Destiny Doll
Clifford D. Simak
ONE
The place was white and there was something aloof and puritanical and uncaring about the whiteness, as if the city stood so lofty in its thoughts that the crawling scum of life was as nothing to it.
And yet, I told myself, the trees towered over all. It had been the trees, I knew, when the ship started coming down toward the landing field, riding on the homing beam we’d caught far out in space, that had made me think we’d be landing at a village. Perhaps, I had told myself, a village not unlike that old white New England village I had seen on Earth, nestled in the valley with the laughing brook and the flame of autumn maples climbing up the hills. Watching, I had been thankful, and a bit surprised as well, to find such a place, a quiet and peaceful place, for surely any creatures that had constructed such a village would be a quiet and peaceful people, not given to the bizarre concepts and outlandish mores so often found on an alien planet.
But this was not a village. It was about as far from a village as it was possible to get. It had been the trees towering over the whiteness of it that had spelled village in my mind. But who would expect to find trees that would soar above a city, a city that rose so tall one must tilt his head to see its topmost towers?
The city rose into the air like a towering mountain range springing up, without benefit of foothills, from a level plain. It fenced in the landing field with its massive structure, like an oval of tall bleachers hemming in a playing field. From space the city had been shining white, but it no longer shone. It was white, all white, but soft satiny, having something in common with the subdued gleam of expensive china on a candle-lighted table.
The city was white and the landing field was white and the sky so faint a blue that it seemed white as well. All white except the trees that topped a city which surged up to mountain height.
My neck was getting tired from tilting my head to stare up at the city and the trees and now, when I lowered my head and looked across the field, I saw, for the first time, there were other ships upon the field. A great many other ships, I realized with a start-more ships than one would normally expect to find on even some of the larger and busier fields of the human galaxy. Ships of every size and shape and all of them were white. That had been the reason, I told myself, I’d not spotted them before. The whiteness of them served as a camouflage, blending them in with the whiteness of the field itself.
All white, I thought. The whole damn planet white. And not merely white, but a special kind of whiteness-all with that same soft-china glow. The city and the ships and the field itself all were china-white, as if they had been carved by some industrious sculptor out of one great block of stone to form a single piece of statuary.
There was no activity. There was nothing stirring. No one was coming out to meet us. The city stood up dead.
A gust of wind came from somewhere, a single isolated gust, twitching at my jacket. And I saw there was no dust. There was no dust for the wind to blow, no scraps of paper for it to roll about. I scuffed at the material which made up the landing surface and my scuffing made no marks. The material, whatever it might be, was as free of dust as if it had been swept and scrubbed less than an hour before.
Behind me I heard the scrape of boots on the ladder’s rungs. It was Sara Foster coming down the ladder and she was having trouble with that silly ballistics rifle slung on a strap across one shoulder. It was swinging with the motion of her climbing and bumping on the ladder, threatening to get caught between the rungs.
I reached up and helped her down and she swung around as soon as she reached the ground to stare up at the city. Studying the classic planes of her face and mop of curling red hair, I wondered again how a woman of such beauty could have escaped all the softness of face that would have rounded out the beauty. She reached up a hand and brushed back a lock of hair that kept falling in her eyes. It had been falling in her eyes since the first moment I had met her.
“I feel like an ant,” she said. “It just stands there, looking down at us. Don’t you feel the eyes?”
I shook my head. I had felt no eyes.
“Any minute now,” she said, “it will lift a foot and squash us.”
“Where are the other two?” I asked.
“Tuck is getting the stuff together and George is listening, with that soft, silly look pasted on his face. He says that he is home.”
“For the love of Christ,” I said.
“You don’t like George,” said Sara.
“That’s not it at all,” I said. “I can ignore the man. It’s this whole deal that gets me. It makes no sort of sense.”
“But he got us here,” she said.
“That is right,” I said, “and I hope he likes it.”
For I didn’t like it. Something about the bigness and the whiteness and the quietness of it. Something about no one coming out to greet us or to question us. Something about the directional beam that had brought us to this landing field, then no one being there. And about the trees as well. No trees had the right to grow as tall and big as those that rose above the city.
A clatter broke out above us. Friar Tuck had started down the ladder and George Smith, puffing with his bulk, was backing out the port, with Tuck guiding his waving feet to help him find the rungs.
“He’ll slip and break his neck,” I said, not caring too much if he did.
“He hangs on real good,” said Sara, “and Tuck will help him down.”
Fascinated, I watched them coming down the ladder, the friar guiding the blind man’s feet and helping him to find the rungs when he happened to misjudge them.
A blind man, I told myself-a blind man and a footloose, phony friar, and a female big game hunter off on a wild
