Highway of Eternity (10 page)

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 corner 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.