Special Deliverance (5 page)

“Yes, of course. We salvage those we can.”

“And fix them up and send them out again?”

“Why, certainly,” said the Brigadier. “In war you conserve your resources very jealously.”

“General,” said Jurgens, “I do not think I would like to live in the kind of world you have.”

“What is your kind of world? If you wouldn’t want to live in my kind of world, tell me the kind of world you do live in.”

“A peaceful world. A kindly world. We have compassion for our humans.”

“It sounds sickening,” said the Brigadier. “You have compassion for your humans. Your humans?”

“In our world there are few humans left. We take care of them.”

“Much as it goes against my gram,” said the Parson, “I’m coming to the conclusion that Edward Lansing may be right. Listening, it becomes apparent that we all do come from different worlds. A cynical world that regards war as a simple game—”

“It is not a simple game,” said the Brigadier. “At times it is complex.”

“A cynical world,” said the Parson, “that regards war as a complex game. A world of poetess and poet, of music and academies. A world in which robots take kindly care of humans. And in your world, my lady, a society where a woman may become an engineer.”

“And what is wrong with that?” asked Mary.

“The wrongness is that women should not be engineers. They should be faithful wives, competent keepers of the home, efficient raisers of children. These activities are the natural sphere of women.”

“In my world women are not only engineers,” said Mary. “They are physicists, physicians, chemists, philosophers, paleontologists, geologists, members of the board of great corporations, presidents of prestigious companies, lawyers and lawmakers, heads of executive agencies. The list could be greatly added to.”

Mine Host came bustling up to the table.

“Make way,” he said. “Make way for supper. I hope you’ll find it to your liking.”

T
HE MEAL WAS FINISHED, a most satisfactory one. Now, the table pushed back, they sat in front of the blazing fire. Back of them, in the other corner of the room, the card players were hunched above their table.

Lansing made a thumb over his shoulder in their direction. “What about them? They did not join us at supper.”

Mine Host made a gesture of contempt. “They will not leave their play. We served them sandwiches and they continued with their game. They will not cease until early in the morning and then be up again after little sleep. Then they hold a prayer breakfast and go back to the cards.”

“To whom do they pray?” asked Mary. “The gods of chance, perhaps.”

Mine Host shook his head. “I do not know. I have never eavesdropped.”

“It seems to me you are a most incurious man,” said the Parson. “You know less of common matters than any man I have ever met. You do not know what land we’re in. You do not know why we’re here or what we’re supposed to do.”

“I tell you true,” said Mine Host. “I do not know these things and I have never asked.”

“Could it be true that there is no one for you to ask? No one we can ask?”

“I think that is a fair statement,” said Mine Host.

“So we’ve been dumped here,” said Mary, “without knowledge and without instructions. Someone, or some agency, must have dumped us here for whatever reason. Do you have the slightest idea of—”

“I have none whatsoever, my lady. I can tell you this—the other groups that have come here have left this place, following an ancient road to seek out what lies beyond.”

“So there have been other groups?”

“Oh, yes. Very many of them. But at long intervals.”

“And do they return?”

“Seldom. Only stragglers now and then.”

“What happens when the stragglers return?”

“That I do not know. I close up for winter.”

“The ancient road you speak of,” said the Brigadier. “Can you tell us more of it? Where it might go or what’s to be found along the way?”

“Only rumors. There are rumors of a city and rumors of a cube.”

“Rumors only?”

“That is all.”

“A cube?” asked Lansing.

“That is all I know,” said Mine Host. “I know naught other of it. And now a matter that I hesitate to mention, but that must be done.”

“What is it?” asked the Parson.

“It is the matter of payment. I must be paid for my lodging and the meals, and I run a small commissary from which you might wish to purchase food and other items before you set out upon your way.”

“I have no money on me,” said the Brigadier. “I seldom carry any. Had I known I was coming here, I would have obtained some cash.”

“I have but a few bills and a handful of change,” the Parson told Mine Host. “As are all the clergy in my country, I am very poor.”

“I could write you a check,” said Mary.

“I am sorry. I can accept no checks. I must have cold, hard cash.”

Sandra Carver complained, “I do not understand all this. Cash and checks?”

“He is talking about money,” said the Brigadier. “You must know of money.”

“But I don’t. Pray tell me—what is money?”

The Brigadier answered gently. “It is a token, either paper or metal, that has a stated value. It is used to pay for goods or services. You must use it, certainly, to buy what you need, your food and clothing.”

“We do not buy,” she said. “We give. I give my poems and my songs. Others give me food and clothing as I have need of them.”

“A perfect communistic society,” said Lansing.

“I see no reason for all of you to look so shocked and puzzled,” Jurgens said. “Sandra’s way is the only sensible way for a society to operate.”

“Which means, I suppose,” said the Brigadier, “that you have no money, either.”

He turned to Mine Host and said, “Sorry, old chap. It seems you’re out of luck.”

“Hold up for a moment,” said Lansing. To Mine Host he said, “Does it sometimes happen that only one member of a group carries money? Money possibly supplied by the agency that has initiated each particular wild goose chase?”

“It sometimes happens that way,” said Mine Host. “As a matter of fact, it almost always happens that way.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?”

“Well,” said Mine Host, licking his lips, “a man can never know. And he must be careful.”

“Do I gather,” asked the Parson, “that you, Mr. Lansing, are the treasurer for our group?”

“It would seem so,” Lansing said. “I wondered at the time.”

He took one of the golden coins out of his jacket pocket and flipped it to the innkeeper.

“That is honest gold,” he said, not knowing if it was or not. “How far can that coin cover us?”

“Two more like this,” said Mine Host, “will take care of the meal tonight, the night’s lodgings and tomorrow’s breakfast.”

“I think, Mr. Lansing,” said the Parson, “that he may be gouging you.”

“I think so, too,” said Lansing. “I think the one coin might cover all of it. But out of sheer generosity, I’ll give you another, but no more.”

Mine Host whined. “With costs going up and labor so expensive…”

“One more,” said Lansing, holding up the second coin, “but that is all.”

“All right,” said Mine Host. “The next group may prove more generous.”

The Parson said, “I still think it’s too much.”

Lansing flipped the coin, and the innkeeper grabbed it with a swoop of his flabby hand.

“It well may be too much,” Lansing told the Parson, “but I do not wish him saying that we cheated him.”

Mine Host got slowly to his feet. “When you wish to retire,” he said, “call me and you’ll be shown to your rooms.”

When he was gone Mary said, “What a strange way to finance an expedition. You could have said nothing, Edward, and hung onto the money.”

“It wouldn’t have washed,” he said. “He knew that someone had it.”

“It appears, from this matter of the money,” she said, “that someone sent us here.”

“Or something.”

“That is right. Or something. They must want us here quite badly to have paid our way.”

“In that case wouldn’t you think they would have told us what they wanted?”

“Yes, one would. We are dealing with strange people.”

“Mr. Lansing, it may be none of our business,” said the Brigadier, “but I wonder if you’d mind telling us how you got the money.”

“I’d be glad to,” Lansing said. “First of all, have any of you ever heard of a slot machine?”

It seemed none of them had.

“Well, then,” said Lansing, “I’ll tell you a tale of students and of slot machines and of an eccentric friend of mine.”

He told them and they listened, paying close attention.

“I must say,” said the Brigadier when Lansing had finished, “that your experience was excessively involved.”

“All the time that it was happening,” said Lansing, “I had the feeling that I was being taken. And yet I had to go ahead with it. My curiosity drove me to it.”

“Perhaps it was a good thing that you were driven to it,” said the Brigadier. “Otherwise the rest of us would have been stranded here without a penny to our name.”

“It is strange,” said Sandra, “how differently we were translated to this place—I through listening to music, you through the agency of these things you call slot machines.”

“I was done in,” said Mary, “by, of all things, a blueprint. A fellow engineer brought it to me, claiming there was something in it that he did not understand. He insisted I have a look at it, and he pointed with his finger to where he wanted me to look. It was nothing I had ever seen before and as I struggled to make some sense of it, I was caught up in the configuration that was represented on it and the next I knew I was standing in a forest. I am struck by the coincidence that both Edward and myself were trapped by another human—in his case a student, in my case another engineer. This would argue that whoever, or whatever, did this to us has agents on our worlds.”

“For a time I thought,” Lansing said to Mary, “that you and I might be from the same world, the same culture. Our societies seemed very much the same. But I was looking at you when I said a certain word and I could tell that you were puzzled by it. It seemed you didn’t know what communistic meant.”

“I know the word,” she said. “I was surprised by the context in which you used it. You seemed to make it a proper noun, as if a communistic society might exist.”

“On my world it does.”

“There was, I am sure,” said the Parson, “no human provocation for what happened to me. I saw the Glory. I had been seeking it for years. I had felt at times that I was close upon it, but each time it eluded me. And then, standing in a turnip field, I saw it, brighter and more glorious than I had thought it would be. I held up my hands to worship it, and as I did it became larger and brighter and I fell into it.”

“It seems to me the evidence is clear,” said the Brigadier, “that each of us is from a different world—different, but human worlds. It would seem, as well, that no further evidence is needed. The testimony of the four of you is quite sufficient. You will pardon me, I hope, if I do not join with you in telling by what strange circumstance I happen to be here.”

“I, for one, would take it rather badly,” said the Parson. “The rest of us have spoken fully—”

“It’s all right,” said Lansing, interrupting. “If the General does not want to bare his soul, it’s quite all right with me.”

“But in a band of brothers…”

“We’re not brothers, Parson. There are two women here. Even in the sense you mean it, I wonder if we’re brothers.”

“If we are,” said the robot, Jurgens, “we must prove it on the road ahead.”

“If we take that road,” the Parson said. “I, for one, am taking it,” said the Brigadier. “I would die of boredom, cooped up in this inn. This miserable innkeeper of ours spoke of a city up ahead. Certainly a city of any sort would offer better accommodation and entertainment, and perhaps even more instruction, than this pig sty of a place.”

“He also mentioned a cube,” said Sandra. “I wonder what it could be. Never before have I heard anything described simply as a cube.”

T
HEY WERE LATE IN getting started. Breakfast had been unaccountably delayed and there had been much haggling over the purchase of items they would need upon the road—food, clothing, hiking shoes, sleeping bags, belt knives, hatchets, matches, cooking gear, a long list of equipment. The Brigadier had insisted on a gun and had become quite worked up when informed by the innkeeper that no weapons were for sale.

“That’s ridiculous!” stormed the Brigadier. “Who ever heard of an expedition starting out without an adequate defense?”

Mine Host attempted to reassure him. “There’s no danger along the way. There is no need to fear.”

“How would you know that?” demanded the Brigadier. “When we questioned you on other matters you were singularly bereft of knowledge. Knowing nothing else, how can you be so certain that there is no danger?”

When it came time to pay for the supplies, Lansing got down to painful dickering. The innkeeper seemed determined to make an extra profit to compensate for his failure at extracting a higher price for their lodging. In his efforts Lansing was backed up vehemently by the Parson, who was of the general opinion that everyone was out to gouge him.

Finally the transaction was concluded to no one’s liking and they started out.

The Brigadier led the way, with the Parson close behind him. Mary and Sandra followed, while Jurgens and Lansing brought up the rearguard. Jurgens carried a heavy pack that was jammed with food. He alone of them had needed almost nothing—no food or sleeping bag, for he neither ate nor slept. He had no need, as well, of clothing, but he did choose a hatchet and a knife, both of which were bound by a belt about his waist.

“I am intrigued by your first words to me,” Lansing said to the robot as they walked along together. “You asked me if I was a crackpot. You said you collected crackpots. Yet later on you said that in your world there are few humans left. If that is the case—”

“I made a bad joke, only,” the robot told him. “I am sorry now I did. I don’t actually collect humans. What I do is collect crackpot humans I find in literature.”

“You make a list of crackpot characters?”

“Oh, I do more than that. I construct miniatures of them. Miniatures of the kind of humans I conceive they would have been in actual life.”

“A doll collector, then?”

“More than a doll collection, Mr. Lansing. They move about and talk, they act out little scenes. It is most amusing. I use them by the hour for my entertainment Also, I think I may get some further insight into the human condition from the interplay among them.”

“Mechanical dolls?”

“I suppose you could say so. Basically mechanical. Although in some of their aspects they are biological.”

“That is amazing,” said Lansing, somewhat shocked. “You create living beings.”

“Yes. They are alive in many different ways.” Lansing said nothing further, reluctant to expand upon the subject.

The road was little more than a trail. Occasionally the double ruts cut by wheeled vehicles could be seen, but in most places the wheel traces were obliterated by erosion, with grass and creeping vines growing over them. For a time the road climbed through forestland that after a couple of hours of travel began to dwindle, gradually giving way to a rolling, grassy countryside, spotted with small groves of trees. The day, at first comfortably warm, grew hotter as the hour of noon approached.

The Brigadier, still in the lead, halted at a grove, carefully let himself to the ground and leaned against a tree.

As the others came up, he explained the stop. “I thought we had best halt in consideration of the ladies. The sun has proved uncommonly warm.”

He hauled a large, white handkerchief from a tunic pocket and wiped his streaming face. Then he hoisted his canteen around in front of him, unscrewed the cap and gulped at the water.

“We can rest for a while,” said Lansing. “If we want to take the time, we could eat some lunch.”

The Brigadier responded eagerly. “A capital idea,” he said.

Jurgens already had his pack open, was slicing cold meat and cheese. He found a tin of hard biscuits and opened it.

“Should I make some tea?” he asked. “We haven’t the time,” said the Parson. “We should be pushing on.”

“I’ll rustle up some wood,” said Lansing, “so we can have a fire. I saw a dead tree back a ways. Some tea would be good for all of us.”

“There is no need of that,” said the Parson. “We have no need of tea. We could eat cheese and biscuits as we walk along.”

“Sit down,” said the Brigadier. “Sit down and rest yourself. Rushing along as we have been is no way to approach a trek. You break yourself in slowly and take your time to start with.”

“I’m not tired,” snapped the Parson. “I need no breaking in.”

“But the ladies, Parson!”

“The ladies are doing fine,” said the Parson. “It’s you who’s caving in.”

They were still bickering when Lansing went down the road to find the dead tree he had spotted earlier. It was not as far down the trail as he had thought, and he quickly settled down to work, chopping dry branches into easy lengths for carrying. It would be only a short noontime fire and not much fuel would be needed. A small armload should do.

A dry stick cracked behind him and he swung around. Mary stood a few feet from him.

“I hope that you don’t mind,” she said.

“Not at all, glad of company.”

“It was getting uncomfortable up there—the two of them still quarreling. There’ll be trouble between them, Edward, before the trip is done.”

“They are two driven men.”

“And very much alike.”

He laughed. “They’d kill you if you told them so. Each thinks he despises the other.”

“Perhaps they do. Being so much alike, perhaps they do. Do they see themselves in one another? Self-hate, perhaps.”

“I don’t know,” said Lansing. “I know nothing of psychology.”

“What do you know? I mean, what do you teach?”

“English literature. At the college I was the resident authority on Shakespeare.”

“Do you know,” she said, “you even look the part. You have a scholarly look.”

“I think that’s about enough,” he said, kneeling and beginning to stack the wood on his arm.

“Can I help?” she asked.

“No, we only need enough to boil some tea.”

“Edward, what do you think we’ll find? What are we looking for?”

“Mary, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. There seems no reason that we should be here; no one, I think, really wants to be here. Yet here we are, the six of us.”

“I’ve thought a lot about it,” she said. “I barely got any sleep last night, wondering about it. Someone wants us here. Someone sent us here. We didn’t ask to come.”

Lansing rose to his feet, clutching the stack of wood piled on his arm. “Let’s not fret too much about it. Not yet. We’ll know more about it, maybe, in a day or two.”

They went back up the road. Jurgens was striding up the hill with four canteens hanging on a shoulder.

“I found a spring,” he said. “You should have left your canteens so I could have filled them, too.”

“Mine is almost full,” said Mary. “I’ve only had one little swallow out of it.”

Lansing busied himself starting a fire while Jurgens poured water into a kettle and planted a forked stick by which to hang it over the blaze.

“Did you know,” demanded the Parson, standing over the kneeling Lansing, “that this robot person brought along a canteen for himself?”

“What’s wrong with that?” asked Lansing.

“He doesn’t drink. Why do you think that he—”

“Maybe he brought it along so that you or the Brigadier could have water when your canteens are dry. Have you considered that?”

The Parson snorted in disgust, a sneering snort.

Lansing felt anger sweep quickly over him. He rose and faced the Parson deliberately. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “and I’m saying it only once. You’re a troublemaker. We don’t need a troublemaker here. You keep it up and I’ll wipe up the ground with you. Do you understand?”

“Here! Here!” cried the Brigadier.

“And you,” said Lansing to the Brigadier, “keep your damn mouth shut. You’ve set yourself up to be the leader of this group and you are doing badly at it.”

“I suppose,” said the Brigadier, “you think you should be the leader.”

“We don’t need a leader, General. When your pomposity threatens to overcome you, just remember that.”

A pall hung over the little band while they ate their lunch and drank the tea, then they took up the trek again, with the Brigadier still in the lead and the Parson following close upon his heels.

The rolling countryside continued, with the scattered groves of trees. It was a pleasant land, but the day was warm. Stumping on before them, the Brigadier proceeded at a slower pace than he had before they’d stopped for lunch.

The road had been climbing all the afternoon, up succeeding swales, each one higher than the last. Now, ahead of the others, the Brigadier stopped and raised a shout. The Parson loped to stand beside him and the others hurried to catch up.

The land tumbled down into a bowl, and at the bottom of the bowl stood a cube of heaven blue. Even from the ridgetop it appeared to be a massive structure. It was plain, not fancy—straight sides that rose up to a flat top. From the distance that they viewed it, it looked unadorned. But its size and intense blueness made it spectacular. The road they had been following went down the tumbled, tortured slope in angling curves and switchbacks. Once it reached the bottom of the slope, it arrowed toward the cube, but when it reached it, it swept out to run around one side of it, then continued across the bowl and went climbing up the slope beyond in a zigzag fashion.

Sandra squeaked. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

The Brigadier harumphed. “When the innkeeper mentioned it,” he said, “I never for a moment anticipated it would be anything like this. I didn’t know what to expect. A crumbling ruin, perhaps. I guess I really didn’t think too much about it. I was looking forward to the city.”

The Parson pulled the corners of his mouth down. “I don’t like the looks of it.”

“You don’t like the looks of anything,” said the Brigadier.

“Before we start passing opinions,” said Lansing, “let us go down there and have a look at it.”

It took awhile to get there. They had to follow the road because the sloping ground was too steep and treacherous to do otherwise. By following the road in all its wanderings, they traveled several times the distance between the slope’s summit and its base.

The cube sat in the center of a wide, sandy area that ran all around it, a circle of sand so precise that it seemed it must have been drawn carefully by a survey team—white sand, the kind of sand that one would expect to find in a children’s sandbox, a sugarlike sand that at one time might have been flattened out into a smooth surface but that now had been blown into a series of ripples by the wind.

The walls of the cube rose high. Lansing, measuring them with a careful eye, concluded they rose fifty feet or more. In them there were no breaks, nothing that would suggest a window or a door, and there was, as well, no ornamentation, no artful carving, no dedicatory plaque, no incised symbols that might announce a name by which the cube was known. Viewed close at hand the blueness of the walls held true—a celestial blue that could have represented the purest innocence. Likewise, the walls were smooth. Certainly not stone, Lansing told himself. Plastic, perhaps, although plastic seemed incongruous in this howling wilderness, or ceramic, a cube formed of the finest porcelain.

With scarcely a word spoken, the band walked around the cube, by some unspoken convention not stepping within the circle of sand that surrounded it. Back on the road again, they halted and all stood looking at the blueness.

“It’s beautiful,” said Sandra, drawing in her breath as a sign of continuing astonishment. “More beautiful than it seemed when we glimpsed it from the hilltop. More beautiful than you could expect anything to be.”

“Amazing,” said the Brigadier. “Truly amazing. But does anyone have the foggiest notion what it is?”

“It must have a function,” said Mary. “The size, the mass of it would argue that. If it were merely symbolic, it would not have to be this large. And were it only symbolic, it would be placed where it could be seen from a distance, atop the highest elevation rather than being tucked away down here.”

“It has not been visited recently,” said Lansing. “There are no tracks in the circle of sand around it.”

“If there were tracks,” said the Brigadier, “they would soon be covered by the drifting sand. Even recent tracks.”

“Why are we standing here, simply looking at it?” asked Jurgens. “As if we might be afraid of it.”

“I think, perhaps, we are standing here because we are afraid of it,” said the Brigadier. “It seems quite evident that it was placed here by sophisticated builders. This is no fumbling job such as might have been done by benighted heathens intent on raising a memorial to their deity. Such a great accomplishment, logic says, must be protected in some manner. Otherwise there would be graffiti scribbled all across the walls.”