Highway of Eternity (28 page)

“This is one you'll have to do yourselves,” said Conrad. “Robots cannot help you.”

“We'll take a tiny bite,” said Horace. “We'll test the taste. If it tastes bad, burns the tongue, or puckers up the mouth, we'll spit it out. If it tastes good, we'll swallow a tiny piece of it, then we'll wait and see.”

One of the robots cried out a warning, gesturing up the hill. A vehicle—a flier—of gleaming metal was streaking down the hill toward them. It flew only a few feet above the ground. It swooped upon them and passed over them, then turned sharply to bank against the hills beyond the river. It swung around and followed the slope of the opposite hills to cross the river at a point somewhat upstream from them, then came about to come skimming down the stream, no more than ten feet above the ground, passing almost directly above the hollow square of robots. It continued down the river for some distance, then lazily climbed up the range of hills, flying far above them until it finally disappeared.

“We're being watched,” said Conrad. “They came to look us over.”

“What can we do about it?” Horace asked. “What should we do to protect ourselves?”

“We'll keep close watch,” said Conrad. “We'll look out for them.”

Late in the afternoon, the scouts who had gone down the river returned to report that the stream finally flowed into an extensive swamp. During the night, the upriver scouts came back. The hills, they said, gave way some miles ahead to a high plateau, with mountains thrusting up in the distance.

“That's what we needed to know,” said Conrad. “We go upriver.”

In the morning they started out. As the hills closed in on the stream, the going got harder. Thick veins of coal lay in the sheer rock faces along the stream. The trees began to change. Those that looked like giant ferns and rushes grew fewer. Honest, earth-type trees took over. The hills persisted. They lay in ranges, separated by narrow valleys, each range rising higher. Conrad did not push the march. He and Horace bickered from time to time, but never went beyond the bickering.

They came on food that was fit for human consumption—a couple of kinds of tubers, a yellow fruit that was fairly common, beans that grew in stubby pods on a crawling ground vine. The testing of each food was done in a gingerly fashion. Some possibilities were rejected out of hand—they smelled or tasted bad. Horace picked up a touch of gastritis from berries that he sampled; that was the only nasty episode. The robots brought in small mammals; all but one proved good eating. The fish they took from the streams they came upon smelled so foul that they did not try them.

The robots made hunting weapons, but the bows were awkward and the arrows often failed to fly true. They essayed flint-napping, but from the lack of proper stone and technique, most of the projectile points turned out lopsided. Yet the ranging robots did manage to bring in some game.

The good weather held. No clouds showed in the violet sky. The days were hot, the nights only slightly cooler.

Finally the hills ended, and they came out on a great, flat, dry plateau sprinkled with buttes, with the white-blue of distant mountains poking above the horizon. Carrying water in casks laboriously fashioned out of native wood, the band started across the level plain. Tempers were beginning to run short.

There had been no further sighting of the ship that had buzzed them when they first arrived, although Timothy had the eerie feeling that they were being watched.

Several times they caught a momentary sight of Spike and the killer monster outlined against the sky. Although he could not be certain, Timothy had the impression that Spike had gained some sort of ascendancy, harrying the monster, driving him.

The plain seemed endless. Day after day they plodded along, and little changed. The mountains kept their distance, never seeming nearer. There was nothing but endless distances. At the foot of one of the buttes they found a small, reluctant spring and from it collected sufficient water to fill the empty casks. The small stream that flowed from it ran less than a quarter mile before it disappeared into the thirsty ground. Horace groused continually; Emma wrung her hands. Conrad paid small attention to them; he kept the march moving, boring ever deeper into the barren wasteland.

Late one searing afternoon, the flatness of the plain broke, dipping down into a canyon. From the lip of the break, they sighted, at the bottom of the canyon, a ribbon of a river, flanked by narrow strips of vegetation on either side. To their left a massive butte reared up, its western slope cut sheer in ages past by the ancient river that had carved the canyon. Between the edge of the slope and the steepness of the canyon wall lay a level bench with the crumbling ruins of what at one time would have been a small town.

They wasted little time upon the ruins. Scurrying robots found a narrow path that led down to the bottom of the canyon, and the party made its way cautiously along the trail which wound its way along the face of a towering cliff of rose-red rock. At the bottom of the trail, the cliff turned in upon itself, forming an extensive rock shelter. From the opening of the shelter came a drift of cooler air, providing some relief from the blasting of the sun.

Conrad, followed by the three humans, stepped off the trail to enter the shelter.

“Here,” said Conrad, “we will tarry for a time. It's not all I'd hoped we'd find, but at least we'll have some protection while we plan our further move. The water from the river is only a little distance off. Along its banks, we may find food that humans can consume.”

Emma sat down on the stone floor. “This is good,” she said. “We're away from the sun until it sets late in the day. And we won't have to measure out the water. Maybe I can even have a bath.”

“It's better than nothing,” Horace said in a grudging tone. “It is better than the open plain.”

The next day an exploring robot found the junkyard. It lay against the base of the cliff that hemmed in the canyon. It was broad of base and extended halfway up the cliff. He ran back to the party, shouting the news. Everyone hurried to explore the discovery.

Most of the junk was metal. Originally, undoubtedly, there had been a lot of other trash, but over the ages since it had been dumped, the less durable items had wasted away and disappeared. Only the metal, some strangely shaped stones, and a few large pieces of wood remained. The strange thing about it was that most of the metal had not deteriorated. It remained bright and shiny; there was no sign of rust.

“An alloy,” said Conrad, “that was unknown on Earth. Most of it, all of it, perhaps, as good as the day that it was junked.”

The metal came in all shapes and sizes—simple pieces of scrap, isolated machined parts, broken instruments and tools, metal formed into convoluted shapes, and massive blocks of metal. Some of it was recognizable in a general sort of way; most of it made no sense at all. The robots spread the more easily accessible parts on the ground and wandered about through the outspread display, vastly puzzled as to what they were seeing.

“An alien technology,” said Conrad. “It might take us forever to figure out what some of this could be.”

It was apparent that the junk must have been thrown from the bench above the canyon, possibly by the inhabitants of the forsaken town that now lay in crumbling ruins.

“It seems to be a lot of stuff to be discarded by so small a town,” said Horace.

“It may have been a public dump serving a large area,” said Timothy. “At one time all that plain we crossed might have had many other towns. Perhaps it was an agricultural area and well populated. Then the rains failed and the economic base was gone …”

“We can use the metal,” Conrad told him. “We can make machines we need.”

“You mean we'll huddle here while you concoct machines. What kind of machines?”

“Tools, for one thing.”

“You have tools. You have spades and shovels, axes and saws, crowbars and posthole diggers …”

“Weapons,” Conrad said. “Better weapons than we have. Better bows. Arrows that fly true. This metal is strong but flexible. Maybe crossbows. Spears and lances. Catapults.”

“A hobby!” Horace growled. “You have found a hobby trove and …”

“Likewise,” said Conrad, continuing, “we could contrive a wagon to transport water for you, and what food we can gather. We have robots who can haul the coach and wagons. We might, as well, be able to contrive an engine run by steam …”

“You're out of your skull!” Horace shouted.

“We'll think on it,” Conrad told him. “We'll put our brains to work …”

In the following days they put their brains to work. They squatted in huddles. They drew designs in the sand. They mined coal from a site a mile or so away, set up a forge, and got to work. Horace fumed and fretted. Emma, remembering the days spent crossing the plateau, was satisfied to stay where there was water and protection from the sun. Timothy went exploring.

He climbed the trail and spent long hours snooping through the ruins of the town. Pawing through the sand and dust, he came up with occasional artifacts: primitive weapons; rods up to three feet long, made of metal that was flecked with rust; and strangely shaped ceramics that might have been idols. He crouched and looked at what he'd found and the artifacts added up to nothing. Still, the ruins had an abnormal fascination for him, and he went back again and yet again.

Here, God only knew how many centuries ago, had lived an intelligence that had developed a social and an economic sense. What kind of intelligence, the ruins gave no clue. The doors giving access to the buildings were circular and so small that it was a chore for him to wriggle through them. The rooms were so low that he had to go on hands and knees to explore them. There were no stairs to the upper storeys, but metal poles too slippery for him to climb.

Finally he climbed the massive, chopped-off butte. Its slopes were littered with precariously perched boulders waiting for no more than the slightest push to send them hurtling down. In between the boulders was treacherous, shifting scree that he had to scrabble over, being careful of the boulders.

It made sense, he told himself, that the people of the town might have maintained a watch post on top to spy out the approach of strangers, or to watch for game herds, or perhaps for other purposes that he could not bring to mind. But when he reached the top, he found no watch post. The top was a flat plane of stone, sand, and clay. No plants grew in the sand or clay, no lichens on the rock. The wind keened over it, and it was as desolate a piece of real estate as he had ever seen.

Below him the country spread out in a wonderful array—the brown and yellow of the flat plain over which he had traveled in the robot march, with other buttes, darker in appearance than the plain, dotted here and there. To the west was the gash of the rose-red canyon, and beyond the gash, far off, the blue loom of jagged mountains.

He walked to the edge of the western extension of the butte's top and looked down into the canyon, thinking he might see some sign of the activity of the robot legion; but he could glimpse no sign of activity. The blueness of the river writhed through the canyon floor, bordered on each bank by a strip of green. Beyond the river, the redness of the canyon wall tipped upward toward the yellow flatness of the continuing plateau.

And now he'd have to climb down off this butte—and must proceed most carefully, for the descent could be more dangerous than the climb.

He heard the click of a stone behind him and spun around. His heart tried to leap into his throat, choking him. Charging toward him was a killer monster, and behind the monster was Spike, rolling swiftly in an erratic pattern.

Timothy leaped quickly to one side to get out of the way of the oncoming monster. The monster, apparently seeing for the first time the yawning gulf before him, dodged as well, bearing down upon the human. Quickly Spike moved to head it off and the monster turned again in the opposite direction. Timothy stubbed his toe and fell upon his side. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the monster, fighting desperately to stop its headlong progress, go over the edge of the chopped-off butte. For a moment it seemed to hover in mid-air, then plunged out of sight.

Scrabbling erect, Timothy rushed to the lip of the precipice in time to see the monster strike a clump of boulders that clung to the face of the butte. It struck and bounced, dangling momentarily in the air, and began to come apart. Shattered fragments exploded in all directions and began raining across the face of the slope. The scattered segments went tumbling down the incline above the canyon floor, with the various parts battered into even smaller pieces.

Timothy turned to look for Spike, who was just a few feet away, dancing a jig of final victory, spinning and revolving, leaping high into the air, and skittering along the ground.

“You and your goddamned games!” yelled Timothy, although he knew, even as he spoke, that if it had ever been a game, it had been a deadly one.

“So you finally ran him down,” said Timothy. “You never stopped the chase. You tried, that first day, to run him up the hill to us, knowing Horace would use a rifle on him; and when that failed, you kept on running him.”

Spike had ceased his jigging and was standing now, rocking slowly back and forth.

“Spike,” said Timothy, “we underestimated you. All these years, we took you only for a clown. Come on. We'll go down and join the others. They will be glad to see you.”

But when he moved, Spike rolled to intercept him. He moved again, and Spike headed him off.

“Goddamn it, Spike,” he shouted. “Now you're herding me. I will not stand for it.”

He heard a faint humming and turned around to find what it might be. A shining aircraft was skimming toward them, like the one that had buzzed them their first day on the planet. It lowered gently to the ground and rested there. The top of it slowly levered up. In the forward section sat a monstrosity. A proportionately small head sprouted out of broad shoulders. What started out as an upturned nose split into twisted twin antennae. The skull swept back to a point that was tufted by angry red feathers, resembling misplaced wattles. A single compound eye protruded between the nose and the spearlike termination of the skull. The head turned toward Timothy and a chittering came out of it.