Highway of Eternity (16 page)

“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 back-country 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.”