“Sure,” said Lansing. “Come along.”
After supper they built up the fire and sat around it.
“So we are learning slowly where we came from,” Mary said, “but we still have no idea where we’re going. I came from a continuation of the great empires, the logical working out of the empire concept, and you from a world in which the empires have disappeared. Or was it only the British Empire that disappeared?”
“Not only the British. All nations lost at least the major part of their colonial holdings. In a sense there still are empires, although not quite the same. Russia and the United States. They aren’t called empires — they’re called super-powers.”
“Sandra’s world is harder to figure out,” she said. “It sounds much like a fairyland. Like a combination of the ancient Grecian ethos, or what sentimentalists would call the Grecian ethos, and recurring Renaissances. What was it she said — the Third Renaissance? Anyhow, it sounds like an unreal world. A beautifully fuzzy world.”
“We don’t know about the Parson and the Brigadier,” said Lansing, “except for what the Brigadier said about playing war games.”
“I think he was given the impression,” Mary said, “that we disapproved of his world. He tried to make it sound like knightly medieval tournaments, but I think it might be more than that.”
“The Parson is the close-mouthed one,” said Lansing. “That business about the Glory in the turnip patch, but that is all he told us. He kept silent after that.”
“His world sounds like a dismal one,” she said. “Dismal and holy. The two so often go together. But we’re forgetting Jurgens.”
“You’ll excuse me, please,” said Jurgens.
“Oh, it’s all right with me,” said Mary. “We were just gossiping.”
“What beats the hell out of me,” said Lansing, “is trying to figure out what we have in common. The one reason I can think of that we should have been pitchforked here is that all six of us are the same kind of people. But it’s apparent, when you think of it, that there are few similarities among us.”
“A college professor,” she said, “a military man, a parson, a poetess and — how would you describe yourself, Jurgens?”
“I’m a robot. That is all. I’m not even human.” “Cut that out,” said Lansing sharply. “Whatever sent us here made no distinction between a robot and the human. Which makes you one of us.“ ”Later it may come clear,“ said Mary, ”this common denominator that you mention. Right now I can’t seem to find it.”
“We’re not the only ones,” said Lansing. “There have been others here before us and there may be others after us. It all spells out to a program or a project. I wish someone would tell us what kind of program or project. I’d feel more comfortable about it.”
“So would I,” said Mary.
Jurgens struggled to his feet and, balancing on his crutch, threw more wood upon the fire.
“Did you hear that?” asked Mary.
“I heard nothing,” Lansing said.
“There’s something out there in the dark. I heard it snuffling.”
All of them listened. There was nothing. The dark was silent.
Then Lansing heard it — a sniffling. He held up his hand in a warning for the others to stay silent.
The sniffling stopped, then started again, a short distance from where it had been before. As if some animal had its nose against the ground, sniffing at a spoor. It stopped, then took up again, in a different place, as if whatever was doing the sniffling was circling the camp-fire.
Jurgens pivoted about, flailing his crutch. Lansing shook his head at him. Jurgens froze.
They listened. For long minutes there was no sniffling and they relaxed.
“You heard it?” Mary asked.
“Yes,” said Jurgens. “It started right behind me.”
“There was something out there, then?”
“It’s gone now,” said Lansing. “Jurgens scared it off.”
“Sandra heard it last night,” said Mary. “It’s been here all the time.”
“It’s not unusual,” said Lansing. “It’s something we should expect. Wild animals are always attracted to a fire.”
13
Five days were required to reach the city. The trip could have been made in two if they had not been forced to match their pace to Jurgens’s.
“I should have gone back to the inn,” the robot said. “I could have made it there alone. I could have stayed there and waited for you. That way I wouldn’t hold you up.”
“Then what would we have done,” said Lansing, “when the time came that we needed you and you weren’t with us?”
“That day may never come. You may never have any need of me.”
Lansing, cursing him roundly as a fool, kept the robot going.
As they progressed, the character of the country changed. The land still was rolling land, but it became more arid. The groves of trees were farther apart and smaller, both in extent and in the size of the trees, which began to tend to scrubbiness. The wind blew hot instead of cool. The little streams on which they depended for water were farther apart and smaller, often no more than trickles.
Each night the Sniffler prowled the campfire. On one occasion, the second night out, Lansing and Jurgens, armed with flashlights, went out into the darkness to seek some sign of it. There was nothing, not even tracks. The land about the fire was sandy and should have shown tracks, but there were none.
“It’s following us,” said Mary. “It travels along with us. Even when it isn’t sniffling, I know that it’s out there. It’s out there watching us.”
“It hasn’t threatened us,” said Lansing, trying to soothe her. “It means no harm. If it had meant any harm, it would have acted before now. It has had all sorts of chances.”
After the first couple of days, they often sat silent around the campfire, all talked out, no longer needing to talk to keep alive the close association the trip had formed among them.
At times, in those long silences, Lansing found himself thinking back to his former life and was surprised to discover that the college where he had taught seemed a distant place and the friends he had there were friends of long ago. It has been no more than a week, he reminded himself, forcing himself to remind himself, and already there was the feel of years between this place and the college town. Nostalgia swept over him and he felt the powerful urge to turn about and retrace his steps, to get up from the campfire and go back down the trail. Although, he knew, it would not be that simple. Even should he go back, he’d be going back no farther than the inn or, perhaps, the woodland glen in which he had first found himself. There was no trail back to the college, to Andy, to Alice, to the world that he had known. Between him and his former life lay an imponderable and he had no idea what it was.
He could not go back. He must go on, for only in that way could he possibly find the way back home. There was something here that he must find, and until he found it, there was no road back home. Even when he found it, if he ever did, there still was no guarantee there would be a way back home.
It might be a foolish thing to do, but he had no choice. He must keep on. He could not drop out, as the four card players at the inn had dropped out.
He tried to conjure up a logical mechanism by which he — he and the others — had been translated to this place. The whole thing smacked of magic yet it could not be magic. Whatever had been done must have utilized the application of certain physical laws. Magic itself, if it did exist, he argued with himself, must be no more than the application of physical laws as yet unknown back in the world he’d come from.
Andy, talking over their drinks at the Faculty Club, had talked of an end to knowledge, an end to physical law. But Andy had not known or even had a glimmer of understanding about the concepts that he had talked about; he was doing no more than flapping his mouth around to produce philosophical mutterings.
Could the answer be here, he wondered, in this world where he sat beside the campfire? Might that be what
