Highway of Eternity (7 page)

David climbed the wall and sat down with them.

“Henry is here with us,” said Corcoran. “We've been talking with him. An enjoyable and instructive conversation.”

“I thought he was,” said David. “I caught the sense of him. Henry, I am glad you're here. All the family should be on hand for the burial. All of us now will be there, barring Spike. Do you have an idea where he is? Could you go and find him?”

I have no idea, David. No one can keep track of him. He could be anywhere. After all, it matters little. He is not exactly family.

“By now he is,” said David.

“One thing I am curious about,” said Corcoran. “Was any determination made of how Gahan died?”

“Horace had a look at him. His chest was torn open, as if a great taloned claw had struck him and torn it all away. How he lived long enough to warn us, I do not comprehend. He was close to death when the traveler crashed.”

“How long would it have taken? I mean the trip from Athens to here.”

“It would have been almost instantaneous.”

“That sounds right. On our trip from New York, there was a momentary darkness, then almost immediately the bump of landing.”

“Horace, I suppose,” said David, “is the only one of us who would have thought to examine Gahan. Horace beats out his brains getting to the bottom of things, planning ahead. But he has no capacity for the long range. Right now he has all three travelers lined up on the lawn. Gahan's traveler is operative. The landing in the flower bed damaged it not at all. So Horace has them all stocked with food and some of Timothy's weapons.”

“I take it, then, that you have decided to leave.”

“Well, yes, I would suppose so, although not exactly when or where to. Horace has each of us assigned to specific travelers.”

“And when you leave, are we going with you?”

“Why, most assuredly. Our numbers are not large. Quite possibly, we will have need of you.”

“I suppose we should be grateful.”

“Grateful or not, you are going with us. The both of you.”

“I don't think I would enjoy staying here,” said Corcoran, “trapped on a few acres inside a displaced segment of time.”

“It is strange how it has all worked out,” said David musingly, as if he might be talking to himself. “With the family, I mean. Horace, the hardheaded, practical lout, the organizer, the schemer. Emma, the moaner, the keeper of our consciences. Timothy, the student. Enid, the thinker. And I, the loafer, the bad example, the one who makes the others feel virtuous.”

“There is one thing you said,” Boone told him. “Enid is the thinker. It seemed to me you put a special emphasis, almost a special meaning …”

“In the time from which we came,” said David, “there was finally time to think. There was no need to break one's back to make a living or to get ahead. We had made our progress and we had no great regard for it. So, given the time to do so, many turned to thought.”

“Philosophy?”

“No, just thinking for the sake of thinking. A way to kill one's time. It was an activity held in very high regard. It brought about many great ideas, discussed most learnedly and politely, but never put to use. We were tired of putting things to use. The great thing about thinking is there's never any end to it. You could spend a lifetime thinking, and many people did. Perhaps that was the reason so many of us could equate ourselves with the Infinites' idea of turning ourselves into units of incorporeal intelligence, thinking entities unhampered by the grossness of a biological body.”

“You come close to sounding as if you approved of the program pushed by the Infinites.”

“Not at all,” said David. “I am only trying to tell you the situation as it applied to many of the race.”

“But Enid …”

“With her, it is slightly different. Look at it this way. Timothy is a student, studying mankind's past in an attempt to find the basic, early flaws in the human culture, in the hope that the future remnant of the biological race can set up a way of life that has a better chance of reasonable survival. Enid is trying, by the exercise of deductive thought, to arrive at independent scenarios that may serve as guides for the new culture that must be established if any of our race are to survive as biological beings. Both Timothy and Enid are trying to lay out new paths for us. Give them time and they may come up with a new human pattern.”

Here comes Enid now, said Henry.

The three sitting on the wall clambered off it and stood, waiting for her.

“We are about to begin,” said Enid.

“Henry's here, with us,” said David.

“Good,” she said. “Then all of us will be there. Even Spike is here. He came rolling in just a while ago.”

They started up the slope toward the house, Corcoran and David walking ahead, Boone falling in beside Enid. She took his arm and spoke in a confidential voice.

“There is no coffin,” she said. “No time to build one. We wrapped him well in a new white muslin sheet and Timothy found a length of canvas that Emma and I sewed into a shroud. It's the best that we could do. Horace is in a dither. He thinks we should get away at once.”

“And what do you think?”

“I suppose he's right. We probably have to go. But I hate to leave this house. It's been home for a long, long time. We are burying Gahan at the foot of an old oak tree back of the house.”

“You have a fondness for trees?”

“Yes. It's not an unusual love. Many people love them. Would it surprise you if I told you trees will come after men? The trees will supersede us; they will take our place.”

Boone laughed. “That's as fine-honed a conceit as I have ever heard.”

She did not answer and they went up the slope in silence. As they came up to the house, she gestured to her right. “There the travelers are,” she said. “All lined up and waiting.”

And there they were on the lawn before the house—the two smaller ones the closest and the large one that had served Martin as living quarters a little distance off.

“You and your friend will be going with us,” she said. “Had anyone thought to tell you that? I hope that you don't mind. I am sorry that you got mixed up in this.”

He said grimly, not entirely joking, “I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”

“Do you really mean that?” she asked.

“I'm not quite sure,” he told her. “One thing I do know. When you leave, I'd rather go with you, wherever you may be going, than stay here in this place, unable to get out.”

Corcoran and David had turned to the left to go around the house.

“Right after the funeral,” said Enid, “we'll get together and make a final decision what to do.”

A high-pitched, ragged screech came from somewhere behind the house. It cut off for a moment, then took up again, a caterwaul of fright which kept on and on, its pitch going up and up.

Boone started running toward the sound, sobbing as he ran, for suddenly the terror in the shrieking closed down all about him and seemed to grasp him by the throat.

As he was about to round the corner of the house, something going fast and hard struck him in mid-stride and bowled him over, tumbling him across the grass until he brought up in a thicket of rosebushes, half in, half out of the thorny clump. He tipped forward into the soft earth that extended beyond the clump and landed nose down in the dirt.

He pawed at his face to wipe away the clinging dirt, scrabbling with the other hand to claw himself free of the bushes, which was not an easy thing to do, for the sharp and solid thorns had snagged into his clothing and resisted all attempts to pull loose.

With the dirt partially off his face, he saw Emma streaking for the Martin traveler, with some, perhaps all, of the others close behind her—all running as if the very devil were nipping at their heels. It was Emma, he thought, who ran into me.

He lunged desperately to pull himself free of the bushes, but a clinging rose sprout with a grip still on his trouser leg tripped him so that he sat down solidly upon the ground, facing back along the left side of the house.

Something was coming along the side of the house, a sort of thing he had never seen before nor would have believed possible. It was like a living spider web a good twelve feet or more across. It throbbed with pulses of energy, or what he thought of as energy, running all across it, flickering and sparkling and flashing all along and across the tiny threads that made up the web. Behind the threads was a mirror, or a disk of some sort that might have been an eye. Through the flashing energy, Boone dimly saw what could have been mechanical appendages that were beginning to reach out and down toward him. There were other things immersed within the web, but what they could be he could not imagine.

A voice shrieked at him. “Boone, you fool! Run! I'll wait for you.”

He lunged to his feet, jerking his trouser free of the bush, and spun about, beginning to run.

There was only one of the smaller travelers left upon the lawn, standing with the port wide open and Enid beside it.

“Run!” she shouted. “Run!”

He ran as he had never run before. Enid leaped into the traveler. From the entrance, she beckoned at him desperately.

He reached the traveler and sprang into the port, catching his toe on the edge of it and sprawling on top of Enid.

“Get off me, you dunce!” she shouted, and he flung himself to one side. The port banged shut. As it closed, he glimpsed the web, almost on top of them. Enid was scrambling frantically toward a glowing instrument panel in the front of the traveler.

Boone started to crawl forward, but there was a sudden shock that pinned him to the floor, and with the shock came darkness, the utter, unnerving darkness he had experienced when the Martin traveler had left New York.

6

Enid and Boone

Light came back—blinking lights on the panel and faint sunlight from a small observation screen.

Boone struggled to his knees, tried to rise to his feet. He bumped his head rather painfully on the ceiling.

“These vehicles are cramped,” said Enid, speaking easily, unexcited. “You crawl on your hands and knees.”

“Where are we?”

“I'm not sure where. I had no chance to pick a location or a time. I simply told it ‘go!'”

“That was taking a chance, wasn't it?”

“Sure it was. But would you rather I had stayed and let that monster wreck the traveler?”

“No, of course not. I implied no criticism.”

“I am getting a reading,” said Enid, bending low over the panel. “A time reading, that is. I still don't know where we are.”

“And the reading?”

“Measured from where we started, more than 50,000 years into the past—54,100 to be exact.”

“50,000 B.C.?”

“That's right,” she said. “Open country. A plain. Hills in the distance. Funny looking hills.”

He crawled forward, crowded in beside her, and looked through the forward vision plate.

Scant grass flowed toward bald, squat hills. In the distance were dots that looked like a grazing game herd.

“America, I think,” he said. “The western plains. Somewhere in the southwestern United States, more than likely. I can't tell you how I know. I just have a feel for it. Desert in my time, but 50,000 years before that, it would have been good grassland.”

“People?”

“Not likely. The best bet is that men first came to the continent 40,000 years before my time. Not sooner. The scientists could be wrong, of course. In any case, Ice Age America. There would be glaciers to the north.”

“Safe enough, then. No bloodthirsty tribesmen. No ravening carnivores.”

“There are carnivores, but there's good feeding for them. They shouldn't bother us. Any idea where the others are?”

She shrugged. “It was each man for himself.”

“Timothy? He said he wouldn't go.”

“I think he went with the others. Your friend, Corcoran, held back, arguing, seeing what was happening to you. David picked him up and heaved him into the other small traveler. They all took off, not waiting for us.”

“You waited for me.”

“I couldn't leave you to that monster.”

“You think it's the one that destroyed the base at Athens?”

“Probably. There is no way of knowing. You know this place we are in?”

“If it's the southwestern United States, I've been there. Spent a couple of vacations there. It looks like it to me, unless some other places have that kind of butte. I've never seen any that resembled them in any other part of the world.”

“The food and whatever else Horace threw in the traveler should be somewhere in the back. He put some supplies in each of the travelers, but he was in a hurry and he probably paid less attention to what he included than he should have. I think he threw the rifle that David brought Timothy from New York in this one.”

“You want to go out now?”

“I think we should. It's terribly cramped in here. Get out and stretch our legs, have a look, take a little time to decide what we should do.”

“Have you any idea what we should do?”

“None. But in this sort of place it should take a while to track us down, if it can be done at all.”

Crawling the length of the traveler, Boone found the rifle, a rucksack, a roll of blankets, and a few other packages bundled up in haphazard fashion. He got them all together while Enid opened the port.

Crouching in the doorway, Boone examined the rifle. One cartridge was in the breech and it had a clip of five. There was, he hoped, more ammunition in the bundles.

“You stay here for a moment,” he told Enid. “Give me a chance to check what's out there.”

He jumped out of the port, straightening swiftly when he landed, the rifle up and ready. It was all damn foolishness, he told himself. There was nothing here. If it was southwestern North America of 50,000 years ago, there'd be only the game herds and the prowling predators; those would not be lying in wait for stray humans who might come stumbling in and who, in any case, probably would make poor eating.