'Not too much food,' said the census-taker. 'Only what you must. You'll find food along the way. You have fish hooks, have you not?'
'Yes, we have a few fish hooks,' said Cynthia. 'I bought a box of them, almost as an afterthought. But we can't live on fish.'
'There are roots and berries.'
'But we don't know which roots and berries.'
'You do not need to know,' said the census-taker. 'I know all of them.'
'You'll be going with us?'
'We'll be going with you,' said the census-taker.
'Of course we will,' said O'Gillicuddy. 'Every one. of us. It's little we can do, but we'll be of some slight service. We can watch for followers…'
'But ghosts…' I said.
'Shades,' said O'Gillicuddy.
'But shades are not abroad in daylight.'
'That is a human fallacy,' said O'Gillicuddy. 'We cannot, of course, be seen in daylight. But neither can we be at night if it is not our wish.'
The other shades made mutters of agreement.
'We'll make up our packs,' said Cynthia, 'and leave all the rest behind. Elmer and Bronco will come looking for us here. We'll leave a note for them. We'll pin it to one of the packs, where they'll be sure to see it.'
'We'll have to tell them where we're heading,' I said. 'Does anyone have any idea where we'll be going?'
'Into the mountains,' said the census-taker.
'Do you know a river,' Cynthia asked, 'that is called the Ohio?'
'I know it very well,' said the census-taker. 'Do you want to go to the Ohio?'
'Now, look here,' I said, 'we can't go chasing…'
'Why not?' asked Cynthia. 'If we're going somewhere we might as well go where we wish to go…'
'But I thought that we agreed…'
'I know,' said Cynthia. 'You made it very plain. Your composition has first claim and I suppose it still will have to have it. But you can make it anywhere, can't you?'
'Certainly. Within reason.'
'All right,' said Cynthia. 'We'll head toward the Ohio. If that is all right with you,' she said to the census-taker. 'It's all right with me,' he said. 'We'll have to cross the mountains to reach the river. I hope we can lose the wolves somewhere in the mountains. But if I may inquire…'
'It's a long story,' I told him curtly. 'We can tell you later.'
'Have you ever heard,' asked Cynthia, 'of an immortal man who lives a hermit's life?'
She never let go of anything once she got her claws in it.
'I think I have,' said the census-taker. 'Very long ago. I suspect it was a myth. Earth had so many myths.'
'But not any longer,' I said.
He shook his head, rather sadly. 'No longer. All Earth's myths are dead.'
Chapter 14
The sky had clouded over and the wind had shifted to the north, growing cold and sharp. Despite the chill, there was a strange, wet smell in the air. The pine trees that grew along the slope threshed and moaned.
My watch had stopped, not that it made much difference. It had been fairly useless ever since leaving Alden. On board the funeral ship, which operated on galactic time, it had been impossible. And Earth time, it had turned out, was not the same as Alden time, although with a little mathematical calculation one could get along. I had inquired about the time at the settlement where we'd waited for the hoedown, but no one seemed to know or care. So far as I could learn, there was only one clock in the settlement, a rather crude, homemade affair, made mostly out of carved wood, that more than half the time stood dead and silent because no one ever seemed to think to wind it. So I'd set ray watch by the sun, but had missed the moment when it stood directly overhead and had been compelled to estimate how long since it had started its decline to the west. Now it had stopped and I could not get it started. Why I bothered I don't know; I was as well off without it. The census-taker clumped on ahead, with Cynthia behind him and myself bringing up the rear. We had covered a lot of ground since dawn, although how long we had been walking I had no way of knowing. The sun was covered by the clouds and my watch had stopped and there was no way to know the time of day.
There was no sign of the ghosts, although I had the queasy feeling they were not far away. And the census- taker troubled me as much as the invisible ghosts, for in the daylight he was a most disturbing thing. Seen face to face, he was not human unless one could regard a rag doll as being human. For his face was a rag-doll face, with a pinched mouth that was slightly askew, eyes that gave the impression of a cross-stitch and no nose or chin at all. His face ran straight down into his neck with no intervening jaw, and the cowl and robe that I had taken for clothing, when one had a close look at him, seemed a part of his grotesque body. If it had not seemed so improbable, one would have been convinced that they were his body. Whether he had feet I didn't know, for the robe (or body) came down so close to the ground that his feet were covered. He moved as if he had feet but there was no sign of them and I found myself wondering, if he had no feet, how he managed to move along so well. Move he did. He set a brisk pace, hobbling along ahead of us. It was all that we could do to keep up with him.
He had not spoken since we had started, but had simply led the way, with the two of us following and neither of us speaking, either, for at the pace that we were going we didn't have the breath to speak.
The way was wild, an unbroken wilderness with no sign that it ever had been occupied by man, as it surely must have been at one time. We followed the ridgetops for miles, at times descending from them to cross a small valley, then climb a series of hills again to follow other ridgetops. From the ridges we could see vast stretches of the countryside, but nowhere was there a clearing. We found no ruins, saw no crumbling chimneys, ran across no ancient fence rows. Down in the valleys the woods stood thick and heavy; on the ridgetops the trees thinned out to some extent. It was a rocky land; huge boulders lay strewn all about and great gray outcroppings of rock jutted from the hillsides. There was a little life. A few birds flew chirping among the trees and occasionally there were small life forms I recognized as rabbits and squirrels, but they were not plentiful.
We had stopped briefly to drink from shallow streams that ran through the valleys we had crossed, but the stops had been only momentary, long enough to lie flat upon our bellies and gulp a few mouthfuls of water, while the census-taker (who did not seem to need to drink) waited impatiently, and then we hurried on.
Now, for the first time since we had set out, we halted. The ridge we had been traveling rose to a high point and then sloped down for a distance and on this high point lay a scattered jumble of barn-size rocks, grouped together in a rather haphazard fashion, as if some ancient giant had held a fistful of them and had been playing with them, as a boy will play with marbles, but having gotten tired of them, had dropped them here, where they had remained. Stunted pine trees grew among them, clutching for desperate footholds with twisted, groping roots.
The census-taker, who was a few yards ahead of us, I scrambled up a path when he reached the jumble of rocks disappearing into them. We followed where he'd gone amp found him crouched in a pocket formed by missive stones. It was a place protected from the bitter wind, but open in the direction we had come so that we could see back along our trail.
He motioned for us to join him.
'We shall rest for a little time,' he said. 'Perhaps you'd like to eat. But no fire. Perhaps a fire tonight. We'll see.'
I didn't want to eat. I simply wanted to sit down and never move again. 'Maybe we should keep on,' said Cynthia.
'They may be after us.' She didn't look as if she wanted to keep on. She looked wore down to a nubbin.
The prissy little mouth in the rag-doll face said, 'They have not returned to the cave as yet.'
'How do you know?' I asked.
'The shades,' he said. 'They would let me know. I haven't heard from them.'
