'Maybe they've run out on us,' I said.
He shook his head. 'They would not do that,' he said. 'Where is there to run to?'
'I don't know,' I said. I couldn't, for the life of me, imagine where a ghost might run to.
Cynthia sat down wearily and leaned back against the side of a massive boulder that towered far above her. 'In that case,' she said, 'we can afford a rest.'
She had slid her pack off her shoulder before sitting down. Now she pulled it over to her, unstrapped it and rummaged around inside of it. She took something out of it and handed it to me. There were three or four strips of hard and brittle stuff, red shading into black.
'What is this junk?' I asked.
'That junk,' she said, 'is jerky. Desiccated meat. You break off a chunk of it and put it in your mouth and chew it. It is very nourishing.'
She offered a few sticks to the census-taker, but he pushed it away. 'I ingest food very sparingly,' he said.
I unshipped my pack and sat down beside her. I broke off a chunk of jerky and put it in my mouth. It felt like a piece of cardboard, only harder and perhaps not quite as tasty.
I sat there and chewed very gingerly and stared back along the way we'd come and thought what a far cry Earth was from our gentle world of Alden. I don't think that in that moment I quite regretted leaving Alden, but I was not too far from it. I recalled that I had read of Earth and dreamed of it and yearned for it, and so help me, here it was. I admitted to myself that I was no woodsman and that while I could appreciate a piece of woodland beauty as well as any man, I was not equipped, either physically or temperamentally, to take on the sort of primitive world Earth had turned out to be. This was not the sort of thing I'd bargained for and I didn't like it, but under the circumstances there wasn't much I could do about it.
Cynthia was busy chewing, too, but now she stopped to ask a question. 'Are we heading toward the Ohio?'
'Oh, yes, indeed,' said the census-taker, 'but we're still some distance from it.'
'And the immortal hermit?'
'I know naught,' said the census-taker, 'of an immortal hermit. Except some stories of him. And there are many stories.'
'Monster stories?' I asked. 'I do not understand.'
'You said that once there were monsters and implied the wolves were used against them. I have wondered ever since.'
'It was long ago.'
'But they once were here.'
'Yes, once.'
'Genetic monsters?'
'This word you use…'
'Look,' I said, 'ten thousand years ago this planet was a radioactive hell. Many life forms died. Many of those that lived had genetic damage.'
'I do not know,' he said.
The hell you don't, I told myself. And the suspicion swiftly crossed my mind that the reason he did not want to know was that he, himself, was one of those genetic monsters and was well aware of it. I wondered dully why I had not thought of it before.
I kept at him. 'Why should Cemetery care about the monsters? Why was it necessary to fabricate the wolves to hunt them down? I suppose that is what the wolves were used for.'
'Yes,' he said. 'Thousands of them. Great packs of them. They were programmed to hunt down monsters.'
'Not humans,' I said. 'Only monsters.'
'That is right. Only the monsters.'
'I suppose there might have been times they made mistakes, when they hunted humans as well as monsters. It would be hard to program robots that only hunted monsters.'
'There were mistakes,' the census-taker said.
'And I don't suppose,' said Cynthia, bitterly, 'that Cemetery cared too much. When something of the sort did occur, they didn't really mind.'.
'I would not know,' said the census-taker.
'What I don't understand,' said Cynthia, 'is why they should have done it. What difference did a few monsters make?'
'There were not a few of them.'
'Well, then, a lot of them.'
'I think,' said the census-taker, 'that it might have been the Pilgrim business. Once Cemetery had gotten off to a solid start, the Pilgrim business grew until it represented a fair piece of revenue. And you could not have a pack of howling monsters come tearing down the land when Pilgrims were around. It would have scared them off. The word would have spread and there would have been fewer Pilgrims.'
'Oh, lovely,' Cynthia said. 'A program of genocide. I suppose the monsters have been fairly well wiped out.'
'Yes,' said the census-taker, 'fairly well disposed of.'
'With a few showing up,' I said, 'only now and then.'
His cross-stitch eyes crinkled at me and I wished I hadn't said it. I don't know what was wrong with me. Here we were, depending on this little jerk to help us, and I was needling him.
I cut out the talking and went back to chewing jerky. It had softened up a bit and had a salty-smoky taste and even if it wasn't supplying too much nourishment, it still gave me the impression that I was eating something.
We sat there chewing, the two of us, while the census-taker just sat, not doing anything.
I looked around at Cynthia. 'How are you getting on?' I asked.
'I'll do all right,' she said, a little sharply.
'I'm sorry it turned out this way,' I said. 'It is not what I had in mind.'
'Of course it's not,' she said. 'You thought of it as a polite little jaunt to a romantic planet, made romantic by what you'd read of it and imagined of it and…'
'I came here to make a composition,' I said, considerably nettled at her, 'not to play hide-and-seek with bomb-throwers and grave-robbers and a pack of robot wolves.'
'And you're blaming me for it. If I hadn't been along, if I hadn't foisted myself off on you…'
'Hell, no,' I said. 'I never thought of that.'
'But even if you did,' she said, 'it would be all right, for you'd be doing it for good old Thorney…'
'Cut it out,' I shouted at her, really burned up now. 'What's got into you? What's this all about?'
Before she could answer the census-taker got to his feet (that is, if he had feet); at any rate, he rose.
'It is time to go again,' he said. 'You've had rest and nourishment and now we must push on.'
The wind had become sharper and colder. As we moved out of the shelter of the nest of boulders and faced the barren ridgetop, it struck us like a knife and the first few drops of driven rain spattered in our faces.
We pushed ahead-pushing against the rain, leaning into, it. It was as if a great hand had been placed against us and tried to hold us back. It didn't seem to bother the census-taker much; he skipped on ahead without any trouble. The funny thing about it was that the wind seemed to have no effect at all upon his robe; it didn't flutter, it never even stirred, it stayed just the way it was, hanging to the ground.
I would have liked to call this to Cynthia's attention, but when I tried to yell at her, the buffeting wind blew the words back into my mouth.
From below us came the moaning of the forest trees, bending in the gale. Birds tried to fly and were whipped about the sky. The cloud cover seemed to become thicker by the minute, although as far as I could see, there were no moving clouds. The rain came in sudden gusts, icy cold, hard against the face.
We trudged on, miserably. I lost all track of everything. I kept my eyes on Cynthia's plodding figure as she moved on ahead of me. Once she stumbled and without a word I helped her up. Without a word, she resumed the march.
