“You must realize,” said Jurgens, “that it might have been impossible for him to separate himself from it. He may have been so biologically tied to it that there was no escape from it. He probably would not have minded it too much. He would have been accustomed to it. And such a machine would have some advantages. In a place like this it would.”
“Yes,” said Lansing, “yes, it would.”
“Here he came to grief,” said Jurgens. “Here, in all his arrogance, he came to final grief.”
Lansing looked at the robot. “You think that all humans are arrogant. That it’s a mark of the human race.”
“Not all humans,” Jurgens said. “You can understand if I hold some bitterness. To be left behind…”
“It has festered all these years?”
“Not festered,” Jurgens said.
They were silent for a time, then the robot said, “Not you. You are not arrogant. You never have been. The Parson was, so was the Brigadier. Sandra, in her gentle way…”
“Yes, I know,” said Lansing. “I hope you can forgive them.”
“You and Mary,” Jurgens said. “I’d lay down my life for you and Mary.”
“And yet you would not tell Mary about yourself. You refused to tell her.”
“She would have pitied me,” said Jurgens. “I could not have withstood her pity. You have never pitied me.”
“No, I haven’t,” Lansing said.
“Edward, let us leave the arrogance behind. The two of us now should be upon our way.”
“You lead, I follow,” Lansing said. “We have no time to waste. I didn’t like leaving Mary. Even now I find it hard not to turn back.”
“Three days more and we’ll be back. We’ll find her safe and sound. Four days is all we’ll give ourselves.”
They found no wood along the way. The land was scoured bare of everything. That night they made camp without a fire.
In a hard, enameled way, the night was beautiful. Empty sand and a soaring moon, while out toward the edges of the sky, undimmed by the white brilliance of the moon, the stars shone with a fierce intensity.
Lansing felt the essence of the night soaking into him — the hard, the cruel, the classic beauty of it. Once he heard what he thought was wailing. It came from the south, and it sounded like the wailing of the great lost beast that had wailed above the city and again from the badlands butte. He listened intently, not certain he had heard it, but it did not come again.
“Did you hear anything?” he asked Jurgens.
Jurgens said he hadn’t.
The robot woke Lansing well before dawn. The moon was hanging just above the western horizon and the stars were paling in the east.
“Eat something,” Jurgens told him, “and we’ll be on our way.”
“Nothing now,” said Lansing. “A drink of water’s all. I’ll eat later while we walk.”
The going was fairly easy to start with, but by noon they began to encounter dunes again, small ones at first, growing larger as they went along. They were in a world of shifting yellow sand, with the pale blue of the sky a dome that came down and enclosed the sand. The land ahead of them gradually sloped upward until it seemed they were climbing into the hard blue sky. Ahead of them a narrow strip of sky above the northern horizon assumed a darker, deeper shade of blue, and as they climbed over the treacherous dunes, the sand sliding underneath their feet, so did the darker strip climb higher in the sky, turning from dark blue at its top to black a little lower down.
Vague, muted mumblings came from the north. As they fought to make their way against the dunes, the mumbling grew louder.
Jurgens stopped at the top of one high dune and waited for Lansing to catch up. Lansing pulled up beside him, panting with the climb.
“That sounds like thunder up ahead,” said Jurgens. “A heavy storm may be coming up.”
“The color of the sky looks right,” said Lansing, “but it doesn’t look like a storm cloud. I never saw one with an edge that runs straight across. There usually are big thunderheads boiling up, and I see no thunderheads.”
“I thought awhile ago,” Jurgens said, “that I saw a lightning flash, not the bolt itself, but a nicker, like the reflection of a flash.”
“Heat lightning,” Lansing told him. “A reflection against the clouds of lightning far away.”
“In a while we’ll see what it is,” said Jurgens. “Are you ready to go on? Or shall we rest awhile?”
“Go on. I’ll tell you when I need to rest.”
By midafternoon, the great black cloud had climbed well above the horizon. In places it had tinges of deep purple and was, in all, a frightening phenomenon. It appeared to have no motion, no roiling clouds, no wind-driven banks of scudding vapor, although at times it seemed to Lansing, when he stopped for a moment to watch it, to have an almost imperceptible downward movement, as if a thin film of some substance was running down across the blackness, as a thin sheet of water would run down a window-pane during a summer shower. A sense of terrible violence seemed inherent in the cloud itself, the overwhelming threat of heavy weather, and yet there was no visible violence or even threat of violence except for the massive lightning strokes that at intervals ran across the face of darkness. Now the rumble of thunder was continuous.
“Most unusual,” Jurgens said. “I have never seen the like of it.”
“Chaos?” Lansing asked. Asking it, he remembered the chaos, or the sense of chaos (for he doubted now that he’d really seen it) he had glimpsed when he had stood for a moment on the hill of suns above the universe. And that glimpsed chaos, that glimpsed universal chaos had not been anything like this, although he realized that if he were called upon to describe it, he would be unable to tell a single thing about it.
“Perhaps,” said Jurgens. “I ask you: What is Chaos?”
Lansing did not attempt to answer.
They climbed on, and now the way was steeper than it had been at any time since they had started out. They toiled upward over a series of ever higher dunes, and ahead of them the horizon curved away from them to both left and right, as if they were climbing one continuous dune, the rim of which ran in a semicircle, either side of it impinging on the blackness in the sky.
Late in the afternoon they reached the top of the great ridge they had been climbing. Lansing, exhausted, slumped down to the sand, leaning against a large boulder. A large boulder? he asked himself. A boulder here when there had been up to this time nothing larger than a grain of sand? He staggered to his feet, amazed, and the boulder was there — not one boulder, but a clump of them, perched just below the ultimate height of the dune they had been climbing. Resting in the sand, as if someone had, perhaps in ages past, carefully placed them there.
Jurgens stood on top of the dune, straddle-legged, with his crutch dug deep into the sand to prop him up and keep his balance.
To right and left swept the curving edge of the dune that they had climbed, while in front of them the surface broke sharply to plunge downward in an unbroken slope until it reached the bottom of the massive cloud that loomed in front of them.
Looking directly at the cloud, Lansing saw that it was not a cloud, although what it was he did not know. It was a massive wall of utter blackness that rose from where it met the surface of the downward-sloping sand far into the sky, so far that he was forced to crane his neck to see the top of it.
Lightning bolts still slashed across its face with devastating ferocity, and thunder crashed and rumbled. The wall, he saw or thought he saw, was a monstrous dam raised against the sky, and over the lip of it was pouring something that was not water, a gigantic waterfall of a blackness that was not water, crashing down across the face of it, a waterfall so solid and unbroken that he did not see the actual falling of it, but only had the hypnotic sense of its falling. Watching it, he realized that it was not only thunder that he heard, but the deep, awful roar of whatever was falling over the lip of the dam, the Niagara-like rushing sound of something falling from great height, falling from the unknown into the unknown. It seemed to him that the very ground beneath him was trembling with the roar.
He turned his head and looked at Jurgens, but the robot did not notice him. He was leaning heavily upon his crutch, staring at the blackness, seemingly entranced and hypnotized by it, rigid with his watching.
Lansing shifted his gaze back to the blackness and now, clearer than ever, it seemed to be a dam, although a
