“I’m willing,” Lansing said. “There’s no sense in going to the tower since you just left. Tell me about Sandra. Did you bury her?”
Melissa shook her head. “We talked about it, but we couldn’t. To bury her seemed not quite right. We decided we should leave her where she was. She is little better than a mummy. I think she died as she would have wanted to. We thought it best to leave her.”
Lansing nodded. “My thoughts were much the same. I even wondered if she’d died. It seemed to me, looking at her, that she had only gone away. The life of her, the spirit of her, going somewhere else, leaving a withered, worthless husk behind.”
“I think that you are right,” Melissa said. “I can’t put it into words, but I think that you are right. She stood apart from all of us; she was never one of us. What would be right for us would not be right for her.”
They built a fire, cooked food, boiled coffee and ate, crouched around the fire. The moon came up, the stars came out and the night was lonely.
Holding the coffee mug in both his hands, sipping occasionally at the brew, Lansing thought back to Chaos and to Jurgens, principally to Jurgens. Had there been, he asked himself, anything that he could have done to save the robot? Had there been some way, if he only had been able to think well and fast enough, that he could have walked down the sloping sand to catch his sliding friend and haul him back to safety? His mind was blank as to any suggestion of how he might have done it. Yet he could not escape the sense of guilt that rose up to choke him; he had been there. Certainly there had been some action that he could have taken. He had tried, of course; he had ventured out on the sliding sand slope, he had had a try at it, but that had not been good enough. He had tried and failed, and failure itself spelled out to guilt.
And what of Jurgens now? Where had he gone, where was he now? He, Lansing, had not even paid his friend the courtesy of watching where he’d gone. He had been busy at the time, trying to save himself, but be that as it may, he somehow should have managed to note what had happened to the robot. It seemed, he told himself sourly, that there was no end to guilt. Whatever a man might do, there was always guilt.
The assumption must be that Jurgens had kept on sliding, unable to stop the slide, until he came to that point where the black curtain of roaring Chaos (whatever Chaos might be) came down to meet the sand. And what happened then? What was it Jurgens had said just before the fall? The end of everything. There goes the universe. Eaten by the blackness. Had Jurgens known? Or had he been only talking? There was no way to know.
It was strange, Lansing thought, the ways they had been lost. The Parson walking through a door. The Brigadier being taken up (taken up?) by the two banks of machines crooning to themselves. Sandra sucked dry of life by a singing tower. Jurgens sliding into Chaos. And Mary — Mary walking off. But as yet Mary was not gone — at least so far as he knew, she was not gone as the others now were gone. There still was hope for Mary.
Jorgenson asked, “Lansing, what is going on? You seem deep in thought.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Lansing said, “of what we should do come morning.”
He had not been thinking that, but it was something he could say to answer Jorgenson.
“I suppose back to the city,” said Jorgenson. “That’s what you indicated.”
“You will come with me?” Lansing asked.
“I won’t go to the city,” Melissa said. “I was in the city once and—”
“You won’t go to the city and you won’t go north,” said Jorgenson. “There are too many places you refuse to go. Much more of this, by Jesus, and I’m walking off and leaving you. You’re bitching all the time.”
“I think we could save some time,” said Lansing, “by going cross-country.”
“What do you mean, cross-country?”
“Well, look,” said Lansing. He put down the cup and with the palm of one hand smoothed out a place in the sand. With an extended forefinger he began to draw a map. “When we left the city we traveled the badlands trail. We were going slightly west, but mostly north. Then when we left the inn, we traveled straight west to the tower. It seems to me there should be a shorter way.”
He had drawn one line to represent the badlands trail, another, at right angles to it, between the inn and tower. Now he made another mark, connecting the tower and city. “If we went that way, there’d be less ground to cover. A triangle, you see. Instead of traveling two legs of it, we’d travel only one. Head southeast.”
“We’d be in unknown country,” Jorgenson protested. “No trail to follow. We’d get tangled in the badlands. We would lose our way.”
“We could maintain our bearing with compass readings. It might be we would miss the badlands. They may not extend this far west. It would be a shorter way to go.”
“I don’t know,” said Jorgenson.
“I do. That’s the way I’m going. Will you come along?”
Jorgenson hesitated for a long moment, then he said, “Yes, we’ll come along.”
They set out at early dawn. An hour or so later they crossed the eastward-running river that some miles later would flow past the bin. They crossed at a shallow ford, barely getting wet.
The character of the land began to change. It went in a gentle slope upward from the river, marked by long ridges, each ridge rising higher than the last. It became less arid. There was less sand, more grass. Trees began to appear and as they climbed each successive ridge, the trees increased in number and in size. In some of the small valleys that separated the ridges, tiny creeks made their way, clear, sparkling water chattering over rocky courses.
Toward the end of the day they topped one ridge that stood considerably higher than those they had been crossing and saw, spread out before them, a valley somewhat wider and more lush than the others they had seen — a green valley with many trees and, far below, a river of respectable size. A short distance up the valley, toward the west, thin curls of smoke spiraled up into the air.
“People,” said Jorgenson. “There must be people there.”
He started moving forward, but Lansing put out a hand to halt him.
“What’s the matter?” asked Jorgenson.
“We don’t go rushing in.”
“But I tell you, there are people.”
“I suppose there are. But we don’t go rushing in. Neither do we sneak up. We let them know we’re here and give them a chance to look us over.”
“You know about everything,” said Jorgenson, sneering.
“Not everything,” Lansing told him. “Only common sense. Either we give them a chance to look us over or we sneak around them, pass them by.”
“I think we should go in,” Melissa said. “Mary may be there. Or someone might know something of her.”
“That’s unlikely,” Lansing said. “I’m convinced she headed for the city. She’d have no occasion to come this way.”
“We’re going in,” said Jorgenson, a belligerent tone in his voice. “Someone may know what is going on. If so, it’ll be the first time we’ve known since we came here.”
“Okay,” said Lansing. “We’ll go in.”
They went down the hill until they reached the valley, went slowly up it, toward the smoke. Up ahead someone saw them and shouted warning. The three halted and stood waiting. In a short time a small group of people, ten or so, appeared, making their way down the valley toward them. The crowd stopped and three men walked forward.
Lansing, standing in front of Jorgenson and Melissa, studied the three as they approached. One of them was old. His hair and beard were white. The other two were younger — one a blond youth with yellow beard and hair that hung down to his shoulders, the other a grim, dark-visaged, dark-haired man. He wore no beard, but the stubble on his face was heavy; he had not shaved for several days. Their clothing was in tatters, elbows out, holes in the knees of their trousers, rips and tears inexpertly sewed together. The old man wore what appeared to be a vest of rabbit fur.
The three halted only a few paces away. The yellow-haired man spoke in a strange tongue.
“Heathen talk,” said Jorgenson. “Why can’t he speak English?”
“Foreign, not heathen,” Lansing said. “German, at a guess. Do any of you speak English?”
“I speak it,” the old man said. “I and a couple of others in the camp. Your guess is correct. My young friend does speak German. Pierre, here, speaks French. I can understand both fairly well. My name is Allen Correy. I would suppose you might have come from the tower. You must have lost your way.”
