goose chase, hunting for a man who might have been no man at all, but just a silly legend. I must have been out of my mind, I told myself, to take on a job like this.
The two men finally reached the ground and Tuck, taking the blind man’s arm, turned him around so he faced the city.
Sara had been right, I saw, about that silly smile. Smith’s face was wreathed in beatitude and a look like that, planted on his flabby, vacant face, reeked of obscenity.
Sara touched the blind man’s arm with gentle fingers.
“You’re sure this is the place, George? You couldn’t be mistaken?”
The beatitude changed to an ecstasy that was frightening to see. “There is no mistake,” he babbled, his squeaky voice thickened by emotion. “My friend is here. I hear him and he makes me see. It’s almost as if I could reach out and touch him.”
He made a fumbling motion with a pudgy hand, as if he were reaching out to touch someone, but there was nothing there to touch. It all was in his mind.
It was insane on the face of it, insane to think that a blind man who heard voices-no, not voices, just a single voice- could lead us across thousands of light years, toward and above the galactic center, into territory through which no man and no human ship had been known to pass, to one specific planet. There had been, in past history, many people who had heard voices, but until now not too many people bad paid attention to them.
“There is a city,” Sara was saying to the blind man. “A great white city and trees taller than the city, trees that go up and up for miles. Is that what you see?”
“No,” said George, befuddled by what he had been told, “No, that isn’t what I see. There isn’t any city and there aren’t any trees.” He gulped. “I see,” he said, “I see...” He groped for what he saw and finally gave up. He waved his hands and his face was creased with the effort to tell us what he saw. “I can’t tell you what I see,” he finally whispered. “I can’t find the words for it. There aren’t any words.”
“There is something coming,” said Friar Tuck, pointing toward the city. “I can’t make it out. Just a shimmer. As if there were something moving.”
I looked where the friar was pointing and I caught the shimmer. But that was all it was. There was nothing one could really see. Out there, at the base of the city wall, something seemed to be moving, an elusive flow and sparkle.
Sara was looking through her glasses and now she slipped the strap over her shoulder and handed them to me.
“What do you think, captain?”
I put the glasses to my eyes and moved them slowly until I caught the movement. At first it was no more than a moving blur, but slowly it grew in size and separated. Horses? I wondered. It didn’t make much sense that there’d be horses here, but that was what they looked like. White horses running toward us-if there were horses, of course they would be white! But very funny horses and, it seemed, with very funny feet, not running the way a normal horse would run, but with a crazy gait, rocking as they ran.
As they came closer I could make out further detail. They were horses, all right. Formalized horses-pert upright ears, flaring nostrils, arched necks, manes that rose as if the wind were blowing through them, but manes that never moved. Like wild running horses some crummy artist would draw for a calendar, but keeping the set pose the artist had given them, never changing it. And their feet? Not feet, I saw. Not any feet at all, but rockers. Two pair of rockers, front and rear, with the front ones narrower so there’d be no interference as the horses ran-reaching forward with the rear pair and, as they touched the ground, rocking forward on them, with the front pair lifted and reaching out to touch the ground and rock in turn.
Shaken, I lowered the glasses and handed them to Sara.
“This,” I said, “is one you won’t believe.”
She put the glasses up and I watched the horses coming on. There were eight of them and they all were white and one was so like the other there was no telling them apart.
Sara took down the glasses.
“Merry-go-round,” she said.
“Merry-go-round?”
“Sure. Those mechanical contraptions they have at fairs and carnivals and amusement parks.”
I shook my head, bewildered. “I never went to an amusement park,” I told her. “Not that kind of amusement park. But when I was a kid I had a hobbyhorse.”
The eight came rushing in, sliding to a halt. Once they halted, they stood rocking gently back and forth.
The foremost of them spoke to us, employing that universal space argot that man had found already in existence when he’d gone into space more than twenty centuries before, a language composed of terms and phrases and words from a hundred different tongues, forged into a bastard lingo by which many diverse creatures could converse with one another.
“We be hobbies,” said the horse. “My name is Dobbin and we have come to take you in.”
No part of him moved. He simply stood there, rocking gently, with his ears still perked, his carven nostrils flaring, with the nonexistent breeze blowing at his mane. I got the impression, somehow, that the words he spoke came out of his ears.
“I think they’re cute,” Sara cried, delighted. And that was typical; she would think that they were cute.
Dobbin paid her no attention. “We urge upon you haste,” he said. “There is a mount for each of you and four to take the luggage. We have but a small amount of time.”
I didn’t like the way that it was going; I didn’t like a thing about it. I’m afraid I snapped at him.
“We don’t like being hurried,” I told him. “If you have no time, we can spend the night on the ship and come in tomorrow morning.”
