“As a matter of fact,” said Lansing, “we are heading for the city.”
“For what reason?” Correy asked. “There is nothing there. All of us know that.”
“He’s hunting for a lost girl friend,” said Jorgenson. “He has the idea she may be going there.”
“In that case,” Correy said to Lansing, “I sincerely hope you find her. You know how to get there?”
“Southeast,” said Lansing. “That should get us there.”
“Yes, I think it will,” said Correy.
“Do you know anything about the country up ahead?”
“Only for a few miles. We stay fairly close to camp. We do not wander far.”
“You are people, I suppose, the same as us. I don’t know what to call us. I’ve never thought about that. But people who were brought here.”
“We are part of them,” said Correy. “There may be other bands like us, but if so, we don’t know where they are. You know, of course, that few of us survive. We are a small group of survivors. There are thirty-two of us here. Twelve men, the rest are women. Some of us have been here for years.”
The dark-visaged Frenchman spoke to him, and Correy said to Lansing, “You will pardon me. I forgot my manners. Will you not come into camp and join us? It will be dark before too long and supper now is cooking. We have a huge pot of rabbit stew and plenty of fish to fry. I wouldn’t be surprised if there should be a salad, although we are long since out of dressing and must do with hot cooking fat. I must warn you also we are short of salt. Long since we have become accustomed to the lack, and it no longer bothers us.”
“Nor will it bother us,” Melissa told him. “We accept your invitation gladly.”
A short distance up the valley, as they rounded a grove of trees that had hidden it, they came upon a cornfield with a few shocks of harvested stalks still standing in it. Beyond the field, in a sheltered cove formed by a sharp bend in the river’s course, stood a collection of rude huts and a few tattered, weatherbeaten tents. Fires were burning and small groups of waiting people stood about.
Correy gestured at the cornfield. “It’s a poor thing at the best, but we take good care of it and each season harvest enough to take us through the winter. We also have a rather extensive garden plot. Mrs. Mason secured for us the seed corn and the seeds we needed to plant the garden.”
“Mrs. Mason?” Melissa asked.
“She is the landlady at the inn,” said Correy. “A grasping soul, but she has cooperated with us. At times she sends recruits, people of our sort who have nowhere else to go and gravitate back to the inn. She doesn’t want them there unless they have money they can spend. Few of them do, so she gets rid of them by sending them to us. However, our population does not grow by any appreciable number. There are deaths, especially in the bitter winter months. We have, among other things, a growing cemetery.”
“There’s no way back?” asked Jorgenson. “No way back to the worlds you came from?”
“None that we have found,” said Correy. “Not that we have sought extensively. A few of us have. Most just hunker down.”
The evening meal was ready to be dished up by the time they arrived at the camp. They sat down, the three of them, in a circle with all the others about the central campfire and were given bowls of stewed rabbit and others of boiled, mixed vegetables and platters of crisp-fried fish. There was no coffee or tea, only water to drink. There was not a salad, as Correy had said there might be.
Many of the people in the camp, perhaps all of them (Lansing tried to keep count, but lost the count) came to shake their hands and welcome them. Most of them spoke in foreign tongues, a few in broken English. There were two other than Correy for whom English was a native language. Both of them were women, and immediately they squatted down with Melissa and the three of them jabbered away at an alarming rate.
The food, despite the lack of salt, was good.
“You said you lack salt,” Lansing said to Correy, “and probably a number of other things. Yet you say that Mrs. Mason secured seed for your garden and your patch of corn. Won’t she get you salt and other necessities you need?”
“Oh, most willingly,” said Correy, “but we have no money. The treasury has run out. Perhaps earlier we spent it more freely than was wise.”
“I have some left,” said Lansing. “Would a donation be in order?”
“I would not wish to solicit funds,” said Correy, “but if, of your own free will…”
“I’ll leave a small sum with you.”
“You’re not staying with us? You are welcome, as you must know.”
“I told you I was going to the city.”
“Yes, I do recall.”
“I’ll be glad to spend the night,” Lansing told him. “In the morning I will leave.”
“Perhaps you will come back.”
“You mean if I don’t find Mary.”
“Even if you find her. Any time you wish. She’ll be welcome if she returns with you.”
Lansing looked about the camp. It was not the sort of place where he would care to settle down. Life here would be hard. There would be unremitting labor — chopping and bringing in wood, taking care of the garden and the cornfield, the never-ending scrounging for food. There would be bitter little rivalries, the flaring of tempers, incessant squabbling.
“We have worked out a primitive way of life,” said Correy, “and we manage rather well. There are fish to be taken from the river, the valleys and the hills have game. Some of us have become experts at trapping — there are a number of rabbits. More some years than others. A couple of years ago, when a drought hit us, all of us worked hard and long, carrying water from the river for the garden and the corn. But we managed; we had a splendid harvest.”
“It’s amazing,” Lansing said, “such a varied mix of people. Or I suppose it’s varied.”
“Very much so,” Correy said. “In my former life I was a member of a diplomatic corps. We have, among others, a geologist, a farmer who once owned and worked thousands of acres, a certified public accountant, a noted and once-pampered actress, a woman noted as an eminent historian, a social worker, a banker. I could go on and on.”
“Have you, in the time that you and the others have had to think about it, arrived at any conclusions as to why we all may have been brought here?”
“No, not actually. There are many speculations, as you may guess, but nothing solid. There are those who think they know, but I’m quite certain that they don’t. There are people, you understand, who find a certain stability in convincing themselves they are right about even the most fantastic notions. It gives them something they can cling to, a certainty that they know what is going on, that they know while all the rest of us are groping in the dark.”
“And you? Yourself?”
“I am one of those people who is cursed by being able to see both sides, or the many sides, of a question. As a diplomat, it was imperative that I should. I find it necessary to be strictly honest with myself; I will not allow myself to fool myself.”
“So you have no hard conviction?”
“Not a single one. All of it is as much a mystery to me as the day that I arrived.”
“What do you know of the country we’ll be traveling to reach the city? How about the badlands?”
“It’s rough and hilly,” said Correy, “so far as we have ventured. Forest mostly. But not hard going. The badlands I do not know about. We have not come upon them. They must lie east of here.”
“You are quite content to stay here? You have not ventured farther? You have not looked?”
“Not content,” said Correy, “but what is there to do? Some of us have gone north to Chaos. Did you go that far?”
“I did. I lost a good friend there.”
“The north is closed by Chaos,” Correy said. “There is no getting past it. What it is, I do not know, but it blocks the way. For a hundred miles or more beyond the tower is nothing but man-killing desert. To the south, so far as we have gone, there seems no promise. So now you go back to the city, hoping you will find something that you missed.”
“No,” said Lansing. “I am going to find Mary. I must find her. She and I are the only ones of our band who are left. The other four were lost.”
