Special Deliverance (16 page)

E
ARLY IN THE AFTERNOON they reached the summit of the hills that ringed in the city and entered a grotesque world of erosion carving. The trail plunged downward through a colorful nightmare of earthen turrets, castles, battlements, towers and other fantastic shapes, tinted by the unending range of hues exhibited by the many geological layers of the different earths.

The going was slow; they did not try to hurry. The trail no longer could claim the distinction of being called a road. At times they would come out into the flatness of small floodplains, but then they would leave them to drop again into the weird, color-riotous madness of the tortured terrain.

Well before night closed in, they chose a camping place in the angle of a soaring clay cliff. Wood they found in tangled heaps of drift, deposited at some time long ago when great trees had come riding on the crests of the raging torrents that had carved the land. Wood, but no water. The day had not been excessively hot, however, and their canteens were almost full.

Vegetation grew sparse. Except for occasional patches of stout grasses and a few clumps of small conifers, hugging close against the ground, the sculptured earth was bare.

After supper they sat and watched the glory of the colors fade. When night fell, the stars came out bright and hard. Searching the skies, Lansing spotted familiar constellations. There could be no doubt, he told himself, that this place was Earth, but not the old familiar Earth that he had known. It was not another planet in another solar system; it was one of the alternate Earths that Andy had talked about, never for a moment suspecting there could be such other Earths.

The time factor bothered Lansing. With the constellations so little changed, if changed at all, the time differential between this Earth and the one that he had known must be no greater than a few tens of thousands of years at most. And yet, on this Earth, a great civilization had risen to heights as great or greater than had been the case on his Earth—had risen, developed, flourished and died. Could it be, he asked himself, that here Man had gotten an earlier start? Could the race of man here have developed some millions of years earlier? Was it possible, he wondered, that the crisis point between the two had been the dying out of mankind on his Earth, necessitating a starting over? That idea bothered him. If man died out on one Earth, what would be the chance of starting over again, of being given a second chance? Reason told him that the chance would be well nigh impossible.

“Edward,” Mary called, “you’ve scarcely said a word. What is going on?”

He shook his head. “A few random thoughts. Nothing of any great importance.”

“I’ll never feel quite right,” said Sandra, “for having left so soon. We really didn’t give the Brigadier much chance of getting back.”

“Why didn’t you speak up?” asked Mary. “You never said a word. We would have listened to you.”

“I was as anxious as the rest of you to get away. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending another day in the city.”

“For my part,” said Jurgens, “I think we wasted time waiting for him. He’s gone and gone for good.”

“What will happen to us now?” asked Sandra.

“Because the Parson and the Brigadier are gone?” asked Jurgens.

“Not that the two of them are gone, not those two alone. But there were six of us and now there are four. When will there be only three of us, or two?”

“We’ll have a better chance out here than we had in the city,” Mary said. “The city was a killer. We lost our people in the city.”

“We’ll be all right,” said Jurgens. “We’ll feel our way along. We’ll keep close watch and we won’t take chances.”

“But we don’t know where we’re going,” Sandra wailed.

“We never have,” said Jurgens. “Not since we were first thrown into this world have we known where we were going. Maybe the next bend down the trail will tell us. Maybe the day after tomorrow or the day after that.”

That night the Sniffler came back again. It sniffed all around the camp but did not intrude. They sat and listened to it. There was something comforting about its presence, as if an old friend had come back, as if a straying dog had come home again. There was no terror in the sniffling. The Sniffler had not entered the city with them; perhaps it liked the city no more than they had. But now that they were on the trail again, it had returned to join them.

Well before dark on the second day, they came on a tumbled ruin that sat on a small terrace above the trail.

“A place to spend the night,” said Jurgens.

They climbed the terrace and came to a rubble of fallen stones, soft sandstone blocks that at one time had formed a low wall around the small, ruined building that stood in the center of the rectangle formed by the scattered wall.

“Sandstone,” said Lansing. “Where could it have come from?”

“Over there,” said Jurgens, pointing to a low clay cliff that formed a backdrop for the place. “A strata of sandstone in the clay. There are signs, old signs, of quarrying.”

“Strange,” said Lansing.

“Not so strange,” Jurgens told him. “Here and there, along the way, there have been sandstone outcrops.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“You have to look sharp to see them. They are of the same color as the clay. I saw the first one by accident and then kept looking for them.”

The area within the shattered walls might have covered half an acre, scarcely more. The ruin standing in its center at one time had been a one-room structure. The roof had fallen in, part of the walls had tumbled down. Some broken crockery was scattered about on what once had been a well-trodden earthen floor, and in one corner of it Jurgens found a tarnished, battered metal pot.

“A stopping place for travelers,” said Sandra. “A caravansary.”

“Or a fort,” said Jurgens.

“A fort against what?” asked Lansing. “There is nothing here to fort up against.”

“At one time there might have been,” the robot said.

Outside the ruined building they found evidence of an old campfire, a bed of ash and smoke-blackened stones placed at intervals around it, perhaps to serve as cooking hearths. Beside the fire site was piled some driftwood.

“The last party through,” said Jurgens, “gathered more than was needed. It should last us out the night.”

“How about water?” Lansing asked.

“I think we have enough,” said Mary. “We’ll have to find some tomorrow.”

Lansing walked out to the ruined wall and stood, looking out over the monstrously sculptured terrain. Badlands, he thought, that was the word he had been searching for during the last two days and that had eluded him till now. Out in the western area of the two Dakotas were stretches of such lands as these that the first explorers—French, perhaps, although he could not remember with any certainty—had called badlands, bad lands to travel through. Here, unknown years ago great freshets of water, probably originating in torrential rains, had chewed up the land, gouging it out, washing it away, with a few areas of more resistant material withstanding the raging waters to finally turn into the twisted shapes that now remained.

Here, once, in days long gone, this trail they followed might have been an artery of trade. If Sandra had been right, if this ruin once had been a caravansary, then it had been a stopping place for caravans that carried precious freight, perhaps from the city, perhaps to the city. But if to the city, where had been the origin of the caravans? Where lay the other terminus of the route?

Mary came up from behind and stood beside him. “Other nonimportant thoughts?”

“Only trying to look back into the past. If we could see the past, what this place was like some thousands of years ago, we might know somewhat better what is happening now. Sandra suggested that this once had been a stopping place for travelers.”

“It is a stopping place for us.”

“But before us? I just now was speculating that caravans could have passed this way, perhaps many centuries ago. To them it would have been a known land. To us it is unknown.”

“We’ll be all right,” she reassured him.

“We’re moving deeper into the unknown. We have no idea what’s ahead. Someday our food will come to an end. What do we do then?”

“We still have the food the Parson and the Brigadier were carrying. It’ll be a long time before we’ll run out of food. Water is our big concern right now. We must find water tomorrow.”

“Somewhere this desolate land must end,” he said. “We’ll find water when it does. Let’s go back to the fire.”

The moon came up early, a full moon or almost full, flooding the badlands with its unearthly, ghostly light. On the other side of the trail lay a mighty butte, the side presented to them still in darkness, but its shape sharply outlined by the rising moon.

Sitting close beside the fire, Sandra shivered. “It’s a fairyland,” she said, “but a vicious fairyland. It never occurred to me that a fairyland could have a vicious aspect.”

“Your viewpoint,” Lansing said, “is colored by the world you lived in.”

Sandra flared at him. “There is nothing wrong with the world I lived in. It was a beautiful world, filled with beautiful things and beautiful people.”

“That’s what I meant. You have no comparison.”

His words were blotted out by a sudden wail that seemed to come from almost on top of them.

Sandra leaped to her feet and screamed. Mary took a quick step forward, seized her by the shoulders and shook her.

“Shut up!” Mary yelled at her. “Keep quiet!”

“It followed us!” Sandra shrieked. “It is trailing us!”

“Up there,” said Jurgens, pointing toward the butte. The wail had died and for a moment there was silence.

“Up on the rim,” said Jurgens, speaking quietly.

And there it was, the thing that wailed, a monstrous creature outlined against the rising moon, a black cutout against the big face of the moon.

It was wolflike, but much too large to be a wolf, heavier, more full-bodied than a wolf and yet it held the sense of strength and agility that was the mark of wolf. It was a great shaggy beast, unkempt, as if it might have fallen on hard times, foraging desperately for the little food it found, skulking to locate a place to sleep and raked by an agony that drove it to lament against the world.

It flung back its head, lifting its muzzle, and cried again. Not a wail this time, but a sobbing ululation that wavered across the land and quivered among the stars.

Lansing felt a chill run through him and he struggled to remain erect, for his knees were buckling. Sandra was crouched upon the ground, her head shielded by her arms. Mary was bending over her. Lansing felt an arm thrown around his shoulders. Turning his head, he saw that Jurgens was beside him.

“I’m all right,” said Lansing.

“Of course you are,” said Jurgens.

The Waller howled and whimpered, bawled and brayed its grief. It went on forever, or seemed to go on forever, and then, as suddenly as it had come, was gone. The moon, swimming up the east, showed only the smooth, humped line of the looming butte.

That night, after the three humans were in their sleeping bags and Jurgens stood on watch, the Sniffler came out of the night and sniffed all about the firelit circle of the camp. Lying in their bags, they listened to the sniffling and were undismayed. After the Wailer on the butte top, he was a welcome friend come visiting.

The next afternoon they came out of the badlands into a narrow but widening green valley and found water in a stream that ran through it. As they traveled along the stream, the valley widened further and the flanking badlands’ skyline drew off and off until it was only a white smudge on the left and right horizons, finally to fade out entirely.

Just before sunset they came upon another stream, a somewhat larger one, flowing from the west, and on the point of land between the two streams, where they flowed together, the travelers came upon an inn.

W
HEN THEY PUSHED THE door open, they found themselves in a large common room, with a fireplace at one end. Before the fireplace was a large table ringed with chairs. With their backs toward the new arrivals, two people sat in chairs, facing the fire. A dumpy little woman with a moonlike face hurried from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a checkered apron tied about her middle.

“So you are already here,” she gasped. “You catch me by surprise. You arrive sooner than I thought.”

She halted in front of them, still wiping her hands, and squinted at them out of her moon face. She put up a hand to brush a straggling lock of hair out of her face.

“My, my,” she said, in mild exclamation, “there are four of you! You lost no more than two in passing through the city. The people sitting by the fire lost four, and there are bands that are all gobbled up.”

Some small sound made Lansing glance toward the other end of the room, the shadowed area away from the fire, and there he saw the card players crouched around a table, intent upon their game and paying no attention to the arrival of the party. The noise he had heard, he realized, had been the soft slapping-down of cards upon the tabletop.

He nodded toward the players.

“When did they show up?” he asked.

“They came last night,” said the woman. “They went straight to the table and sat down. They’ve been playing ever since.”

The two who had been sitting before the fire had gotten to their feet and were advancing across the room. One of them was a woman, blond, tall and willowy; the other was a man who reminded Lansing of a bond salesman who at one time had tried to sell him a portfolio that was, at best, highly questionable.

The woman held out her hand to Mary. “My name is Melissa. I am not a human, although I may look like one. I’m a puppet.”

She made no further explanation, but shook hands all around.

“I am Jorgenson,” said the man, “and extremely glad to see you. The two of us, I must confess, are frightened. We’ve been cowering here for days, unable to convince ourselves that we should continue on this senseless journey to which we, unwillingly and unwittingly, seem to have been committed.”

“I can appreciate how you might feel that way,” said Lansing. “All of us, I think it safe to say, have felt similar touches.”

“Let’s go back to the fire,” said Jorgenson. “We have a bottle on which we have not been able to make appreciable progress. You, perhaps, can help us.”

“Most willingly,” said Lansing. “Thanks for the invitation.”

The aproned woman, who apparently was the proprietor of the inn, had disappeared. The card players paid them no attention.

Settled in chairs before the fire and with the drinks all poured, Jorgenson said, “And now, perhaps, we should become better acquainted with one another and exchange experiences and thoughts. So far as I am concerned, I am a time traveler. When I first came to this place I thought I was just traveling through—which, if that had been the case, would have seen me long gone from here. It turns out, however, that this is not the case. Why it’s not, I do not know. I’m not at all sure what happened; this is the first instance that I have been stuck in time.”

Lansing tasted the drink and it was passing good; he took another swallow.

“As I told you,” Melissa said, “I am a puppet. I do not have it quite straight in mind what a puppet is, although I am made to understand it is an imitation human. Why there should be need of imitation humans, I am not exactly sure. There are only a few of us or, rather, there were only a few of us, since I am no longer there—a few of us residing in what I suppose might be called the ultimate city, a place of great comfort and convenience, in which we live what could be described as good lives except that our lives seem to have no purpose, which at times can be mildly depressing. There are, as I have said, only a few of us and it may well be that all of us are puppets, although I have always been afraid to ask—fearing, you see, that I might be the only puppet among the lot of them, and if that should turn out to be true, it would be just dreadful.”

“For years,” said Jorgenson, “I have been seeking for a certain time and place. Once, long ago, I was there for a while and then, without meaning to, I slipped out of it. I’ve sought it ever since and no matter how hard I try, always seem to miss it. I have wondered if, for some reason, it may be closed to me. And if that should be true, I have wondered why.”

“If you had it well in mind,” said Mary, “that might help you find it. I mean, if you knew the time and place—”

“Oh, I know the time and place fairly well. It is in the 1920s, the so-called Roaring Twenties, although at the time I was there, there was no roaring in them. There was peace and quiet, the peace and quiet of a never-ending summer’s day. The world as yet had not arrived at the cynical sophistication that came upon us some decades later on. I think, as a matter of fact, I have it pegged quite well. I think it was 1926 and the month was August. The place was a sleepy seaside town on the eastern coast. Massachusetts, maybe, more likely Delaware or Maryland.”

“None of the names you speak mean anything to me,” Melissa complained. “You’ve told me North America, but I know no North America. All I know was the place where we lived. It was magnificently built and we had little, scurrying mechanical servitors who kept it clean and neat and attended to our needs. But there were no place names, not even a name for where we lived. There was no need for us to know if it had a name and there was nowhere else that we wished to go, so there were no place names, either, for the other places if, in fact, there were other places.”

“There were six of us,” said Jorgenson, “when we came to this place.”

“There were six of us as well,” said Mary. “I wonder if such groups as ours always are made up of six.”

“I would not know,” said Jorgenson. “Our group and your group are the only ones I know of.”

“There was an idiot,” said Melissa, “not a drooling idiot, but a most engaging one. He was full of fun. He was always clowning and making the most outrageous puns. And there was the Mississippi gambler. I have never asked before because I didn’t want to display my ignorance. But I’ll ask now. Can anyone tell me what a Mississippi is?”

“It is a river,” Lansing told her.

“The landlady said that you lost the other four in the city,” Mary said. “Can you tell us how you lost them?”

“They did not come back,” Melissa said. “All of us went out one day, looking for something. What we were looking for, we had no idea. Well before night, the two of us came back to where we were camping in the plaza. We built up the fire and cooked a meal and waited for the others. We waited through the night and they did not return. Then, shaking in our fear, we went out and hunted for them. We sought them for five days and there was no trace of them. And every night a giant beast came out on the hills above the city and cried out against its fate.”

“So you found the trail west of the city and finally reached this inn,” said Sandra.

“That is what we did,” said Jorgenson. “Since then we have been covering here, afraid to travel further.”

“The landlady,” said Melissa, “has been hinting that it is time for us to go. She knows we have no money. Two of our group had money, but with them, the money’s gone.”

“We have some money,” Lansing said. “We will pay your bill and you can travel on with us.”

“You will travel on?” she asked.

“Of course we will,” said Jurgens. “What else is there to do?”

“But it’s all so senseless!” cried Jorgenson. “If we only knew what we’re here for, what we’re supposed to do. Have you any information?”

“None at all,” said Mary.

“We’re rats running in a maze,” said Lansing. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“When I was home,” Melissa said, “before I was transported here, we had gaming tables. We’d play the games for hours, even for days. There were no rules to the games, the rules developed as we went along. Even when the rules were established, or we thought they had been, then they’d change again…”

“Did anyone ever win?” asked Mary.

“I can’t seem to remember. I don’t think we ever did. Not a one of us. But we didn’t mind, of course. It was just a game.”

“This game is real,” Jorgenson said, glumly. “We all have bet our lives.”

“There are certain skeptics,” said Lansing, “who will tell you there is no abiding principle in the universe. Just before I left my world, I talked with a man—a friend of mine, a loud-mouthed friend of mine—who suggested that the universe might operate at random, or worse. This I can’t believe. There must be an element of reason in it. There must be cause and effect. There must be purpose, although that does not mean we are capable of grasping the purpose. Even if some other, more intelligent form of life should set us down and explain it to us in considerable detail, we still might not understand it.”

“Which doesn’t hold out too much hope for us,” said Jorgenson.

“No, I suppose it doesn’t. Although it could mean that there is some hope. We’re not entirely sunk.”

“There are mysteries,” said Jurgens, “and I speak in the best sense of the word—not the shoddy, sensational connotation of it—that can be unraveled if one puts his mind to it.”

“We’ve asked the landlady what lies ahead,” Melissa said, “and she can tell us almost nothing.”

“Exactly like that great lout at the first inn,” said Jorgenson. “He could tell us only of the cube and city.”

“The landlady,” said Melissa, “says that some distance ahead, we’ll come to a singing tower. And that is all. Except that she warns us we should only travel west, not north. To the north, she says, lies Chaos. Chaos, with a capital.”

“She knows not what Chaos is,” said Jorgenson. “She only knows the word. She shivers when she says it.”

“So then we’ll travel north,” said Jurgens. “I tend to get suspicious when someone warns you off from a certain place. I get the feeling that something may be found there we’re not supposed to find.”

Lansing finished his drink and set the mug upon the table. He got slowly to his feet and walked across the room until he stood beside the table where the four were play-big cards.

He stood for a long moment, with none of them paying him the slightest heed, as if they had not noticed his approach. Then one of them raised his head and turned it, looking at him.

Lansing stepped back a pace, horrified at what he saw. The eyes were dark holes in the skull, out of which peered two black obsidian pebbles. The nose was not a nose, but two breathing slots, slashed into the area between the eyes and mouth. The mouth was another slash, without benefit of lips. There was no chin; the face sloped down to the neck in a slanting line.

Lansing turned about and left. As he approached the table before the fire, he heard Sandra saying, with a strange lilt in her voice, “I cannot wait until we reach the singing tower!”