Special Deliverance (18 page)

F
ROM THE INN TO the tower the land had grown increasingly arid. North from the tower the aridness turned to desert. It was hard traveling. The sand slid underneath the feet, there were dunes to be climbed. The wind blew steadily from the northwest and swirled sand into their faces.

They did no talking. Heads bent against the wind, Jurgens checking compass readings and setting the course, they made dogged progress north. The robot limped ahead and Lansing staggered after him. At first Lansing had gone ahead, the robot limping behind him. But, as Lansing tired, Jurgens, his mechanical body never tiring, had taken the lead.

After several hours the dunes, in large part, disappeared and they came to firmer, although still sandy, footing.

Watching Jurgens as the robot hitched energetically ahead of him, Lansing fell to wondering about him. Jurgens was still a mystery—as, he admitted, all the rest of them were mysteries. He tried to bring into mind what he knew of each of them, and the facts that he could muster were sketchy. Mary was an engineer in a world where the old empires of the eighteenth century still persisted, making for a stable, but noncompassionate, world. Other than that he knew little about her except for one important fact—he loved her. No idea of what kind of job she may have worked in, what kind of engineering she might have practiced, nothing about her family or her former life, less, perhaps, about her than any of the others.

Sandra’s world was a fuzzy place, a culture that he could not understand, although, he told himself, the culture that she mirrored might be no more than a small subculture in which she had existed. The overall culture of her world might be something else entirely and she almost as unaware of it as he. They had not, he thought, been entirely fair to Sandra. The group, as a whole, largely had ignored her. Given a chance, she might have been able to make a significant contribution. If she had been exposed to the machines of the installation, rather than he and Mary, she might have brought back from her experience more than they had brought. Even now, through her close rapport with the music tower, she might supply the key to what they all had sought.

The Parson had been, it seemed to Lansing, an open book, although, once again, he might have been a reflection of a subculture. There was no evidence to suggest that the Parson’s entire world had been as bigoted, as narrow and as vicious as the Parson saw his world. Given time, they might have had a chance to comprehend the Parson, to have found with him some level of understanding, knowing his background, to have found some measure of sympathy with his cross-grained thinking.

The Brigadier, he told himself, had been another matter. Secretive—he had not attempted to explain his world, had refused to tell how he had been pitchforked into the present situation—domineering, with a fierce urge to mastery and command, unwilling to listen to reason other than his own, he had been an enigma. Undoubtedly he had not been a member of a subculture; his world sounded like a place of military anarchy in which hundreds of contending little warlords had battled one another. A game, he had said, not more than a game, but at best a deadly one.

And Jurgens? No subculture there, but a world that had been abandoned for the stars, with the rejects left behind to slide down into an uncomprehending barbarism. Freedom, Jurgens had said—he finally had gained freedom from the implicit responsibility he and the other robots had felt toward the sad remnants of humanity. Freedom? Lansing wondered. He wondered if Jurgens even now realized he had not regained his freedom. He still played shepherd to his humans, even as he played it now, plunging ahead through this desert heading for a Chaos that he or no one else could claim to understand. Ever since they had come to this unlikely world, he had stood by, always ready to serve, always with the needs and hopes of others, of his humans, foremost in his mind.

For some reason, however, he had not put his entire trust in these humans of his. To him, Lansing, he had told at least part of his story—what his world was like, his hobby of making humanoid puppets, fashioned from the old tales of mankind. (Puppets, Lansing wondered, like the puppet Melissa?) To all the others he had not told a thing, had remained stubbornly silent even when Mary had asked him, more or less, point blank.

That was puzzling, Lansing told himself. Why had the robot confided in one of them and no one else? Was there between the two of them a bond that the robot saw and the man could not?

Up ahead of him, Jurgens had halted at the foot of a small dune. When Lansing came up, the robot pointed at an object protruding from the dune. It was a heavy glass or clear plastic bubble, resembling the helmet of a space suit, and inside it, facing them, was a human skull. The grinning row of teeth flashed a wide-spaced smile at them and one of the teeth, Lansing saw, was gold, glinting in the sun. Hunched out of the dune was a rounded piece of metal and farther along the dune, toward the right, another chunk of metal.

Jurgens took a shovel from his pack and began to dig away the sand. Lansing, saying nothing, stood and watched.

“In a minute we will see,” said Jurgens.

In a few minutes they did see.

The metal contraption was vaguely human-shaped. There were three legs, not two, and two arms, a torso. It measured ten or twelve feet in length, and in the upper part of it was a space in which a skeleton that once had been a man had ridden. The bones that belonged to the skeleton were jumbled all about, disarticulated, in that space the man had occupied. The skull was captured in the bubble.

Jurgens, squatting beside it, looked up at Lansing.

“A guess?” he asked.

Lansing shuddered. “Your guess, not mine.”

“All right,” the robot said. “A walking machine.”

“A walking machine?”

“It could be. That’s the first thing that came to mind.”

“But what is a walking machine?”

“Something akin to this was developed by the humans of my planet. Before they went out to the stars. To be used on other planets. In a hostile environment, I suppose. I never saw one. I only heard about them.”

“A machine to move about in on a hostile planet?”

“That’s right. Tied in with the human nervous system. Intricate circuitry that would respond in the same way as a human body would respond. The human wants to walk, so the machine walks. The arms the same.”

“Jurgens, if this is true, we may be looking at one of the original people of this planet. No other human could have been brought here as we were brought, encased in a contraption such as this. We came in the clothes we stood in, of course, but…”

“You can’t rule it out, however,” Jurgens said.

“Perhaps,” said Lansing, “but such a man, if he came from elsewhere, would have had to come from an alternate world that had become hostile to man. So polluted, so dangerous…”

“A world at war,” said Jurgens. “Full of dangerous rays and gases.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be possible. But once he reached this world, he would have needed it no longer. The air here is not polluted.”

“You must realize,” said Jurgens, “that it might have been impossible for him to separate himself from it. He may have been so biologically tied to it that there was no escape from it. He probably would not have minded it too much. He would have been accustomed to it. And such a machine would have some advantages. In a place like this it would.”

“Yes,” said Lansing, “yes, it would.”

“Here he came to grief,” said Jurgens. “Here, in all his arrogance, he came to final grief.”

Lansing looked at the robot. “You think that all humans are arrogant. That it’s a mark of the human race.”

“Not all humans,” Jurgens said. “You can understand if I hold some bitterness. To be left behind…”

“It has festered all these years?”

“Not festered,” Jurgens said.

They were silent for a time, then the robot said, “Not you. You are not arrogant. You never have been. The Parson was, so was the Brigadier. Sandra, in her gentle way…”

“Yes, I know,” said Lansing. “I hope you can forgive them.”

“You and Mary,” Jurgens said. “I’d lay down my life for you and Mary.”

“And yet you would not tell Mary about yourself. You refused to tell her.”

“She would have pitied me,” said Jurgens. “I could not have withstood her pity. You have never pitied me.”

“No, I haven’t,” Lansing said.

“Edward, let us leave the arrogance behind. The two of us now should be upon our way.”

“You lead, I follow,” Lansing said. “We have no time to waste. I didn’t like leaving Mary. Even now I find it hard not to turn back.”

“Three days more and we’ll be back. We’ll find her safe and sound. Four days is all we’ll give ourselves.”

They found no wood along the way. The land was scoured bare of everything. That night they made camp without a fire.

In a hard, enameled way, the night was beautiful. Empty sand and a soaring moon, while out toward the edges of the sky, undimmed by the white brilliance of the moon, the stars shone with a fierce intensity.

Lansing felt the essence of the night soaking into him—the hard, the cruel, the classic beauty of it. Once he heard what he thought was wailing. It came from the south, and it sounded like the wailing of the great lost beast that had wailed above the city and again from the badlands butte. He listened intently, not certain he had heard it, but it did not come again.

“Did you hear anything?” he asked Jurgens.

Jurgens said he hadn’t.

The robot woke Lansing well before dawn. The moon was hanging just above the western horizon and the stars were paling in the east.

“Eat something,” Jurgens told him, “and we’ll be on our way.”

“Nothing now,” said Lansing. “A drink of water’s all. I’ll eat later while we walk.”

The going was fairly easy to start with, but by noon they began to encounter dunes again, small ones at first, growing larger as they went along. They were in a world of shifting yellow sand, with the pale blue of the sky a dome that came down and enclosed the sand. The land ahead of them gradually sloped upward until it seemed they were climbing into the hard blue sky. Ahead of them a narrow strip of sky above the northern horizon assumed a darker, deeper shade of blue, and as they climbed over the treacherous dunes, the sand sliding underneath their feet, so did the darker strip climb higher in the sky, turning from dark blue at its top to black a little lower down.

Vague, muted mumblings came from the north. As they fought to make their way against the dunes, the mumbling grew louder.

Jurgens stopped at the top of one high dune and waited for Lansing to catch up. Lansing pulled up beside him, panting with the climb.

“That sounds like thunder up ahead,” said Jurgens. “A heavy storm may be coming up.”

“The color of the sky looks right,” said Lansing, “but it doesn’t look like a storm cloud. I never saw one with an edge that runs straight across. There usually are big thunderheads boiling up, and I see no thunderheads.”

“I thought awhile ago,” Jurgens said, “that I saw a lightning flash, not the bolt itself, but a nicker, like the reflection of a flash.”

“Heat lightning,” Lansing told him. “A reflection against the clouds of lightning far away.”

“In a while we’ll see what it is,” said Jurgens. “Are you ready to go on? Or shall we rest awhile?”

“Go on. I’ll tell you when I need to rest.”

By midafternoon, the great black cloud had climbed well above the horizon. In places it had tinges of deep purple and was, in all, a frightening phenomenon. It appeared to have no motion, no roiling clouds, no wind-driven banks of scudding vapor, although at times it seemed to Lansing, when he stopped for a moment to watch it, to have an almost imperceptible downward movement, as if a thin film of some substance was running down across the blackness, as a thin sheet of water would run down a window-pane during a summer shower. A sense of terrible violence seemed inherent in the cloud itself, the overwhelming threat of heavy weather, and yet there was no visible violence or even threat of violence except for the massive lightning strokes that at intervals ran across the face of darkness. Now the rumble of thunder was continuous.

“Most unusual,” Jurgens said. “I have never seen the like of it.”

“Chaos?” Lansing asked. Asking it, he remembered the chaos, or the sense of chaos (for he doubted now that he’d really seen it) he had glimpsed when he had stood for a moment on the hill of suns above the universe. And that glimpsed chaos, that glimpsed universal chaos had not been anything like this, although he realized that if he were called upon to describe it, he would be unable to tell a single thing about it.

“Perhaps,” said Jurgens. “I ask you: What is Chaos?”

Lansing did not attempt to answer.

They climbed on, and now the way was steeper than it had been at any time since they had started out. They toiled upward over a series of ever higher dunes, and ahead of them the horizon curved away from them to both left and right, as if they were climbing one continuous dune, the rim of which ran in a semicircle, either side of it impinging on the blackness in the sky.