“Another day or two,” I said, “and we may find what it is.”
For I was under the spell as well as she, although perhaps not so completely under it. She may have been more sensitive than I, she may have seen things that I bad missed, or placed different interpretations upon certain impressions that both of us had experienced. There was no way, I realized, that any one person might hope to realize or understand, or even guess, how another person’s mind would operate, what impressions it might hold and how those impressions might be formed and how they might be interpreted or what impact the interpretation might have upon the intellect and senses of the owner of the brain.
“Tomorrow, maybe,” she said.
And, yes, I thought, tomorrow. It might be tomorrow.
I looked at her across the fire and she had the appearance of a child who was saying, not being sure at all, that tomorrow might be Christmas.
But tomorrow was not trail’s end, not Christmas. It turned out to be the day that Tuck disappeared.
We became aware that he was not with us in the middle of the afternoon and, try as we might, we could not recall if he’d been with us at the noonday stop. We were certain that he had started with us in the morning, but that was the only thing of which we could be certain.
We stopped and backtracked. We searched and yelled, but got no response. Finally, as evening fell, we set up camp.
It was ridiculous, of course, that none of us could remember when we had seen him last and I wondered, as I thought of it, whether he had actually left us, wandering off either intentionally or by accident, or if perhaps he had simply faded away, as George may have faded away that night when we were penned by the bombardment of the tree in the red-stone structure at the city’s edge. It was the growing grayness of the man, I told myself, that had made it possible for us not to miss him. Day by day he had grown more distant and less approachable, had progressively effaced himself until he moved among us as a ghost would have moved, only half-seen. The growing grayness of the man and the half-sensed enchantment of this blue land through which we made our way, where time ceased to have a great deal of sense of function and one traveled as if he were walking in a dream-these two factors, teamed together, had made his disappearance, I told myself, quite possible.
“There is no point in looking for him anymore,” said Sara. “If he had been here, we would have found him. If he had been present, he would have answered us.”
“You don’t think that he is present?” I asked, thinking that ft was a strange way of saying he was not around.
She shook her head. “He found what he was looking for. Just the way George found what he was looking for.”
“That doll of his,” I said.
“A symbol,” Sara said. “A point of concentration. Like a crystal ball in which one can lose himself. A madonna or some ancient and effective religious belief. A talisman...”
“A madonna,” I said. “You mentioned that before.”
“Tuck was sensitive,” said Sara, “down to his fingertips. In tune, somehow, with something outside our space- time reference. An offensive sort of man-yes, I’ll admit that now-an offensive, sort of man, and different in a very special way. Not entirely of this world.”
“You told me once he wouldn’t make it,” I said, “that somewhere along the way he would break up.”
“I know I did. I thought that be was weak, but he wasn’t. He was strong.”
Standing there, I wondered where be had gone. Or was he gone at all? Had his grayness progressed to a point where he simply disappeared? Was he still with us, unseen and unsuspected, stumbling along at the edge of a twilight world into which we could not see? Was he out there even now, calling to us or plucking at our sleeves to let us know that he still was with us, and we unable to hear him or to feel the plucking? But that, I told myself, could not be the case. Tuck would not pluck or call. He wouldn’t care; he wouldn’t give a damn. He would not care if we knew he was there or did not know. All he needed was the doll to clutch against his chest and the lonely thought that jangled in his skull. Perhaps his disappearance had not been so much a disappearance as a growing grayness, as his utter and absolute rejection of us.
“You now be only two,” said Hoot, “but strong allies travel with you. The other three of us still stand fast with you.”
I had forgotten Hoot and the other two and for a moment it had seemed, in truth, there were only two of us, two of the four who had come storming up out of the galaxy to seek in its outland fringes a thing we could not know-and even now did not know.
“Hoot,” I said, “you sensed George leaving us. You knew when he left. This time. . .”
“I did not hear him go,” said Hoot. “He gone long back, days back. He fade away so easily there be no sense of leaving. He just grow less and less.”
And that was the answer, of course. He’d just got less and less. I wondered if there had ever been a time when he’d been wholly with us.
Sara was standing close behind me, with her head held high, as if she might somehow be defiant of something out there in the gathering dark-the thing, perhaps, or the condition, or the interlocking of circumstances which had taken Tuck from us. Although it was hard to believe that there was any single thing or any specific set of circumstances involved. The answer must lie inside of Tuck and the kind of mind he had.
In the light of the campfire I saw that tears were running down her cheeks, weeping silently, with her head held high against whatever might be out there in the dark. I reached out a tentative hand and put it on her shoulder and at the touch she turned toward me and I had her in, my arms-without planning to, surprised that it should happen-with her head buried in my shoulder and now sobs were shaking her while I held her close and fast against myself.
Out by the campfire stood Roscoe, stolid, unmoving, and in the silences punctuated by Sara’s sobbing, I heard his whispered mumbling: “Thing, bring, cling, sting, wing, fling...”
