Highway of Eternity (22 page)

Wolf whined. He was pressed hard against Boone's leg and Boone could feel the nervous trembling of the animal's body.

“What's the matter, boy? What is going on?”

Wolf whimpered.

Looking down at him, Boone saw that Wolf's head was tilted upward, staring at the sky, which was no sky at all, but a lowering grayness pressing against the grayness of the land.

“There is nothing up there,” Boone told Wolf. “Not a thing at all.”

Even as he spoke, however, he saw that he was wrong. There was something up there in the grayness, slowly taking form. It was simply a wavering shape that looked for all the world like a badly woven carpet undulating in the grayness.

He watched as the flapping carpet sank closer to the ground, seeing finally that it was not a carpet, but a very open net with two figures crouched upon it.

Then it was on the ground, billowing as it settled down, and a woman leaped off it, running toward him with her arms outstretched.

“Enid!” he yelled, leaping forward to catch her.

They were in one another's arms and she was pressing close against him. Her face was muffled on his chest and she was saying something, but her words were so mumbled that at first he was unable to make them out. Then he did. “… so glad I found you. I did not want to go and leave you, but you yelled at me to go and save the traveler. I was coming back to join you. I intended to come back, but something happened and I couldn't.”

“It's all right,” he told her. “Now you are here and that is all that matters.”

“I saw you,” she said, lifting her face and looking up at him. “I saw you in a place of grayness and you were gray and there was a gray wolf with you.”

“The wolf's still here,” said Boone. “He is a friend of mine.”

She stepped a pace away and looked closely at him. “You are all right?” she asked.

“Never better.”

“What is this place?”

“We're on the Highway of Eternity.”

“What in the world is that?”

“I don't know. I never got it straight in mind.”

“It's a different place. It isn't Earth.”

“I think not,” said Boone, “but I don't know where or what it is.”

“You stepped around another corner?”

“I suppose I did. Lord knows, I tried hard enough.”

The second figure that had been aboard the net had clambered off it and was coming toward them. It had two legs and two arms and seemed, in other ways, to be humanoid, but it was no human. Its face was that of a scrawny horse and the expression that it wore overflowed with misery. Its ears flared out from either side of its elongated head. It had two groups of eyes scattered in blobs upon its forehead. Its neck was thin and gaunt. Its legs were bowed so badly that it spraddled in its walking. Its arms had no elbows, but looked somewhat like rubber hoses. A pair of gills pumped on either side of its throat. Its body was a warty barrel.

“Meet Horseface,” Enid said to Boone. “I don't know what his name is, but that is what I call him and he doesn't seem to mind. Horseface, this is Boone. The one I told you of. The one we came to find.”

“I am pleased that we have found you,” said Horseface.

“And I'm pleased that you're both here,” Boone told him.

The robot was emerging from the cube with a tray balanced on his head.

“Are you hungry?” Boone asked. “I see food is here.”

“I am starved,” said Enid quickly.

As they sat at the table, Boone turned to Horseface. “This is human food. It may not be to your taste.”

“In my wandering,” Horseface assured him, “I have learned to gulp down anything that has nutrients.”

“I brought you nothing,” the robot said to Boone. “You just bolted down a tremendous meal. I brought the wolf another plate of meat. He looks all squeezed with hunger.” The robot set down the plate of cut-up meat for Wolf. Wolf dived into it.

“He's a glutton,” Boone said. “Wolf can eat half a bison without pause for breath.”

“Is he one of those that hung about the camp? One of those who were pestering the poor old bison?” Enid asked.

“None other. After you left—no, before—he cozied up to me. I sat up the first night, and there he was, nose to nose with me. I said nothing of it because I thought I was hallucinating.”

“Tell me about it. What happened to the killer monster and the brave old bull?”

“You have a story of your own that I want to hear.”

“No, you first. I'm too hungry now to talk.”

Wolf had finished eating. Now he walked away and began worrying The Hat.

“What is that thing Wolf has?” asked Enid. “It looks like a silly doll.”

“That's The Hat. I'll tell you of him. He's a big part of my story.”

“So get on with it,” said Enid.

“In just a moment,” said Boone. “You told me that you saw me. In a place of grayness, you said, and the wolf was with me. Would you mind telling me exactly how you saw me, how you knew where I was?”

“Not at all,” she said. “I found a televisor. I'll explain that later on. The televisor shows you what you want to see. You think at it. So I thought about you, and there you were.”

“It may have showed me in the grayness. But it couldn't have told you where to find me.”

“The net did that,” Horseface told him. “Flimsy as it may appear, it is a wondrous mechanism. No, not a mechanism. Nothing nearly so clumsy as a mechanism.”

“Horseface made it,” said Enid. “He made it in his mind and …”

“You helped,” Horseface insisted. “Had it not been for you, there would have been no net. You held the finger so I could tie that final, all-important knot.”

“This sounds interesting and mysterious,” said Boone. “Tell me all of it.”

“Not now,” said Enid. “First we finish eating. Now tell us whatever happened to you since you yelled at me to leave, with the killer monster charging down upon us.”

Boone settled down to the telling, marshaling the facts as concisely as he was able. As he finished, Horseface pushed his plate away and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

Wolf had finally finished his play with The Hat and was using it, all bunched up, as a pillow. He blinked yellow eyes at them.

“The Hat, the way you told it, was alive,” said Enid.

“He's disconnected now,” said Boone. “I don't know how to say it better. He's nothing but a puppet. A ventriloquist's dummy.”

“You have no idea who the ventriloquist might be?”

“Not a hint,” said Boone. “You're wasting time. Tell me what happened to you.”

When she had finished with her telling, he shook his head. “A lot of it makes no sense. There should be some sort of pattern, but there isn't. None that I can see.”

“A pattern there is,” said Horseface. “Likewise a pinch of reason. The three of us have been brought together with the chest I found on the pink-and-purple planet.”

“You stole it,” Enid told him. “You did not find it. You stole it. I know very well you did.”

“Well, I stole it, then,” said Horseface. “Perhaps I only borrowed it. That is a softer term and more acceptable.”

He sprang from his chair and went shambling toward the net.

As they watched him struggling with the chest, Boone asked, “Have you any idea who he might be?”

“He is a thing of many wonders,” Enid said. “I have no idea who he might be or what might be his origin. But he has great ideas and perhaps some knowledge, although not of the human sort.”

“Can he be trusted?”

“As to that, I cannot tell. We'll have to go along with him and watch him.”

“Wolf seems not to dislike him. I'm not sure he likes him, but he shows no dislike of him.”

“You have confidence in Wolf?”

“He could have eaten me, up there on the butte. There was not a thing to stop him. We'd been on short rations and he was hungry. But I don't believe he even thought of eating me.”

Horseface came back to the table, bent over with the weight of the chest upon his back. He thumped it to the ground.

“Now we'll see,” he said.

Enid asked, “By that, you mean you don't know what it is?”

“Oh, I know what it is. But not the shape or form of it, or what the manner of its use.”

He bent and unlatched the locks. The lid of the chest popped open and a mushy dough surged out. The dough ballooned and then collapsed, falling down all around the chest, and still the mushiness kept pouring out of it, as if it had been compressed within the chest and now had been freed and was in a hurry to escape.

The dough kept coming. It overflowed the area where the tables and chairs had been placed and began to envelop the cube. The robot came charging out, fleeing the invasion of the doughlike mass. Boone grabbed Enid by the arm and hustled her down the road. Wolf came scampering to range himself beside them. There was no sign of Horseface. Off to one side, the net had lifted and was moving away, flying low, a few feet off the ground. After flying several hundred yards, it settled down again. The forefront of the dough was closing in upon the trolley, and the car began backing away, gaining speed as it went rumbling down the tracks.

Now, however, the dough was changing character. Instead of continuing as a solid mass, it was becoming porous and somewhat honeycombed. All the time, however, it continued to spread out. It crawled along the ground and billowed in the air. Its size increased enormously. Sparkling points of light showed up in it, as well as large areas of smudged blackness and some misty swirls that were shot with brightness. Some of the points of light grew brighter and others moved away, becoming dimmer as they moved. All through the entire mass there was a sense of movement, of shifting and changing.

“Do you know what it is?” Enid asked.

Boone shook his head.

“Have you seen Horseface? Is he still in there?”

“I suspect he is,” said Boone. “The damn fool let it catch him.”

The chest no longer could be seen. It had been buried by the mass that was changing to a misty filminess and was growing larger, although at a slower pace than it had shown before. It was now a sparkling, shimmering soap bubble.

“Here he comes,” said Enid, her voice tense and low. Looking in the direction of her pointing finger, Boone saw Horseface, faint and tenuous in the bubble, but sturdily stumping his way toward them.

Finally he broke free, as a man might break free of a mass of cobwebs, and spraddled toward them.

“It is the galaxy,” he called to them. “A chart of the galaxy. I had heard of such charts, but never such as this.”

He halted and stared at them, his blobs of many eyes goggling, then turned half-around and started stabbing one rubbery finger toward the bubble.

“See the stars,” he said. “Some shining with a fierce brightness, others so dim they barely can be seen. Note the clouds of dust, the haze of nebulae. And there, the straight white line spearing straight for the heart of the galaxy, is your Highway of Eternity.”

“It's impossible,” said Enid.

“You see it and yet you cry impossible. Can you not see the glory and the immensity of our galaxy?”

“It's a galaxy, all right,” said Boone. “And the white line is there, although I'd never have guessed it to be this highway we are on.”

“It is, I tell you,” Horseface insisted. “In my people's legend there was mention of a highway that ran among the stars. Although the legends, every one of them, fell short of telling why the highway might be there or whence it might lead. But now we follow it. Now we go and see.”

Boone had another long look at the blob and there seemed no doubt that it did represent a spiral galaxy. In shape it was approximately oval, thicker in the center than at the edges, although not so neat and disciplined as the photos he had seen of spiral galaxies. It was, however, clearly a sprawling spiral with misty arms flaring out, thinner and more wispy than the central area. One of the spiral arms came twisting out around the place where the tables had been standing. Rather vaguely, the tables were still visible there.

Horseface moved away from them, sidling closer to the chart, stooping and peering at it, examining it.

Wolf stood close beside Boone and, when Boone looked down, he saw the shivers that ran through the animal's body. No wonder, he told himself. It was spooky enough for anyone. He reached down to pat Wolf on the head. “Easy, boy,” he said. “It will be all right. Everything's all right.” Wolf moved closer to him, and he wondered if what he said had been correct. He could not be sure that it was all right.

He said to Enid, “He talked with you, didn't he, about charts and maps?”

“He talked of a lot of things,” she said. “Some of it nonsensical. At least, it sounded so to me. I can't remember all of it. He talked mostly of genetic maps, of maps implanted in his mind or his consciousness.”

Horseface came lumbering back to them. “Shall we have a look?” he asked.

“You mean into that thing?” Enid asked. “You mean walk right into it?”

“Of a certainty,” said Horseface. “How else will we know? The white line leads someplace. We go to find that place it leads to. It was put there for a purpose.”

“We could get lost in there,” protested Enid. “We could flounder around for days.”

“Not if we follow that white line. We follow in, then we follow back.”

“If we are going in there,” said Enid, “there is something that I want.”

Having said that, she ran swiftly toward the net.

To go and have a look into that maelstrom of mistiness was the last thing Boone wished. On the surface it was simple enough, no more than a representation put together by a technology and an art that had yet been unthought of in his time. There was about the chart a scary alienness that he could not cotton to. What if a man got tangled up inside of it with no way to get out? Follow the white line, Horseface had said, and that would be all right should the white line stay in place. However, what if the white line were no more than bait to lure prey into a trap?