Destiny Doll

TWENTY

We made good time, not looking back. I did look back, for an instant only, before we plunged into the canyonlike cleft between the soaring rocks that led back to the gateway.

Sara came to and screamed at me, kicking and beating at my back with clenched fists, but I hung tightly to her with one arm, holding her against my shoulder. In the other arm, I clutched the wooden box I had lifted from the table.

Still running, we reached the end of the canyon. Roscoe and Paint stood exactly as we had left them. Sara’s rifle leaned against the rocky wail and my sword and shield lay beside them.

I dumped Sara on the ground with no ceremony. I had taken quite a beating from her flailing feet and fists, and was not feeling exactly kindly toward her and was glad to be rid of her.

She landed on her rump and stayed sitting there, looking up at me, her face white with fury, her jaws working, but so sore at me that she could form no word but one, “You- you-you,” she kept saying. It was probably the first time in her money-buttressed life that anyone had laid violent and disrespectful hands upon her.

I stood there, looking down at her, blown with my mad, frantic running up the valley and through the canyon, gulping air, weak in the knees, sore in the back and belly, where she had hammered me-and thinking of that one backward look I’d taken before I’d plunged into the canyon.

“You hit me!” she finally said screaming in her outrage.

She said it and waited for my answer. But I had no answer. I had no answer in my mind and no breath to speak an answer. I don’t know what she expected as an answer. Maybe she was hoping I’d deny it, so that she could berate me not only as a bully, but a liar, too.

“You hit me!” she screamed again.

“You’re damned right I did,” I said. “You didn’t see a thing. You would have argued with me. There was nothing else to do.”

She leaped to her feet and confronted me. “We found Lawrence Arlen Knight,” she yelled. “We found a wonderful, shining place. After all our traveling, we found what we set out to find and then. . .”

Hoot said, “Gracious lady, the fault belongs on me. I sensed it with the edges of my third self and I made Mike to see. Strength I did not have to make more than one of you to see. Not the second one. And I made Mike to see. . .”

She whirled on him. “You filthy beast!” she cried. She lashed out with her foot. The kick caught him in the side and bowled him over. He lay there, his tiny feet working like little pistons, trying frantically to right himself.

Then, swiftly, she was on her knees beside him. “Hoot,” she cried, “I’m sorry. Can you believe me, I am sorry. I am sorry and ashamed.” She set him on his feet.

She looked up at me. “Mike! Oh, Mike! What has happened to us?”

“Enchantment,” I said. “It’s the only thing I can think of that would cover it. Enchantment happened to us.”

“Kindly one,” Hoot said to her, “resentment I do not bear. Reaction of the foot was a natural one. I quite understand.”

“Stand,” said Roscoe, “band, grand, sand.”

“Shut up,” said Old Paint, gruffly. “You’ll drive us nuts with that gibberish.”

“It was all illusion,” I told her. “There were no marble villas. There were only filthy huts. The stream did not run free and shining; it was clogged with garbage from those huts. There was a terrible smell to it that caught you in the throat. And Lawrence Arlen Knight, if that is who he was, was a walking corpse kept alive by God knows what alchemy.”

“Wanted here we’re not,” said Hoot.

“We are trespassers,” I said. “Once here we can’t go back to space because no one must know about this planet. We’re caught in a big fly trap. Once we came near we were tolled in to a landing by the signal. And finally we chased a myth and that myth was another fly trap-a trap within a trap.”

“But Lawrence Arlen Knight chased the myth back in the galaxy.”

“And so did we,” I said. “So did the humanoids who left their bones back in the gully. In some insect traps certain scents and odors are used to attract the insects, even from far off. And in many cases the scents and odors drift on the winds to very distant places. Read, instead of scent and odor, myth and legend. . .”

“But that man back there,” she said, “was happy and contented and so full of life and plans. His days were busy days and full. Knight or not, he was sure he’d reached the place that he had hunted.”

“What simpler way,” I asked, “to keep a life form where you want it than to make it happy where you put it?”

“You are sure?” she asked. “Sure of what you saw? Hoot could not have fooled you?”

“Fool him I did not,” said Hoot. “I make him see it straight.”

“But what difference would it make?” she asked. “If he is happy there. If he has purpose there. If life is meaningful and there is no such thing as time to rob it of its meaning. . .”

“You mean we could have stayed?”

She nodded. “He said there was a place for us. That there are always places. We could have settled down. We could have...”

“Sara,” I asked, “is that what you really want? To settle down in imagined happiness? Never to go back to Earth?”

She started to speak, then hesitated.

“You know damn well,” I said, “it isn’t. Back on Earth you have this house filled with hides and heads, with trophies of the hunt. The great huntress. The killer of the vicious life forms of the galaxy. They gave you social status, they made you a glamor figure. But there were too many of them. People began to yawn at them. They were getting bored with your adventures. So to keep on being glamorous, you had to hunt a different game. . .”

She leaped to her feet and her hand swung in a vicious arc and caught me in the face.

I grinned at her. “We’re even now,” I said.