Highway of Eternity (26 page)

“It's all right,” Timothy comforted her. “Think no further of it.”

“I looked for beer. But there wasn't any.”

“Water will be fine,” said Horace.

They sat down and began to eat. It was not too bad. The cheese was aged and crumbly, melting on the tongue, the ham robust and tasty. The jam was brambleberry and, despite its heavy freight of seeds, was excellent; the bread was crusty and substantial.

Emma nibbled on a slice of cheese and munched a slice of bread slathered with jam. Between two bites, she asked, “What do we do now?”

“For the moment,” Horace told her, “we stay right here. This traveler is luxurious by any standard. It will serve as a shelter and a base of operations.”

“How long?” Emma quavered. “I don't like this place.”

“Until we learn what's going on. That situation out there seems chaotic to me, but in a few more days, it may resolve itself, and then we'll know what we should be doing.”

“For my part,” said Timothy, “I am going back as soon as possible.”

“Going back to where?” asked Emma.

“Back to Hopkins Acre. I never meant to leave. If I'd had time to consider it, I never would have left.”

“But the monster!” Emma cried in horror.

“By the time I get back, the monster will be gone.”

“Why would you want to go back?” asked Emma. “I can't understand. It could be dangerous back there.”

“My books are there,” said Timothy. “And notes that I worked years upon. I still have work to do.”

“Your work is finished,” Horace told him harshly.

“No, it's not. There is still much to do.”

“You were working for a hoped-for future. You thought you could find a way for humans to reverse their course, to profit from the old mistakes and to make a new beginning. Don't you understand you failed?
This
is your future, and in it humanity, or the greater part of it, has been converted to those sparkling points of light you see up in the sky. The Infinites have done their work and left.”

“But some people are still here. We could start over.”

“Not enough of them,” said Horace. “A few one place, a few somewhere else, all of them hiding out. Some in the past, some in the present time. The gene pool is too small for starting over.”

“It's no use talking to him,” Emma said. “He is the stubborn one. Once he gets an idea in his head, he never will let loose. No amount of talking and no kind of argument will convince him otherwise.”

“We'll talk again tomorrow,” Horace said. “After a good night's sleep.”

Timothy got to his feet. “Can I have some blankets? I'll spend the night outdoors. The weather's clement, and it's not too cold. I'll sleep beneath the stars.”

Emma got him blankets. “Don't wander off too far,” she warned him.

“I never wander,” he told her.

Night had fallen. The blackness of the monastery was swallowed by the darkness around it. The robot campfires gleamed all around the hills, and over all was the twinkling of the sky. Staring up, Timothy was able to make out some stars, but only a few of the brighter ones, for the glitter of the points of light served to blot out the dimmer ones.

He found a small, benchlike terrace on the hillside. It was fairly level and would serve well as a bed. He folded one of the blankets as a protection against the ground and pulled the other blanket over him.

He lay flat upon his back, looking at the glittering points in the sky. He was content to watch. Up there, he saw the final phase of the human race. As segments of pure thought, humanity could survive the extinction of both time and space at the end of the universe. The intelligence of man would remain untouched in the emptiness and would persist forever. But persist for what? He tried to conjure up what might come, if anything could, after time and space were gone. He could think of nothing.

He had said to Horace that men had been impatient with evolution, that they had not been content to wait. Had he been wrong in saying that? Had the works that men had created and the dreams they had held been as truly evolutionary as the slow process by which the small pulse of life had come to man himself? Had the intervention of the Infinites done no more than help man along the evolutionary track he had been meant to follow? Had that first faint stir of life in some shallow sea been irrevocably aimed at the glinting sparkles set out overhead? Could the universe all along, in its glory and its wonder, have been only a hothouse in which to grow intelligence?

If that were true, then the human race had been the Chosen People. Yet there would not have been one Chosen People, but many Chosen Peoples. Rather than relying upon a single race, there would have been an attempt to bring about many different intelligences, for one could not be certain of survival. Through foolish, perhaps inevitable mistakes, many would have died upon the way. Others could have taken such unfavorable turns that deliberate elimination of them would have been the only answer. Like many creatures of Earth, which spawned thousands of eggs to insure that a few of their progeny would survive to adulthood, so must evolution have spawned vast numbers of intelligent races to make certain that a few, in the end, would win to full development.

It could not be, Timothy told himself. This was foolishness, a mad thought even to entertain for a moment.

But why had humanity taken such a step at a time when the stars were firmly in its grasp and when mankind seemed about to reap the benefits of the journey along the highway of technology? Why had man faltered? Had there been a racial tiredness, a shying away from an implied responsibility which, in the light of past achievements, he should have been fully capable and anxious to assume? Standing face to face with the unlimited space and opportunity which stretched before him, had man stepped back in fear of failure? Or in fear of something else?

Timothy tried to put a stop to thinking and make his mind a blank, for he realized that all he was doing was building up a troublesome confusion inside himself, and that there were no conclusions to be reached. He shut his eyes and fought to purge the tenseness from his body. Finally the thoughts that had been surging in his skull did slow. He went to sleep, but it was a fitful slumber. Time and time again he came half awake, puzzled by where he was, listening to the shuffle and murmur of the legion still at work upon the forts, disturbed by the pulsing ripples in the sky—and then, recalling where he was, went back to sleep again.

Then someone was shaking him by the shoulder and speaking to him in a querulous voice. “Timothy, wake up! Wake up, Timothy! Spike has disappeared.”

He sat up, throwing the covering blanket to one side, wondering at the urgency of the voice, knowing it was Emma who was shaking him to tell him that Spike had disappeared. He was considerably puzzled. Spike was always disappearing. Back at Hopkins Acre, Spike had been gone a good part of the time. They'd not see him for days on end and had never worried about him. In good time, in his own time, he would show up again, as frisky as ever, never harmed by absence.

The land was silvered by the first light of dawn. The valley floor still lay in half darkness. Smoke dribbled up from the fires built among the forts. Why, Timothy wondered, should robots be so intent on building fires? Certainly not for cooking, for they never ate. Probably this fire building was only another evidence of a robot's ever-present urge to ape man, its creator.

Horace was standing a hundred feet or so away, talking with Conrad and a gaggle of other robots. Horace was shouting gruffly, but that meant nothing. Horace always shouted and his voice was almost always gruff, a studied affectation to show how tough he was.

Emma whined at Timothy, “Spike is causing trouble again. He always causes trouble. I don't know why we put up with him all these years.”

Timothy staggered to his feet. He put up his fists to scrub his eyes of sleep, then walked slowly toward Horace and the robots.

Hearing his approach, Horace turned to face him. “It's Spike again,” he shouted. “He's playing games. He is hiding out somewhere. He thinks we'll come and look for him. Playing hide and seek.”

Conrad spoke more softly than Horace, but his words were clear. “The only place he can be is the monastery. Both he and the monster are gone. They're in the monastery.”

“Well, then,” yelled Horace, “why are you bothering us? Why didn't you go and look in the monastery?”

“Not me,” said the robot commander. “The monastery is not our business. It is human business. If you go in, we'll go with you, but we won't go alone.”

Timothy came up and joined the group. “You are sure,” he asked Conrad, “that they didn't sneak through your lines?”

“It would have been impossible. We were on watch all night. We had the two of them in sight all the time; then suddenly they were gone.”

“What were they doing all the time you were watching them?”

“They were playing games, it seemed. They were chasing one another, first one and then the other. They were taking turns at it.”

“Spike is hell on tag,” said Horace. “He likes nothing better. I'm not going to waste any time on him. After a while he'll get tired of it and come dragging back.”

“He's played us fools for years,” said Emma, joining them. “We'd be fools again if we went looking for him.”

Timothy said, “This situation is slightly different. I think we should have a go at it. This time he may be in trouble.”

“No!” howled Horace. “Not a foot! I'll not take a blessed step.”

“Maybe Timothy is right,” said Emma faintly, not sure she should be saying it. “After all, he's family. We let him stay with us.”

“If you don't want to go,” Timothy told Horace, “then I'll go alone. The two of you stay here. Give me the rifle.”

Horace took a long step backward. “I won't give it to you. You don't know how to handle it. You'll end up shooting off your foot.”

“It's my rifle, Horace.”

“Yes, you own it. Which doesn't mean you know how to use it.”

“Then I'll go without it.”

“No, you won't,” yelled Horace. “I won't let you go alone. There's no telling what sort of scrape you'll get into and no one there to get you out of it.”

“If you're going with him,” Emma told Horace, “then I'm going with you. I won't be left alone in this howling wilderness.”

“I'm obliged to you,” said Timothy, speaking to Horace. “I'll be glad to have you with me.”

“I'll organize a company,” said Conrad, “to furnish you support.”

“There's no need,” said Horace, stiffly.

“I insist,” Conrad told him. “We provide protection here. We'll continue to provide it.”

Conrad turned about and began snapping orders. Robots wheeled into line, standing stiffly at attention, each shouldering the tool it had been carrying—a shovel here, a crowbar there, pickaxes, a heavy iron maul, a posthole digger …

“Since you are determined to make fools out of all of us,” Horace growled at Timothy, “let's get it over with.”

Timothy started down the slope, with Horace, rifle carried slantwise across his body, to one side and Emma stumbling along behind. In the rear came the clanking legion with sergeants or their equivalents calling out the marching cadence.

Timothy went down the slope, fighting the steepness of it, driving in his heels to maintain his balance. Small stones and pebbles dislodged by the marching legionnaires went skittering past him, bouncing and rolling and raising little spatters of dust.

Where was Henry? he wondered. If Henry were only here, he could infiltrate the monastery and spy out the place. Then, if it were necessary that the others of them should enter it, they wouldn't be going in blind.

They reached the bottom of the hill, and the company of robots split into two files, to march on either side of them toward the monastery.

Conrad, who had been striding on ahead, snapped out a command, and the two files of robots halted. Conrad came striding back to the humans. “You stay here,” he said. “I'll send out scouts.”

He bellowed another order and four robots went running ahead. “There must be a door, maybe more than one door,” Conrad said. “There has to be a way to get into it.”

“This is foolishness,” protested Horace. “There isn't any danger.”

“Not that one can see,” Conrad told him, “but there always is a chance of danger in any new situation. There could even be a planned and studied attempt to make it appear there is no danger. In any case, it never hurts to be just a trifle cautious.”

Timothy turned around to look over his shoulder. There were other robots on their way to join them. They came tumbling out of the defense lines they had built upon the hill, running madly. Others were streaming across the plain, hurrying to catch up with Conrad's squad.

“The rest of them are coming to join us,” he said to Horace. “The entire gang of them.”

Horace turned around to look. He grunted his disgust with robots.

They waited. A waiting silence settled over them. There was no sound of wind, no chirring of insects. Finally one of the scouts came running around an irregular corner of the building. He pulled up in front of Conrad and said, “Sir, we have found an entrance. An open door. There were other doors and they were locked; we did not try to force them. We thought it would be wiser not to. Then we found the open door.”

“Did you enter?”

“Again, we thought it better not to. The others are waiting for the full company to arrive.”

“Well, thank you, Toby,” Conrad said. “You acted wisely.” He said to Horace, “Are you ready to proceed?”

“We've been ready all the time,” said Horace. “It was not our decision to stand here and dawdle.”

The column lurched into motion and the three humans marched inside their lines, with the reporting scout hurrying on ahead. They came to the monastery and skirted its outer rim. Close up, it was a dowdy building. The outer walls appeared to be constructed of some metal that was beginning to rust. The walls had no windows, but at intervals there were doors and all of them were closed.