We reached the street and Roscoe headed for the spaceport. He was no longer mumbling to himself and he was walking rapidly, as if he might have a purpose-so rapidly that I had to hurry to keep up with him. He was changed- there was no doubt of that-but I had a hard time making up my mind whether it was an actual change or just a new phase of his madness.
When we emerged from the street onto the spaceport, I saw that it was morning. The sun was about halfway up the eastern sky. The spaceport, with its milky-white floor, surrounded by the whiteness of the city, was a place of glare and in that glare the whiteness of the ships stood up like daytime ghosts.
We headed out into the immensity of the port. Roscoe seemed to be moving just a little faster than he had before. Falling behind, I had to trot every now and then to keep up with him. I would have liked to ask him what it was all about, but I had no breath to waste in asking and, in any case, I wasn’t sure he would tell me.
It was a long hike. For a long time it seemed we had scarcely moved and then, rather suddenly, we were a long way from the city walls and closer to the ships.
We were fairly close to Sara’s ship before I saw the contraption at its base. It was a crazy-looking thing, with a mirror of some sort and what I took to be a battery (or at least a power source) and a maze of wires and tubing. It wasn’t very big, three feet or so in height and maybe ten feet square and from a distance it looked like an artistic junk heap. Closer up it looked less like a junk heap; it looked like something a couple of vacation-bored kids would rig up from assorted odds and ends they had managed to accumulate, pretending that they were building some sort of wondrous machine.
I stopped and stared at it, unable to say a word. Of all the goddamned foolishness I had ever seen, this was the worst. During all the time I had been sweating out my heart, running through the worlds, this silly robot had been hunting through the city to pick up all kinds of forgotten and discarded junk and had been lugging it out here and setting up this thing.
He had squatted down before what I imagine he imagined to be a control panel and was reaching out his hands to the knobs and switches on it.
“Now, captain,” he said, “if the mathematics should be right.”
He did something to the panel and here and there tubes flickered briefly and there was a sound like the sound of breaking glass and a shower of glasslike fragments were peeling off the ship and crashing to the ground and the ship stood free of the milk-white glaze the buglike machine had squirted over it.
I stood frozen. I couldn’t move. The fool machine had worked and the ship stood free and ready and I couldn’t move. It was incomprehensive. I could not believe it. Roscoe couldn’t do this. Not the fumbling, mumbling Roscoe I had known. I was only dreaming it.
Roscoe stood up and came over to me. He put out both his hands and gripped me by the shoulders, standing facing me.
“It is done,” he said. “Both for it and I. When I freed the ship, I freed myself as well. I am whole and well again. I am my olden self.”
And indeed he seemed so, although I’d not known his olden self. He had no difficulty talking and he stood and moved more naturally, more like a man, less like a clanking robot.
“I was confused,” he said, “by all that happened to me, by the changes in my brain, changes that I could not comprehend and did not know how to use. But now, having used them and proved that they are useful, I am quite myself once more.”
I found that the paralysis which had gripped me now was gone and I tried to turn so that I could run toward the ship, but he clung tightly to my shoulders and would not let me go.
“Hoot talked to you of destiny,” he said. “This is my destiny. This and more. The movers of the universe, whatever they may be, work in many ways to achieve each individual destiny. How other can one explain why the hammering of crude mallets on my brain could have so changed and short-circuited and altered the pattern of my brain as to have brought about an understanding I did not have before.”
I shook myself free of him.
“Captain,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You do not believe it even yet. You still think I am an oaf. And I may have been an oaf. But I am no longer.”
“No,” I said, “I guess you’re not. There is no way to thank you.”
“We are friends,” he said. “There is no need of thanks. You freed me of the centaurs. I free you of this planet. That should make us friends. We have sat by many campfires. That should make us friends...”
“Shut up!” I yelled at him. “Cut out the goddamned sentiment. You are worse than Hoot.”
I went around his ridiculous contraption and climbed the ladder of the ship, Roscoe climbing close behind me.
In the pilot chair I reached out and patted the panel.
This was it at last. We could take off any time we wanted. We could leave the planet and carry with us the secret of the planet’s treasure. Just how a man could turn a treasure such as that into a cash transaction I had no idea at the moment, but I knew I’d find a way. Whenever a man had a commodity to sell, he’d find a way to sell it.
And was this what it all had come to, I asked myself-that I should have something I could sell? Not another planet (although I suppose I could have sold the planet, too) but the knowledge and the information that was stored upon the planet in the form of seeds, knowledge collected by trees that were thought receivers, storing the knowledge they collected in the seeds they scattered and, that scattered, were collected by colonies of little rodents and not eaten, but deposited in great pits and granaries against the day of harvest.
But there was more to it than that, I told myself. More to the planet than a great white city and knowledge- grabbing trees. It also was a planet where a man might simply disappear (or fade away, as Tuck faded) and when they faded or they disappeared, where did they go? Did they move into another reality, into another life, as Hoot had moved into another life? There had been another culture, an earlier culture than the one that had built the city.
