Destiny Doll

TWENTY-ONE

We turned back, traveling down the trail that we had used in coming, back across that great blue land of high plateau, with the purple mountains looming up behind us.

I had expected Sara to raise a fuss about it. I was not sure that she believed what I had told her; how could she? All she had was my word for it and I was not certain how much reliance she would put upon my word. She had seen none of what I’d seen. So far as she was concerned, the valley still was a shining place, with a flashing stream and bright white sunlight, with the marble villas still perched among the crags. If she were to go back, I was sure, it would all be there for her, unchanged. The enchantment still was working for her.

We had no plans. We had no place to go. Certainly there was no incentive to reach the desert we had crossed. The great white city had no attraction for us. I don’t know what Hoot or Sara might have been thinking. I know that for myself the only thought was to build up some distance between ourselves and that gateway to the valley.

I had forgotten the blueness of the high plateau with its mossy hummocks, its thickets of sweet-smelling shrubs, the icy rills and, towering in every direction, the trees that reached miles into the sky. If one looked for a reason why this planet should be closed, or intended to be closed, I felt that one must look toward those towering trees. For they were clearly the handiwork of another intelligence. Trees, seeding naturally, do not grow in a grid arrangement, each one exactly so far from its nearest neighbor. One tended to become accustomed to them after a time, but this was only, I was well aware, because the mind, tired of fruitless speculation, turned them off, rejecting them as a way of preserving itself against the devastating question mark of wonder written by the trees.

That night, beside the campfire, we tried to put into perspective the situation which confronted us.

There seemed no hope we could get into the spaceship which stood on the field in the center of the city. At least two dozen other ships also stood upon the field. In all the years they’d stood there others must have tried to crack them, but there was no evidence they had.

And what had happened to those other people, those other creatures, that had ridden in the ships? We knew, of course, what had happened to the humanoids whose skeletons we’d found in the gully. We could speculate that the centaurs might be retrogressed out-planet creatures which, centuries ago had landed on the field. The planet was large, with more land surface than the Earth, and there was plenty of space in which other stranded travelers might have found a living niche and settled down. Some of them might be living in the city, although that seemed doubtful because of the killing vibrations which swept the city whenever a ship should land. And there was, as well, the consideration that many expeditions might have consisted only of male members of a species, which would mean there’d be no continuation. Marooned, they’d simply die and that would be the end of it.

“There’s one more possibility,” said Sara. “Some of them may be back there in the valley. We know that Knight made it. Some of the others, perhaps many of the others, might have made it, too.”

I nodded, agreeing with her. It was the final trap. If a visitor did not perish in reaching it, then there was the valley. Once in it, no one would get out. It was the perfect trap in that no one would ever want to leave it. Although there could be no seeking what Lawrence Arlen Knight had sought-and what we had sought. They might have come for reasons quite unknown to us.

“You are sure,” asked Sara, “that you really saw what you say you saw?”

“I don’t know what I can do,” I told her, “to make you believe me. Do you think I threw it all away? To spite you, maybe? Don’t you think I might have been a little happy, too? Maybe, being a suspicious sort of clown, not as happy as you were, but after all those miles. . .”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “You had no reason to. But why you alone? Why not me? I did not see these things.”

“Hoot explained all that,” I told her. “He could alert only one of us. And he alerted me. . .”

“A part of me is Mike,” said Hoot. “We owe one another life. A bond there is between us. His mind is always with me. We be almost one.”

“One,” said Roscoe solemnly, “done, fun, gun...”

“Cease your clack,” said Paint. “No sense at all you make.”

“Fake,” said Roscoe.

“The almost human one,” said Hoot, “tries, to talk with us.

“His brain is addled,” I said. “That’s what is wrong with him. The centaurs. . .”

“No,” said Hoot. “He attempts communication.”

I hunched around and stared up at Roscoe. He stood straight and rigid, the flare of firelight on his metal hide. And I remembered how, back there in the badlands, when we had asked a question, he had signaled that we should travel north. Did he, in fact, still understand? Was there something he could tell us if he could put it into words?

I said to Hoot, “Can you dig it out of him?”

“It beyond my power,” said Hoot.

“Don’t you understand,” Sara said to me, “that there is no use trying. We’re not going to get back to Earth; or anywhere. We are staying on this planet.”

“There is one thing we could try,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I thought of it, too... The other worlds. The worlds like the sand dune world. There must be hundreds of them.”

“Out of all those hundreds, there might be. . .”

She shook her head. “You underestimate the people who built the city and set out the trees. They knew what they were doing. Every one of those worlds would be as isolated as this world. Those worlds were chosen for a purpose. . .”

“Have you ever thought,” I argued, “that one of them might be the home planet of the folks who built the city?”

“No, I never have,” she said. “But what difference would it make? They’d squash you like a bug.”

“Then what do we do?” I asked.

“I could go back to the valley,” she said. “I didn’t see what you saw. I wouldn’t see what you saw.”

“That’s all right for you,” I said, “if that’s the kind of life you want to live.”

“What difference would it make?” she asked. “I wouldn’t know what kind of life it was. It would be real enough. How would it be any different than the life we’re living now? How do we know it isn’t the kind of life we’re living now? How do you judge reality?”

There was, of course, no answer to her questions. There was no way in which one could prove reality. Lawrence Arlen Knight had accepted the pseudo-life, the unreality of the valley, living in delusion, imagining an ideal life with as much force and clarity as if it had been real. But that was for Knight; easy, perhaps, for all the other residents of the valley, for they did not know what was going on. I found myself wondering what sort of fantasy had been invoked within his mind to explain our precipitate departure from his living place. Something, naturally, that would not upset him, that would not interrupt, for a single instant, the dream in which he lived.

“It’s all right for you,” I said, limply, beaten. “I couldn’t go back.”

We sat silently by the fire, all talked out, nothing more to say. There was no use in arguing with her. She didn’t really mean it. In the morning she would have forgotten it and good sense would prevail. We’d be on our way again. But on our way to where?

“Mike,” she finally said.

“Yes, what is it?”

“It could have been good between us if we had stayed on Earth. We are two of a kind. We could have gotten on.”

I glanced up sharply. Her face was lighted by the flicker of the fire and there was a strange softness in it.

“Forget it,” I said angrily. “I make it a rule never to make a pass at my employer.”

I expected her to be furious, but she wasn’t. She didn’t even wince.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” she said. “You know what I mean. This trip spoiled it for us. We found out too much about one another. Too many things to hate. I am sorry, Mike.”

“So am I,” I said.

In the morning she was gone.