty scatter of shining motes moved out to meet them. Corcoran, the first to notice it, stopped short. He felt the hair at the nape of the neck begin to bristle in atavistic fear, then suddenly realized what was taking place.

”David,” he said, speaking softly, “we have a visitor.”

David drew his breath in sharply, then he said, “Henry, we are glad you turned up. I had hoped you would.” Henry floated across the grass and came up close to them.

You laid me a long trail, he said. I had far to go.

“How about the others? What traveler were you in?” I was in no traveler, said Henry. I remained at Hopkins

Acre. I knew you’d all go separately and I’d have to track you all.

“So you planned to start from scratch.”

That I did. It is well I did. There have been complications.

“Well, you found us. That’s a start. But why did you track us? You must have known we’d be able to take care of ourselves. You should have taken Enid’s trail. She had the least experience, would be at the greatest risk.”

That is what I did, said Henry. She has disappeared.

“How could that be? She would have waited for you. She would have known you would track her down.”

She did not wait. She reached her first destination, then left. I fear she fled the monster.

At her first destination lies the monster, dead.

“Dead? Who would have killed the monster?”

“Perhaps Boone,” said Corcoran. “Boone was with her. He was running for her traveler with the monster close behind him. I tried to go to help him, but you seized hold of me and tossed me in the traveler.”

You will not let me tell it all, wailed Henry. You must break in with all your jabbering. There is more to say.

“Well, say it then,” said David, somewhat impatiently.

She left alone. I am sure of that. Boone was left behind.

“That doesn’t sound right. She’d not have deserted him.”

I can be sure of little. Henry said. I have only my deductions. I came upon the destination far in the past from Hopkins Acre. Fifty thousand years into the past, in the southwest of North America. The traveler was gone, but there was scent of it. The traveler had left a week or more before.

“Scent?” asked Corcoran. “Does he trail the travelers by scent?”

“I do not know,” said David. “Neither does he, I would suppose, so there is no point in asking him. He has something you and I don’t have and I wouldn’t make a guess.”

I can do it, said Henry. I know not how; I do not ask. Will you let me now continue?

“If you please,” said David.

I looked about. There was a campfire that was fairly recent. Two days, three, not more than four. There was a rock cairn beside it. A piece of paper was held down on the cairn by another stone placed on top of it. I could not lift the stone nor could I insert enough of me to learn what, if anything, was inscribed upon the paper. I suspect it was a note left for others who might come. A short distance off lay the wreckage of the killer monster and a few strides beyond that the skeleton of some great beast, an oxen of some sort from the looks of it. It had enormous horns.

“There was no sign of Boone?” asked Corcoran.

None. I looked, but in all honesty, I must confess, for no great length of time. I was much too concerned for Enid. The trail was long and hard, but I found the second destination where her traveler had landed.

“And Enid wasn’t there,” said David.

Neither she nor the traveler was there. The traveler had not taken off; it had been taken off. I found skid marks on the ground; I found wheel tracks. It had been dragged off and placed on a vehicle. I tried to work out the trail, but I was never able to track it to the end.

“You looked for Enid. too?”

I checked, making many wide circles. I pried into every corner. I peeked in every cranny.

Not once did I get an impression of her. If she had been in the area, I would have known it.

“So she’s really lost. And someone has a traveler who shouldn’t have it.”

“There’s a good chance,” said Corcoran, “that they don’t know what they have. Someone found it, was intrigued by it, and hauled it off fast, before the owner could come back —figuring, I suppose, that later on they’d have a chance to try to work out what it is.”

David shook his head.

“Look,” said Corcoran, “how many time travelers are there in the world? How many people before your time knew time travel was possible?”

Corcoran could be right, said Henry. You should listen to him, David. He has a good head on his shoulders. He looks facts in the eye.

“At the moment,” said David, “there is no good reason to debate the matter. For the moment, Enid is out of our reach. Her traveler’s gone and so is she. We’d have no idea where to look.”

My suggestion is to go back to the prehistoric site, said Henry. There we can look for Boone. He may have some clue that will help us find Enid. She may have said something to him that could be significant.

“Can you get us there? Have you the coordinates?”

Very closely there. I have the location coordinates. I worked them out carefully before I left. And the time coordinates are off by very little.

“I think you’re right,” said David. “We may find something there to work on. Otherwise we’ll be thrashing around with no idea what to do.”

Corcoran nodded. “It’s the one thing we can do,” he said.

David stepped through the door of the traveler, reaching out a hand to grasp Corcoran by the arm and haul him through.

“Get that door closed,” he said, “and get set. Once Henry gives me the coordinates, we’re off.”

Corcoran closed the door and went forward, watching while David wrote down the coordinates in his log book as Henry gave them to him. David reached his fingers out to the instrument panel. “Hold on,” he warned, then came the shock and darkness, the deep, unforgiving darkness. And almost instantly, it seemed, David was singing out again: “We’re there.”

Corcoran found the door and fumbled with it, finally got it open and tumbled out. The sun battered down out of a molten sky. The buttes stood up against the melting blue. The sagebrush shimmered in the sundance of the sand. Out on the plain lay the whitened skeleton of some great beast.

“Are you sure this is the place?” David asked of Henry.

It is the place. Walk straight ahead and you will find the ashes of the campfire.

“There’s not any cairn,” said Corcoran. “You said there was a cairn close by the fire and a note weighed down.”

You’re right. The cairn’s not there. But the stones of which the cairn was built lie scattered on the ground. Something knocked them over.

Corcoran walked forward. The stones were scattered on the ground and there was a hole dug in the center of the scattered stones. The ashes of the campfire showed white against the sand.

“Wolves or foxes,” said Corcoran. “They scattered the stones to get at the ground beneath them. There must have been something buried underneath the cairn.”

“Meat,” said David. “Boone must have cached some meat there and built the cairn to keep off the wolves.”

Corcoran nodded. It sounded reasonable.

“The note should be here somewhere,” said David. “It all checks out. The ashes of the fire.

The skeleton of the large animal. That pile of junk over there must be what is left of the killer monster.”

They looked for the note and did not find it.

“It’s hopeless,” David said. “The wind blew it away. There’s no chance of finding it.”

Corcoran stood and looked out across the plain. Far off, a dust devil swayed like a dancing snake. Just within the limit of vision dark dots danced in the shimmer of heat. Bison, Corcoran told himself, although it was no more than a guess; there was no way the unaided human eye could have made out what they were. The skeleton, he knew, was a prehistoric bison. The skull lay canted, resting on one horn, the other angled in the air. No other creature than a bison, he thought, could have horns like those.

Had Boone killed the bison? If that was the case, he must have had a large caliber rifle, for no other kind could have dropped that large a beast. And if he had a rifle, had it been he, as well, who had downed the killer monster? Corcoran shook his head; there was no way he could know.

“What do we do now?” asked David.

“We have a look around,” Corcoran told him. “We may meet Boone returning from wherever he may have been. We may find him dead. Although it’s hard to think anything could kill him.

After all the risks he has taken, all the scrapes that he’s been in, the damn fool should have died years ago. But his life is charmed.”

“I’ll climb the butte,” said David. “From the top I might be able to see something that will give a clue.”

“It would help if you had binoculars.”

“I doubt we have. I’ll go and see.”

David walked back toward the traveler; Corcoran headed for the heap of scrap that had been the killer monster. He stayed well clear, walking a wide circle around it, though there was no threat or menace left in the scattered metal. Yet an awareness that seemed no proper part of him warned him to keep his distance.

David came back from the traveler. “No binoculars,” he said. “Horace dumped the stuff in hurriedly; no thought went into it.”

“I’ll climb the butte, if you’d rather,” said Corcoran.

“No, I’ll do it. I’m very good at climbing.”

“I’ll walk along the base of the butte,” said Corcoran. “I don’t expect to find anything. This whole business has a peculiar ring to it. I’m beginning to wonder if Boone might not have left with Enid.”

“Henry doesn’t think he did.”

Corcoran choked back an observation not entirely complimentary to the glittery Henry.

Instead, he asked, “Where is Henry? He hasn’t said a word for a long time now, and I have caught no glimpse of him.”

“Come to think of it, neither have I. But that means nothing. He’ll be back. He’s probably doing some poking around.”

David was carrying a shotgun. He must have picked it up when he went looking for the binoculars. He extended it to Corcoran, holding it upright by the stock. “Here, you might have more use of it than I have.”

Corcoran shook his head. “I don’t expect to run into any kind of trouble. I’ll be careful that I don’t. And you be damned sure that you don’t pick the wrong target. There probably are critters here a shotgun would mean nothing to.”

David tucked the gun comfortably under his arm, seemingly glad that Corcoran had not taken it. “I have never fired this gun or any other gun,” he said, “but on my walks at Hopkins Acre, I got accustomed to carrying one. This particular gun has become a part of me. I feel better, more myself, with it underneath my arm. The gun has never been loaded when I carried it.”

“Take my advice,” said Corcoran, in some disgust, “and load it. I suppose you carry shells?”

David slapped a pocket of his jacket. “Right in here. A double handful of them. Even back at Hopkins Acre, I always carried two shells. I took them out of the gun, Timothy insisting that it always should be loaded when it was in the rack.”

“It is senseless to carry a gun if you don’t intend to use it,” said Corcoran. “What’s the use of packing a gun unless it’s loaded? My old man told me long ago, when he gave me my first gun — don’t ever point your gun at anything, he said, unless you mean to kill it. I took that as good advice and never in my life have I pointed a gun at anything unless I was prepared to kill it.”

“I often pointed this gun,” said David, “but I never killed. I pointed it at hundreds of birds that the dogs put up, but I never pressed the trigger.”

“What are you trying to prove — that you are finally civilized?”

“I’ve often wondered myself,” said David.

Wandering along the base of the butte, Corcoran found a seepage flow that had been scooped out, forming a basin into which the water flowed. He came unexpectedly upon a badger that hissed at him before it waddled rapidly away. He became aware that a wolf was following him and paid it no attention. It kept on following, never getting closer than it had been, never falling back.

Nothing else happened. He found nothing of any interest. After a time, he turned about and followed the curve of the butte back to where the traveler lay. Before he turned back, the wolf had disappeared.

The sun was not far above the western horizon. Using some of the wood from the pile that remained beside the old campfire, he started a blaze. He went to the seepage basin and brought back a pail of water. When David came down off the butte, he was frying sizzling bacon in one pan and cooking flapjacks in a second.

David flopped down on the ground, the gun across his lap. “There is nothing,” he said. “A few grazing herds far out on the plain, and that is all. This is the loneliest place I have ever seen.”

“Pour yourself some coffee,” Corcoran told him. “I have enough flapjacks for you to start.

Help yourself to the bacon. The plates and cups are over there on the blanket.”

Halfway through his first helping of cakes, David asked, “Any sign of Henry?”

“Not a peep from him.”

“It’s strange for him to go away without saying anything about it. Or to stay so long.”

“He got an idea, maybe, and went to try it out.”

“I hope so,” said David. “There are times I’m not sure I understand Henry. He’s my brother and all that, but try as I may to see him as blood and bone, he’s no longer blood and bone —my brother still, but a highly unusual human being. He allowed himself to get snared by the Infinites, by their sleek, fine talk. But the process didn’t take. Maybe Henry was too knotty, too warped a personality for it to take hold of him.”

Corcoran tried to be comforting. “Don’t worry about him. Nothing can happen to him.

Nothing can lay a mitt on him.”

David made no response. A few moments later he asked, “What do you think we should do now? Is there any point in staying here?”

“It’s too early to say,” Corcoran said. “We’ve been here only a few hours. Let’s wait at least through tomorrow. We may have new thoughts by then.”

A soundless voice spoke to them.

You seek a man called Boone? it asked.

After a startled moment, Corcoran said to David, “Did you hear that?”

“Yes, I did. It wasn’t Henry. It was someone else.”

I am the mind, the voice said, of what you term a killer monster. I can help you with this Boone.

“You can tell us where he is?” asked Corcoran.

I can tell you where he went. But first we strike a bargain.

“What kind of bargain, monster?”

Cease calling me a monster. It is bad enough to think of me as such, but to say it to my face is rank discourtesy.

“If you are not a monster, then what are you?”

I am a faithful servitor who does no more than carry out my master’s will. It is not mine to question the rightness or the wisdom of his will.

“Don’t bother to apologize,” said David. “We know who you are. You lie in the tangle of wreckage that was once a killer monster.”

There you go again, calling me a monster. And I made no attempt to apologize.

“It sounded to me as if you did,” said Corcoran. “Let’s get on with your bargain.”

It is a simple bargain. Straightforward and no frills. I tell you where to look for Boone, but before I do that you must lift me from this wreckage of my former self and engage in all sincerity to take me elsewhere, away from this dreadful nothingness.

“Why,” said David, “that is an easy bargain to be struck.”

“Easy on,” Corcoran cautioned. “Ask yourself how much faith you’re willing to accord this junkyard voice.”

“It seems a fairly simple thing,” said David. “He knows where Boone is and is willing … ”

“That’s the point. He doesn’t claim he knows where Boone is. He tells us he’ll tell us where to look for him. Those are two different things.”

“As a matter of fact, they are. How about it, sir? How precise would be your information?”

I would help you in any way I could. The aid I offer will not be limited to the finding of Boone.

“What other kinds of help? In what regards could you be of aid to us?”

“Forget it,” Corcoran growled. “Pay him no attention. He is in a tight spot and he’ll promise anything to get out of it.”

But in all human charity, wailed the monster, you must take pity on me. You must not condemn me to endless eons of no contact with external stimuli. I can not see; with the exception of this telepathic talk, I cannot hear. I feel no heat or cold. Even the passage of time is blurred. I cannot differentiate between a second and a year.

“You’re in terrible shape,” said Corcoran.

Indeed I am. Kind sir, please empathize with me.

“I’ll not lift a hand to help you. I’ll not lift a finger.”

“You’re being hard on him,” said David.

“Not as hard as he was on Athens. No harder than he would have been on us if he’d had the chance — if he’d not bungled it.”

Bungle it I did not. I am efficient mechanism. My luck ran out on me.

“It certainly did,” said Corcoran. “It is still running out. Now shut up. We want no more of you.” It shut up. They heard no more of it.

After a time, David said, “Henry has not come back. You and I are left alone. The monster-mind says it has information. I think it reasonable to believe it does. It was here when Boone was here. It may have talked with him.”

Corcoran grunted. “You are trying to convince yourself that you should show a measure of magnanimity to a fallen enemy, that you should act nobly and be a gentleman about it. It’s your neck if you want to risk it. I wash my hands of it. Do whatever you damn please.”

The sun had set and deep dusk was flowing in. Somewhere out in the emptiness, a wolf howled and another answered. Corcoran finished eating. “Give me your plate and the silverware,” he said to David. “I’ll go down to the seepage basin and rinse them off.”

“Want me to come along as guard for you?”

“No, I’ll be quite safe. It’s just a step or two away.” Squatting beside the dug-out basin, Corcoran rinsed off the dishes. In the east, the moon was riding low. Off in the distance, a half-dozen wolves had joined in lamenting their hard and sorry lives.

When he got back to the fire, David had the blankets out. “It’s been a long day,” he said,

“and we should get some sleep. I’ll stand first watch. I imagine we should keep a watch.”

“I think we should,” said Corcoran.

“I’m worried about Henry,” David told him. “He knows that in a situation such as this we should not divide our forces.”

“He’s probably only delayed,” said Corcoran. “By morning, he’ll be back, and everything will be all right again.”

He wadded up his jacket to use as a pillow and pulled the blanket up. Moments later, he was asleep.

When he awoke, he was lying on his back. Above him, the sky was growing lighter with the first touch of dawn, and David had not called him to take his turn at watch.

Damn him, Corcoran thought. He knew better than that. He doesn’t have to prove that he can take it or that he’s a better man than I am.

“David!” he shouted. “Damn it, what do you think you’re doing?”

On the butte, the birds were singing, saluting the first brightening of the east. Except for the singing, there was no sound at all, and the flicker of the dying fire was the only motion anywhere. Out on the plain, the white bones of the bison gleamed in the soft dawn light; and a little way to the right of them, he could make out the junk heap that marked the death of the killer monster.

Corcoran stood up, shaking off the blanket that had covered him. He moved toward the fire, reaching out for a stick of wood to use in rearranging and consolidating the scattered coals. He crouched down before the fire and it was then he heard the slobbering sound that sent a wave of terror through him. It was not a sound he had ever heard before and he had no idea what it was, but there was about it a freezing quality that held him rigid. It came again and this time he was able to turn his head to see where it might come from.

For a moment all that he could see was a pale blob crouched over a dark blob on the ground. He strained his eyes to see better but it was not until the pale blob lifted its head and stared straight at him that he recognized it for what it was — flat cat face, tasseled ears, the gleam of six-inch fangs — a sabertooth crouched above its prey, feeding with that horrible slobbering to indicate the toothsomeness of what it was ingesting.

Corcoran knew the prey. Out there, under the claws and fangs of the sabertooth, lay David!

Grasping the stick he had picked up from the pile of wood, Corcoran rose. He shifted the stick in his hand, getting a better grip. It was a puny weapon, but was the only thing he had.

The cat also rose to its feet. It was much larger than he had thought. It was fearsome in its size. It stepped over the dark blob that was David and took a few steps forward. It stopped and snarled, the down-curving fangs gleaming in the growing light. The cat’s forelegs were longer than its hind legs; its back sloped and the beast seemed to slouch. There was light enough now for Corcoran to make out the speckled coat, brown splotches on light tan.

He did not stir. After its few steps, neither did the cat. Then slowly, deliberately, as if not yet decided, it pivoted about. It slew-footed its way back to its prey, lowered its head, nuzzling the dark blob and arranging the catch so it could get a firm grip. Then the cat’s teeth sank into the blob and lifted; and the cat began to move away, taking its time, turning its back on the man beside the fire.

Corcoran watched, unable to move a muscle. The cat broke into an effortless trot. It held its head high so that its dangling prey would clear the ground. But even so, one leg fell down and dragged, and the cat stumbled once or twice when one of its front paws tripped over the dragging leg. It went along the base of the bluff, around an extending spur that ran off the butte into the plain, and disappeared.

Not until it was gone did Corcoran move. He crouched down before the fire and fed wood into it. The wood caught quickly and flames leaped high. Still crouching, he swung around to see that the traveler still lay where it had landed. Thirty feet or more beyond the fire lay the shotgun. He had not noticed the gun before. It had been too dark, and, in any case, he had been so occupied with watching the cat he had seen nothing else. He did not move to pick it up. The paralysis of fear still held him.

Slowly the enormity of what had happened struck him full force. Killed by a sabertooth!

Killed and eaten by a sabertooth. Killed, not in anger or defense, nor yet in thoughtless killing fury, but killed for the sake of the meat upon the bone.

David was dead. David who? Shocked, Corcoran realized he’d never known the family name.

The folk at Hopkins Acre had never mentioned it, and he had never asked. He called the roll: David, Enid, Timothy, Emma, and Horace. Although that wasn’t right; Horace’s family name would have been different.

David had not called him, had let him sleep. If he had called me, Corcoran thought, it might have been me instead of him.

He tried, in his imagination, to lay out how the death might have happened. David might have heard something out beyond the fire in the predawn darkness and have stepped out to investigate. He might have been taken by surprise or he might have seen the cat. Whatever the situation, he had not fired the gun.

If it had been me, Corcoran thought, I would have fired. If I had walked out from the fire and run into a sabertooth, I would have used the gun. A shotgun would not be the weapon of choice to use against a sabertooth, but at close range, while it might fail to kill, a shotgun certainly would dampen the killing urge of even so large an animal. David had not used the gun, perhaps because he had never fired it, perhaps because he was too civilized to use it, even if he’d had the chance. To him the gun was not a weapon — it had been a walking stick.

The poor damn fool, Corcoran told himself.

He left the fire and walked out to the gun. It had two shells in the breech; it had not been fired. He cradled it in the crook of his arm and walked out farther. A boot lay on the ground and inside the boot, a foot. The bones were shattered, broken by the crunching teeth of a feeding animal. A little further on he picked up a torn jacket. Around it were scattered other shotgun shells, lying where they had fallen. Corcoran gathered them up, put them in his pocket. There seemed nothing else left of David. He walked back to the boot with the foot enclosed and stood there, staring at it. He did not stoop to touch it. It would be, he told himself, messy to pick up and he shied away from it.

He turned back to the fire and hunkered down. He should eat something, he knew, but he had no urge for food. His mouth tasted sour and foul.

Now what should he do?

He was certain that he could operate the traveler. He knew where David kept the logbook; he had watched David program the control panel for the jump to this place.

But where to go? Back to his own twentieth century, washing his hands of this whole affair? He thought about that. The idea had some attraction, but he felt an uneasiness about it. Thinking of it, he felt like a deserter. Boone was somewhere in this crazy quilt of time, and he should not leave until he was certain he could be of no help to his friend.

He thought about the sabertooth and being alone in this forsaken place, and it was a thought that did not please him. But he weighed it all against the need to be here if Boone should return from wherever he had gone. And Henry, too, perhaps, although Henry had no need of a traveler to move through all of time and space. Henry, he decided, had no need at all of him.

He considered the sabertooth and saw that the cat was an incidental problem, not to be taken account of in any decision he might make. The cat might not return. Even if it did, there now was a weapon in the hands of someone who knew the use of it. With the gun in hand, he told himself, he would not be as vulnerable as David. At night he could sleep in the traveler, with the door closed tight against maraudering carnivores. There was food to last for a time and water in the seep-hole. He could stay, he knew, as long as he might wish.

Full dawn had come and he bestirred himself. He went to the seep-hole for a pail of water; he went to the traveler for food. He squatted by the fire to bake a pan of cornbread, boil coffee, and fry bacon. Hell, he told himself, it’s just a camping trip.

He tried to feel sorry for David, but could dredge up little sorrow. The horror of the death

— or, rather, the horror of the circumstances of the death — sent a shiver through him, but he forced himself not to dwell on it. The quicker he could wipe it from his mind, the better it would be.

There was a titter in his mind. It came from somewhere outside of him. Heh-heh-heh, it laughed.

Anger flared within him.

“Bug off,” he told the monster.

Heh-heh-heh, the monster tittered. Your friend is dead and I am still alive.

“You’ll wish a million times that you were dead before this is all over.”

You’ll be dead yourself, the monster chortled, long before I am. You’ll be bone and dust.

Corcoran did not answer. A whisper of suspicion came to him. Was it possible the monster could have lured the killer cat to David?

It was silly on the face of it. He was paranoid, he thought, for even thinking of it. He ate breakfast, then washed and dried the pots and plates, using his jerked-out shirttail to do the drying. On second thought, he went to the traveler and found a shovel. Digging a hole, he buried the boot with the foot inside it. For sanitary reasons, he explained to himself; the action was not intended to be ceremonial.

Wrapping a chunk of cornbread in a handkerchief, he put it in his pocket. In the traveler he rooted through the flung-in supplies, looking for a canteen and finding none. In lieu of a canteen, he filled the pail half full of water.

It was an awkward thing to carry, but the best that he could do.

Packing the shotgun and the water pail, he walked out onto the plain. A few miles out he turned to his left and began to walk a circle route, with the butte as the center of the circle.

He kept a sharp lookout for any sign that Boone had passed that way.

Twice Corcoran found what he thought might be a human trail. He followed each and could not be sure. Both trails finally petered out. It was useless, he told himself. He had known all along that it would be useless — but even convinced of the uselessness, still he had to try.

He and Boone had gone through a lot together. They had, at times, stuck out their necks for one another. Boone was the closest thing to a friend he’d ever had. He’d not had many friends.

At times he came on wolves that grudgingly moved out of his way, sitting down to watch him once he’d passed. A deerlike animal sprang out of a clump of bushes and dashed away. He passed within a mile of a small herd of bison. In the distance he glimpsed what looked like mastodons, although they were too distant for him to be certain. There could be mastodons here, he told himself; it was the proper time for them.

When the sun stood directly overhead, he halted and squatted in the shade of a tree. He munched cornbread and drank lukewarm water from the pail.

Probably he should go back to the butte. He had set out with the intention of describing a circle around it. He already had completed the western sweep of the circle. To the east lay nothing, just the plain stretching vast, flat, and empty, finally to merge with the sky. If Boone had gone anywhere, he would have gone west, where other buttes loomed up; he would not have gone into the nothingness of the east. Corcoran pondered the matter. Perhaps what he should do was backtrack himself, covering virtually the same ground, keeping a sharper lookout for a clue he might have missed before.

He finished the cornbread and had another lukewarm drink. He was readying himself to rise to his feet when he felt the presence. He froze and listened. There was nothing to be heard, but the presence was still there.

He spoke hesitantly, unsure.

“Henry?”

Yes, it is I, said Henry.

“You know of David?”

Yes, I know of him. As soon as I returned, I knew. And you were missing. I set out to find you.

“I’m sorry about David.”

I sorrow also. He was a brother who cannot be replaced. He was a noble man.

“Yes. A very noble man.”

A cat got him, said Henry. I tracked it and I found it, worrying his remains. There was little left. Tell me how it came about.

“He was standing guard. When I awoke I found what had happened. I had heard nothing.

The cat carried him away.”

There was a grave. A very small grave. “A boot,” said Corcoran. “With a foot inside of it. I buried it.”

I thank you for your act. You did what the family would have done.

“You know where the body is. I could take a shovel and scare off the cat … ”

It would be meaningless. An empty gesture. I see you have the gun. He did not use it?

“He must have been taken by surprise.”

In any case, Henry said, he would not have used it. He was too gentle for this world. This venture has gone badly. For all of us. First Enid lost, then Boone.

“You know of Boone? You have news of him?”

I found where he had gone, but he was not there. A rifle was there and a pack he had carried, but he was gone. A wolf, I think, had been with him. I am sorry, Corcoran.

“I think I know what happened to him,” said Corcoran. “He stepped around another corner. I only hope he stays where he went and does not come popping back.”

What do you intend to do now? There is no point in staying here,

Corcoran shook his head. Yesterday he’d thought briefly of what he could or should do. He had thought of going back to New York. He had rejected this idea out of hand; Boone had been lost and must be found. Now Boone was still lost, he realized, with very little chance of finding.

He thought of the twentieth century and again rejected it. Never in his life had he turned his back on any adventure until it was all played out. This adventure, he reminded himself, was far from being all played out.

He could return to Hopkins Acre. The coordinates, he was sure, could be found in David’s logbook. Living in the Acre would be comfortable. The servants and the tenants still would be there. It would be a place where he could be secure and rethink the situation and, perhaps, arrive at a logical plan for further action. It was possible, as well, that some of the others would be returning there.

But there was that other place where the ruins of a city topped a peak and a massive, sky-piercing tree lanced up to tower above the ruins, with a spiral stairway running around the tree. There must be some mystery there, perhaps not as he had seen it or remembered that he’d seen it, but surely something that needed looking into.

Henry was waiting for an answer. Corcoran could faintly detect the shimmer of him, a cloud of sparkles gleaming in the sun.

Instead of answering Henry’s question, he asked a question of his own. “As I understand it, you stopped short of incorporeality. Can you tell me how it happened?”

It was a piece of bad judgment on my part, said Henry. I let the Infinites talk me into it. I took to hanging around with them. Curious, I would guess, wondering what kind of things they really were. Very strange, you must understand. They are marginally humanlike, or the glimpses that I caught of them seemed humanlike. You don’t see them. You scan them now and then. They float in and out, like ghosts. But see them or not, you hear them all the time.

They preach at you, they reason, they implore, and they plead. They show you the path to immortality and recite the endless comforts and triumphs of immortality — an intellectual immortality, they say, is the only way to go. All else is gross, all else is sloppy and shameful.

No one wants to be shameful.

“They sell you a bill of goods?”

They sold me, said Henry. But they sold me in a moment of weakness. When the weakness went away, I fought them. They were shocked to their very core that I should have the temerity to resist them, and that was when they really got to work on me. But the harder they pounded on me, the stubborner I got. I broke away from them. Or maybe they gave up in disgust. Maybe I was taking more of their time than I was worth, and they heaved me out.

But when I got away, the process had gone too far; I already was halfway to incorporeality; I was stuck somewhere between. I was the way you see me now.

“It doesn’t seem to bother you.”

There are disadvantages and advantages, and I take the view that I am somewhat ahead, that the advantages may outweigh the disadvantages. At least, that’s what I tell myself.

There are many common, human things that I cannot do, but there are abilities no other human can command, and I make the most of those abilities, ignoring what I’ve lost.

“And what do you intend to be doing now?”

There still is one part of the family that I must track down. Horace and Emma — and Timothy, who was hustled aboard the traveler by that big bully of a Horace.

“Have you any idea where to look?”

None at all. I’ll have to track them down.

“Can you use the traveler in your tracking? I could operate it for you.”

No, I must do it on my own. I must go back to Hopkins Acre and pick up the trail from there. It will be faint and thin, but it will still be there. You say you can operate the traveler?

“Yes. I know where the logbook is and I watched David punch in the coordinates when he set the course for here.”

It might be best for you to go back to Hopkins Acre. I think the place is safe. Some of us could come back for you. We could do that, knowing where you were. The coordinates would be written in the logbook. You are sure you can run the traveler?

“I am certain,” Corcoran said. “I don’t think I’ll go to Hopkins Acre. Later on, perhaps, but not immediately. I want to go to the place where you found David and me. There is something there that needs looking into.”

Henry did not ask the question that Corcoran was sure he would. Rather, there was the impression of a shrug.

Well, all right, said Henry. You know where you’re going and I know where I’m going. We’d best be on our way.

Suddenly, Henry was gone.

Corcoran rose to his feet. Boone no longer was in this time and place, and there was no reason to stay on. He knew where he was going and, as Henry had said, he should be on his way as soon as possible.

When he reached the camp, the place was deserted. There was no sign of the cat and not even any wolves. Corcoran picked up the pots and pans beside the ashes of the campfire and flung them on the blanket; then, lifting the blanket, he flung it all over his shoulder.

A voice talked at him. Heh-heh-heh, it said.

At the sound, Corcoran spun on his heel to face the pile of junk.

The tittering kept on.

Corcoran headed for the junk heap.

“Cut out that goddamned tittering,” he shouted.

The tittering cut off and a pleading began.

Dear sir, you are about to leave. You gather up your things to leave. Please take me with you. You will not regret it. Many things I can do for you. I can pay back your kindness. I will be your eternal friend. The taking of me will in no way impede your going. I am of little weight and will not take up much space. You need not search for me. I lie in back of the wreckage of my body. I am a brain case, a highly polished sphere. I would look well displayed upon a mantle. I would be a conversation piece. For me you would find many uses. In times when you are alone and desirous of companionship, the two of us could hold instructive and entertaining conversations. I have a good mind and am well versed in logic. There would be times I could serve as your advisor. And always I would be your friend, filled with loyalty and gratitude …

“No, thank you,” Corcoran said, turning on his heel and walking toward the traveler.

Behind him the killer monster went on wailing, pleading, begging, and promising. Then the wailing fell off and a storm of hatred came.

You scaly son of a bitch, I’ll not forget you for this. I’ll get you in the end. I’ll dance upon your bones.

Corcoran, unscathed, continued to the traveler.

9.

Boone

A cold nose woke Boone, and he tried to jerk himself erect. His leg screamed at him, and he choked back the answering scream deep inside his throat. The wolf, whining, sidled away. All around the southern horizon, the stars glittered coldly at him. His clothes were damp with the chill of frosty dew.

From where he lay he looked over the moon-silvered plain that he had crossed, more desert than plain, although there was some grass and other pasturage for small game herds.

Somewhere, perhaps to the east, there would be grassy plains where enormous herds would range. But here the herds were small and the predators few.

“You’re out of place,” he told the wolf. “You could find better eating elsewhere.”