“The two who are with you?”
“They were not with us to start with. They are from another group. We found them at the inn.”
“They seem to be nice people,” said Correy. “Here they come, to join us.”
Lansing looked up and saw Jorgenson and Melissa walking around the circle. Jorgenson, coming up, squatted down in front of him. Melissa remained standing. “Melissa and I want to tell you something,” Jorgenson said. “We’re sorry, but we’re not going with you. We’ve decided to stay here.”
29
It was just as well, Lansing told himself. He could travel easier and faster by himself. Since morning he had covered a lot of ground — more, he was convinced, than he would have covered if the other two had been tagging along. More than that, he hadn’t liked either one of them. Melissa was a whining bitch and Jorgenson was an unlovely bastard.
If he had regretted leaving anyone, it had been Correy. Though he had spent only a few hours with him, he had liked the man. He had given him somewhat more than half of the coins that still were left and had shaken hands with him. In accepting the donation, Correy had been studiously gracious, thanking him not for himself but for the band.
“I shall husband this sudden wealth in the common interest,” he had said. “I know, given the chance, everyone would thank you.”
“Think nothing of it,” Lansing had told him. “Mary and I may be back.”
“We’ll keep a place beside the fire for you,” Correy had told him. “I hope most sincerely you don’t have to come back. Life here is not a good prospect. Maybe you’ll find a way out. Some of us must. I hope you do.”
He had not thought until Correy had spoken so that there remained any hope of finding a way out of the situation. Long ago, he realized, he had given up such hope. His one hope had been to find Mary so that together they could face whatever was in store for them.
He thought about it as he trudged along. Correy, he knew, had spoken more cheerfully than he’d really thought, but the question still remained — could there yet remain some hope? Logic said that hope was slight, and he was a trifle disgusted at himself for entertaining any thought of it. Yet, as he walked along, he still could detect, deep inside himself, that small, faint glimmer of it.
The travel was comparatively easy. The hills were steep, but the forest was open. There was no water problem. Time after time he came on small creeks and rills running between the hills.
By nightfall he came upon the badlands. They were not, however, the colorful nightmare his band had traversed after leaving the city. These were small badlands, the beginning of badlands that had stopped before going far. Here the action of primeval water had not finished with its job. The rains had stopped, the massive erosion had been ended before full badlands had developed. There were small floodplains, a few deeply channeled gulches, fantastically carved formations that were not complete, as if a sculptor had thrown away his mallet and chisel, in frustration or disgust, before his work was done.
“Tomorrow,” Lansing said, speaking aloud to himself, “I will reach the city.”
He did reach it the next day, just after the sun had marked off noon. He stood on one of the high hills that ringed it in and looked out over it. Down there, he thought, Mary could be waiting for him, and when he thought it, he found that he was trembling.
He plunged down the hill and found a street that led to the city’s heart. It all had the old, familiar look to it — the red, eroded walls, the blocks of fallen stone cluttering the street, the dust over everything.
In the plaza he halted and looked around to orient himself. Once he had gotten his directions straightened out, he knew where he was. Over there to the left was the broken facade of the so-called administration building, with the single tower still standing, and down a street eater-cornered to it he would find the installation.
Standing In the plaza, be called for Mary, but there was no answer. He called a few more times and then he called no more, for the haunting echo of his voice, reverberating back to him, was terrifying.
He walked across the plaza to the administration building and climbed the broad stone stairs to reach the entrance hall where they had camped. His footsteps raised booming echoes that sounded like querulous voices crying out to him. He prowled about the hall and found evidence of their having been there, an emptied can or two, an emptied cracker box, a mug that someone had forgotten. He wanted to go down into the basement and look at the doors, but he was afraid to. He started several times and each time turned back. What was he afraid of? he asked himself — afraid that he would find one of the doors, perhaps the one to the apple-blossom world, had been opened? No, he told himself — no, no, Mary never would do that. Not now would she do it, maybe later on when all hope of finding him was gone, that and all other hope, but certainly not now. Perhaps, he thought, it would be impossible for anyone to do it. The Brigadier had carried away the wrench, probably had hidden it somewhere. Never again, the Brigadier had vowed, would a door be opened.
Standing silently, unmoving in the entrance hall, he seemed to hear their voices, talking not to him, but to one another. He tried to shut his ears to them, but the voices still persisted.
He had planned to camp there, but decided that he couldn’t. There were too many voices, the memories were too thick. So he moved out into the center of the plaza and began hauling in wood from wherever he could find it. All the rest of the afternoon he worked, building a good-sized woodpile. Then, as dark came down, he made a fire and fed it to make it bright and high. If Mary should be in the city, or approaching it or somewhere watching it, she would see the fire and know that someone was there.
On a smaller fire he boiled coffee and cooked some food.
As he ate, he attempted to work out a plan of action, but all that he could think of was to search the city, every street if need be. Although, he told himself, that would be wasted effort. If Mary was in the city, or even now be coming up on it, she would head straight for the plaza, knowing that anyone else who came to the city would do the same.
The Wailer came out on the hills when the moon came up and cried out its agony of loneliness. Lansing sat beside the fire and listened, crying out and answering with his own loneliness.
“Come down here to the fire, with me,” he told the Wailer, “and we can mourn together.”
It was not until then that the realization struck him that the loneliness might keep on and on, that he might never find Mary. He tried to envision how it might be to never see her again, to continue life without her, and how it might be for her. He quailed at the thought of it and huddled closer to the fire, but there was no warmth in it.
He tried to sleep; he slept but little. In the morning he started his search. Gritting his teeth against the fear, he visited the doors. None of them had been opened. He searched out the installation and went down the stairs that led to it. For a long time he stood listening to the song the machines were crooning to themselves. He searched streets haphazardly, inattentively, knowing that he was wasting time. But he kept on, for there was a need to keep busy, to keep himself distracted and somehow occupied.
For four days he searched and found nothing. Then he wrote a note to Mary and left it, weighed down by the mug someone had forgotten, beside the old campfire in the administration building, and took the trail back to the cube and inn.
How long had it been, he wondered, since he first had found himself upon this world? He tried to count the days, but his memory was hazed and he lost track each time he tried to count. A month, he wondered, could it have been no more than a month? Thinking back, it seemed half of all the time there was.
He tried to spot landmarks along the trail. Here we had camped, he’d tell himself, here is where Mary had seen the faces in the sky. Over there is where Jurgens had found the spring. Here is where I had cut the wood. But he was never sure if he was right or not. It was too deep into the past, he told himself, a month into the past.
Finally he came to a hilltop from which he could sight the cube. It still was there, as bright and classically beautiful as he remembered it. For a moment he was surprised to see it — not that he hadn’t expected to find it, but he would not have been greatly surprised if he had not found it. This world, during the last few days, had seemed to assume a phantom quality, with him walking through a vacuum.
He walked down the switchbacks that wound down the long, steep hillside and reached the hill-rimmed bowl where the cube was sited. As he came around the final bend in the road before it reached the cube, he saw that someone was there. He had not seen them before, but now there they were, the four of them sitting on the stone
