The Beyonders (16 page)

XVI

Gander Eye picked his way down the path, past the point where once Struve had appeared to tell him how to run his business. He took his trigger finger away from the rifle. For the first time in a long, deadly while, he hoped he wouldn't need that rifle.

The Kimbers had changed their minds in a swift hurry, or at least Captain Kimber had changed his and told them to change theirs. Maybe that was how folks acted when they turned away from their gods. Love and worship turned into hate, into dealing death to what hadn't been gods after all. It must have seemed like sudden finish of all the good hopes for the Beyonders, getting shot down at long range by the Kimbers, who'd worshipped them. Gander Eye wondered if he ought to feel sorry for the Beyonders, just trying to find things out here, maybe make a life here, and finding death here.

He descended to the grassy hollow, and there in the rich grass lay a Beyonder, close to the pool. He bent down to study this one, too. Its metal casing was beginning to flake, like iron left out to rust all summer and all winter. He looked through the window at where it didn't have a face, just a lardy area tufted with fly-leg bristles. He wondered what you might find if you had some sort of a can opener and ripped that armor open and had a good look. He wondered how much science it would take to figure on a Beyonder s body, if you could call it a body, if any scientist from any big town would have any basis to figure on something from not even in our space, our universe.

The odor smote his nostrils and made him sick. How could you tell someone how a Beyonder smelled when the air was let in on him? A Beyonder who, if you decided to help him, would give you lumps of gold, make your crops grow, maybe even try to treat you right from whatever angle a Beyonder figured right and wrong? Gander Eye walked away from the silent shape, then paced around the pool and toward that doorway where the blue shimmer hung like a curtain.

The blue danced wildly. He stopped at a distance and watched, his forefinger again resting lightly on the trigger of the rifle.

Then, almost as he stopped, all the bright air around and above him was rent and shaken with awful sound.

He reeled and stumbled, as if on a floor that was giving way. That sound had a metallic jangle to it, and an explosive roar that both pounded and wailed. The blueness there inside the cave suddenly danced with what must be great, falling chunks of rock, like the chunks that had come dancing down the Kimber road.

He planted his feet and looked. Another smash of noise, louder this time, pealing like a burst of storm among the heights. The outer lips of the craterlike hole went crumbling inward in a cascade of abrupt ruin. Boulders danced and rolled. The whole slope seemed to fall in upon itself, like the collapsed face of a toothless old man.

The Beyonders had fled back out of this world that Gander Eye knew, for which Gander Eye and the Kimbers had fought, and they were closing the doorway behind them.

Silence fell everywhere after the deafening roar, silence so deep that Gander Eye, waiting, heard it like sound. He looked at where the cavern had been. The mountain side had closed itself up; it yawned no more.

After a moment, Gander Eye turned around and walked away, almost at a shuffle, not sure of the direction, even. He looked this way and that for the trail that led up to the road and sought it. He realized that his feet had halfway dried since they had waded in Bull Creek when he moved on Crispin's cabin to kill the men who had killed Crispin.

He plodded along as if dead tired, half carrying his rifle by the balance, half dragging it. After a time he lifted it and clicked on the safety. For a moment he wondered if he shouldn't throw it away; but it was too good a rifle for that, it had served him too well. He kept it in his broad hand.

"Gander Eye!"

Maybe he'd gone crazy all of a sudden, hearing the last voice he expected to hear. It sounded just like Slowly's voice. He mounted up to the Kimber road. He saw her, hurrying toward him. Behind her trotted Doc Hannum.

"However you come to be here?" Gander Eye challenged her in utter amazement. "That there road is all run full of rocks them Beyonder things flung down, enough rocks to build a college. No car could make it."

"There's another road up here," she said.

"What you a-talking about? I never heard tell of but the one road up Dogged Mountain from Sky Notch."

"There's another, there's always been another," Slowly said. "The Kimbers never showed it to outside folks." Her frill lips fought to steady themselves. "You were up here; I knew you'd come up here. I showed Doc the way to drive up, and he brought me along. "

"I never had any hint of that other road myself," Doc put in. "It's certainly no better than that devil's prank of a road we knew before it was blocked. It treats a car like an orphan groundhog. But I got us up here, and I hope I can get us back. If we're ever going back."

"Oh, we're a-going back all right," Gander Eye assured him, in a voice of the utmost weariness.

Doc looked at him sidelong. "If it isn't classified information, what was that almighty noise we heard?" he asked.

"Them things went on back out of here," said Gander Eye. He pointed. "Went back into their hole down yonder and more or less pulled the hole in after them."

Doc squinted to look.

"Is that where they were trying to enter?" he asked. "From what I can see at this distance, it looks like nothing but a big mess of broken rock."

"They blew it up, some way or other," said Gander Eye. "Fixed it so that's no more way betwixt there and here. Whatever it was they aimed to do with us, they don't seem like as if they want to do it no more."

Slowly, too, gazed. She shaded her beautiful eyes with her hand.

"It was all a true fact, what Jim Crispin told about," she said in a sort of awed whisper. "I didn't truly know the half of what he was a-talking about, not the tenth of it. But whatever happened won't come back to happen again."

"Well, not here, at least," agreed Doc solemnly. "If it tries to happen somewhere else later on, maybe it can be headed off there, too. I begin to gather that this little fight that was put up here was too much for them—here in this world that was so foreign to them. It must have been a ghastly experience to them."

"Yes, sir," said Gander Eye. "But, Slowly, I want you to tell me just one thing."

"What?" Her eyes came around and met his and waited.

"You talked like as if you come up here because I was up here."

She drew in her breath. "That's right. I had to come."

"What for?"

"Well—it was what Jim Crispin said."

"Sure enough," said Gander Eye impatiently. "I got it in mind he explained you something about all this here business, and what you told of it to Captain Kimber changed their minds. You took it for the truth, and it was."

"Jim Crispin was more or less a truth-teller," offered Doc. "Even when he was telling only a part of it."

Slowly still watched Gander Eye, with blue in the green of her gaze.

"He said you loved me, Gander Eye." She was struggling to get each word said. "He said you loved me, and he said I loved you."

Gander Eye lowered the butt of his rifle to the ground and leaned heavily on the muzzle. He listened to a ringing in his ears.

"What you got to say about that?" Slowly asked him.

He held his teeth tight together to steady his voice. "All I can say is," he managed, "my half of what he done said is the natural truth."

Doc Hannum stood and looked from one of them to the other. He did not smile, but his spectacles twinkled.

"If you've been in love with Slowly, why in heaven's name didn't you tell her?" he inquired, as though he were discussing a symptom and its logical treatment. "Long and long ago, why didn't you tell her?"

"I was scared to," Gander Eye blurted out.

"You?" Doc grated. "You've never feared a living thing."

"I was scared to tell Slowly," said Gander Eye. "Not in all my time since I first seen her did I look at her without being scared to say a mumbling word."

Slowly drew another quivering breath.

"My half is the truth, too," she said. "We'll have to find us some time to talk all this out, Gander Eye."

"Yessum," he agreed solemnly, relishfully.

Doc cleared his throat with a mighty rasp.

"In any other situation, I'd be glad to stand and listen to you two and what you're finally beginning to realize for yourselves," he lectured them. "It's fascinating and thrilling. But we've got another fascinating business on our hands. I mean, what's happened here. All the scientific implications, all the violence, all the decisive results." He gestured, full-armed. "Let's get to my car and go back. We've got to tell people. Tell the world about it. Spread the news."

Gander Eye wheeled toward him.

"Who the hell will believe us?" he cried.