Highway of Eternity (27 page)

Finally they came to the door the scouts had found. It opened into the main building.

“We'll wait here,” said Conrad. “I'll send in a squad to have a look, and then we can go in.”

They waited again and finally one of the squad members appeared at the door and beckoned.

“We go in, but, please, without unseemly haste,” said Conrad.

They went in without unseemly haste. The company of robots spread out, scouting ahead.

The interior was lit by a greenish glow. When Timothy looked for the source of it, he was unable to locate one. The light, he decided, emanated from the walls and the domed ceiling.

At first glance, there was nothing much to see. The one vast room into which they had entered seemed empty. Open doors here and there led into the various additions that had been tacked onto the original main structure. Robots kept ducking into the doors and almost immediately returning, as if to indicate they had found absolutely nothing.

As his eyes became accustomed to the faint green light, Timothy made out a pockmarked section of the floor. The pocks were lopsided circles or scooped-out holes. But there was no furniture of any kind—no desks or chairs, no storage bins, no filing cabinets, no machines.

No machines, of course! He was thinking in terms of humans and this was an alien building, constructed for alien purposes. One would not expect to find desks, chairs, or filing cabinets. But there should be other items—alien items—and there were none of these.

Emma nudged him in the ribs. “Look up there,” she said. He looked where she was pointing and saw the strange objects hanging from the ceiling. There were hundreds of them, all suspended by strings or cords. They fluttered in the slight circulation of air that flowed in the building.

“They look like Infinites,” said Emma.

“If they are,” said Conrad, who was standing just a little distance off, “there is no life in them. I can detect no life. If there were life, even a little, my senses would tell me so. If they are Infinites, they are dead and hung up to dry.”

Since entering the building and walking a short distance into it, they had scarcely moved. Now, from deep inside of it came a humming of excitement.

“The boys have found something,” said Conrad. “Let us go and see.”

The four of them hurried forward, coming upon the robots, who had formed into a circle and were watching something with exclamations of wonder.

“Let us through,” said Conrad, speaking sharply. “What is going on? Make room for us.”

The robots parted, and there, in the center of the circle, Spike and the killer monster were dancing a rigadoon. But whether it was a dance or a combative circling, with each opponent waiting for an opening to attack the other, there was no way to determine. They jigged and skittered, moving very fast, making tentative lunges at one another and then turning quickly aside.

“Stand back, the rest of you,” screamed Horace. “I'll put an end to this!”

He had the rifle halfway to his shoulder when the building rocked so violently that the humans and many of the robots were thrown off their feet. As he fell and skidded on the tilting floor, Timothy heard the slamming of a door.

He fell into something. When he attempted to scramble out, the texture of whatever he had fallen into was so slick that he could find no purchase point to hoist himself out of it.

As suddenly as it had started, the bucking of the building ceased and Timothy realized that what he had fallen into was one of the holes scooped out of the floor. His body fitted the hole neatly and he thought that if a man could curl up in it, the hole would be a restful place to sleep. Perhaps that was what it was; conceivably all these holes were beds for Infinites. Being somewhat smaller than humans', their bodies must have fitted into the holes most trimly.

“Are you stuck in there?” Conrad asked, bending over him.

“No, not stuck. It's just difficult to get out. Lend me a hand, if you will.”

Conrad extended a hand, pulled him free, and set him on his feet.

“I think,” the robot said, “that we may be in trouble. I suspect we have been moved.”

“Moved?”

“The building moved.”

“It threw me off my feet.”

“I think it did more than that.”

Someone had opened the door by which they'd entered, and robots were pouring out of it, fleeing from the building. Horace, who apparently had stepped outside, came back through the door, fighting his way against the rush of fleeing robots. Coming toward Timothy, he waved the rifle in the air and bellowed, “The building was a trap. It sucked us in and then it took us somewhere else.” He asked Conrad, “Have you any idea where we are?”

Conrad shook his head. “Not the least,” he said.

Timothy stood confounded, not sure what was going on, what Horace might be saying. “Somewhere else?” he asked. “There should be no problem. A matter of some miles, perhaps.”

“You fool,” said Horace, harshly, “that is not what I meant. Not miles. Light years, more than likely. This is not our planet. We're not on the Earth. Take a look outside.”

Horace grabbed him by the arm and jerked him roughly, propelling him toward the door.

“Go out and look!”

Timothy staggered toward the door, thrust forward by Horace's broad hand between his shoulder blades.

It was dusk or dawn. The air was crisp and fresh, and the sky looked strange. The land lay in folds; rolling hills led to other, ever-higher rolling hills, fading to a far horizon line. Above the horizon hung a bloated yellow moon.

Perhaps there was something about it that Horace had seen to make him think it was a different planet. To Timothy it appeared a quiet place, with no peculiarities. The air was breathable and the gravity like that of Earth.

One of the robots asked, “Is everyone out? Clear of the monastery?”

“Everyone is out,” replied another robot voice.

“Controls?” Horace was yelling. “Did anyone spot controls?”

“Controls?”

“Yes, controls, something to operate the monastery. To control and guide it.”

“No one did, I'm sure,” Conrad answered. “It's not a vehicle. There would be no controls.”

“It moved from there to here,” cried Horace. “It moved. Otherwise, how are we here?”

“It is beginning to break up,” said another robot. “It is cracking at the seams. Listen to it.”

They listened, and the groaning and the screeching of the structure could be heard—the rending of too-ancient metal.

“It barely held together to get us here,” said Conrad. “This is the end of it. A few years more and it would not have moved at all.”

“Damn it!” Horace bellowed. “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”

“I agree with you,” said Conrad, speaking quietly. “There are times when nothing works out right.”

Timothy turned about and walked free of the crowd packed in front of the collapsing monastery. It was just as well, he thought. If the monastery had proved, in fact, to be an operative traveler, there would be no telling what sort of harebrained scheme Horace would cook up. At least here they were momentarily safe and in an environment that up to now had been congenial. They could breathe and move about, the temperature was not oppressive, and probably there would be food of some sort they could eat.

He was standing on a hillside and there was turf beneath his feet—but what kind of turf? It still was too dark to see, although to his right the sky was becoming lighter. Horace had said they were on another planet, but there was nothing as yet to support his assertion. The hills looked like Earth hills. It still was too dark to see much of anything.

Someone moved up the hill toward him and he saw that it was Emma. He walked down to meet her. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I'm all right,” said Emma, “but I'm frightened. Horace says we are no longer on the Earth. He says there are two moons and Earth does not have two moons, and I don't understand at all how it could have happened.”

“Two moons? There's only one moon. It's hanging in the west. Or what I take to be the west …”

“There's another directly overhead,” said Emma. “It is a smaller moon.”

He craned his neck to look and there the moon was, directly overhead. As Emma had said, it was a small moon, less than half the size of Earth's moon. So that is how Horace knew.

The monastery still was groaning. The eastern sky was brighter than it had been before. In another little while the sun would come popping up.

“Have you seen Spike?” Emma asked.

“Not a sign of him.”

“He's off playing his silly games with that stupid monster.”

“I'm not sure they're games,” said Timothy.

“What could it be but games? Spike always was playing some foolish sort of game.”

“Yes, you're likely right,” he told her.

The gang of robots that had been massed downslope from the monastery were withdrawing, trooping down the hill to a point where the incline leveled out to a valley floor. A sharp command rang out and the robots began swiftly shifting into military conformations.

The dawn light had strengthened and it was possible to see a little better. The surge of rolling hills lost the starkness of the night, their profiles softening. Looking first at them in the dark, he had envisioned them as green hills, but now he saw there was no greenness in them. They were tawny, the color of a lion or a cougar, beneath a violet sky. Why should a sky be violet—not a small part of it, but allover violet?

Horace came clumping up toward them. He stopped just downslope, the rifle slung in the crook of his arm.

“We've been had,” he said, angrily. “We were kidnapped and flung into this place, wherever it may be.”

“But we are not alone,” said Emma. “We have the robots with us.”

“A tribe of fools,” said Horace. “A pack of stumblebums.”

“They'll be some help,” said Timothy. “Conrad strikes me as competent—he can get things done.”

“We have lost everything we had,” cried Emma. “All the stuff that was in the traveler. The blankets! And all the rest of it! The skillets and the pots!”

Horace put an arm around her shoulder. “They brought the blankets and some other stuff,” he said. “We'll manage somehow.”

Sobbing, she clung to him; clumsily he held her, patting her back. Timothy watched uncomfortably. It was the first time in all his life he'd seen Horace display even the slightest affection for his sister.

The east was brightening rapidly, and now it could be seen that a river ran through the valley that lay between the hills and that small groves of trees grew along the river and on the lower slope of some of the hills. They were funny trees, however; they had the appearance of giant ferns or overgrown rushes. On the hills above the valley, the tawny growth that could be grass billowed in the wind. Good pasture, Timothy thought, but there were, so far as he could see, no herds of herbivores nor, in fact, any single grazer.

A metal plate slid from the collapsing monastery and skated for a few feet down the hill. The structure, by this time, had completely fallen in upon itself to become only a heap of flattened metal.

Down in the valley the robots' military formation had broken up. All that remained of it was a phalanx, the hollow square, Timothy thought, that had been classic, from Alexander's Macedonians through the centuries to Napoleon's last stand at Waterloo. The rest of the robots were scattering like scurrying bugs fleeing from the center. Apparently they were setting out as scouts to look the country over.

Three of them were heading purposefully up the hill toward the humans. The three reached them, placing themselves in such a way as to partially surround them. One of them spoke, “Sirs and madam, Conrad has sent us to escort you to the safety of the camp.”

“You call that hollow square a camp?” growled Horace.

“We are out searching for fuel to make a fire. Others will bring in water and what else may be needed.”

“Well, all right,” Horace agreed, grudgingly. “I don't know about you two, but I'm hungry.”

He started down the hill with Emma trotting at his side and Timothy following.

The sun had cleared the horizon by now. Glancing over his shoulder, Timothy noted its similarity to the sun of Earth—perhaps a little larger and a little brighter, although that was hard to judge. In a lot of ways, this planet was much like Earth. Underneath his feet grew fine-textured grass intermixed with a vinelike ground cover.

From the hollow square below them rose a wisp of smoke.

“They found fuel,” said Horace. “Something that will burn. We'll have a hot breakfast after all.”

Inside the protective square, Conrad told them about the fuel. “Wood,” he said, “from the fern trees. Not as good a wood as one might like, but it burns, giving heat and light. A hollow center surrounded by a pith, but a fairly dense pith. Also we found coal.”

He thrust his hands out to show the coal, shattered slabs of shiny black.

“We dug it out of a rock formation in the river bank. Not topnotch coal, more like lignite, but coal. We'll keep looking as we travel and we may find better coal. Between poor wood and poor coal, however, we have fire. Back on Earth most of the coal had long since been mined and burned.”

“Travel?” Emma quavered. “Where will we travel?”

“We have to travel somewhere,” Conrad told her. “We can't stay here. We have to find a place where we can get shelter and food.”

“Food?”

“Yes, of course, madam, food. The little that you have will not last.”

“But it might be poison!”

“We'll test it,” Horace said.

“We have no way to test it.”

“I agree,” said Horace. “No laboratory. No chemicals, no knowledge of chemistry even if we had the chemicals. But there is a way. We'll use ourselves as guinea pigs.”