Destiny Doll

THREE

And I should have thought on it much longer, I told myself as I stood on that moon-washed desert; I never should have gone.

Smith still was crawling around on his hands and knees and whimpering. His blind-white eyes, catching the moonlight, glinted like the eyes of a hunting cat. Tuck was getting his legs unwound from the ridiculous robe he wore, stumbling toward the moaning Smith. What was it, I wondered, that made the two of them such pals? Not homosexuality, for that would have been apparent in the close confines of the space trip out from Earth; there must be within them some sort o spiritual need that reached out and touched the other. Certainly Smith would be glad of someone to look after him and Tuck might well regard the blind man and his voice in the head as a good sort of investment, but their friendship must be something more than that. Two fumbling incompetents, perhaps, who had found in each other’s weaknesses a common bond of compassion and of understanding.

The desert was almost as bright as day and, looking at the sky, I saw it was not the moon alone that accounted for the brightness. The entire vault of sky was ablaze with stars, more stars and bigger stars and brighter than I had ever seen before. The stars had not been apparent in the quick glance we had gotten of this place before the hobbies bucked us into it, but now they were-stars that seemed so close it seemed a man could reach up his hand and pick them, like the apples off a tree.

Sara was on her feet by now, still grasping her rifle, carrying it at port arms across her body.

“I managed to keep the muzzle up,” she told me.

“Well, hurrah for you,” I said.

“That’s the first rule, always,” she told me. “Keep the uzzle up so it doesn’t clog. If I hadn’t, the barrel would be full of sand.”

George still was wailing and now his wailing took the form of words “What happened, Tuck?” he screamed “Where are e? What happened to my friend? He has gone away. I don’t hear him anymore.”

“For the love of Christ,” I said to Tuck, disgusted, “get him on his feet and dust him off and wipe his nose and tell him what has happened.”

“I can’t explain,” growled Tuck, “until someone tells me what is going on.”

“I can tell you that,” I said. “We got took. We’ve been had, my friend.”

“They’ll come back,” howled George. “They’ll come back or us. They won’t leave us here.”

“No, of course they won’t,” said Tuck, hauling him to his feet. “They’ll come back when the sun is up.”

“The sun ain’t up now, Tuck?”

“No,” said Tuck. “The moon. And a-lot of stars.”

And I was stuck with this, I thought. Heaved into a place where I had no idea where I was and loaded down with a couple of nincompoops and a white Diana who could only think about how she had kept he muzzle up.

I took a look around. We had been dumped on the lower slope of a dune and on either side of us the dunes heaved up to meet the night-time sky. The sky itself was empty of everything but the moon and stars. There was not a cloud in sight. And the land was empty of anything but sand. There were no trees or bushes, not a blade of vegetation. There was a slight chill in the air, but that, I figured, would be dissipated as soon as the sun came up. More than likely we had a long, hot day ahead and we hadn’t any water.

Long furrows in the sand showed where our bodies had plowed through it, pushing up little mounds of sand ahead of us. We had been thrown from the direction of the other dune, and knowing exactly from where we had been thrown, it occurred to me, might have some importance. I walked out a ways and with the butt of my gun drew a long line in the sand and made some rough arrows pointing from it.

Sara watched me closely. “You think we can get back?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I told her, shortly.

“There was a doorway of some sort,” she said, “and the hobbies bucked us through it and when we landed here there wasn’t any doorway.”

“They had us pegged,” I said, “from the minute we set down. They gave us the business, from the very start. We never had a prayer.”

“But we are here,” she said, “and we have to start to think how we can get out.”

“If you can keep an eye on those two clowns,” I said, “and see they cause no trouble, I’ll go out for a look.”

She regarded me gravely. “Have you anything in mind, captain? Anything in particular?”

I shook my head. “Just a look around. There could be a chance I might stumble on some water. We’ll need water badly before the day is over.” “But if you lost your way...”

“I’ll have my tracks to follow,” I told her, “if a wind doesn’t come up suddenly and wipe them out. If anything goes wrong, I’ll fire a beam up into the sky and you loose off a shot or two to guide me back.”

“You don’t think the hobbies will come back to get us?”

“Do you think so?”

“I suppose not,” she said. “But what’s the point of it? What did they gain by it? Our luggage couldn’t be worth that much to them.”

“They got rid of us,” I said.

“But they guided us in. If it hadn’t been for that beam...” “There was the ship,” I said. “It could have been the ship that they were after. They had a lot of ships out on the field. They must have lured a lot of other people.”

“And all of them on this planet? Or on other planets?”

“Could be,” I said. “Our job right now is to see if there’s any place better than this desert we can go.. We haven’t any food and we have no water.”

I settled the strap of my rifle on my shoulder and started to plod up the dune.

“Anything else I can do?’ asked Sara.

“You might keep those two from tracking up that line I made. If a wind comes up and starts to blot it out, try to mark it somehow.”

“You have a lot of faith in that line.”

“Just that it’s a good idea to know where we are.”

“It mightn’t mean a thing,” she said. “We must have been thrown through some sort of space-time null-point and where we wound up wouldn’t mean...”

“I agree,” I said, “but it’s all we have to go on.”

I plodded up the dune and it was heavy going. My feet sank deep into the sand and I kept sliding back I could make no time. And it was hard work. Just short of its crest I stopped to rest a moment and looked back down the slope.

The three of them stood there, looking up at me. And for some reason I couldn’t explain, I found myself loving them-all three of them, that creepy, soft fool of a Smith and that phony Tuck, and Sara, bless her, with her falling lock of hair and that ridiculous oldtime rifle. No matter what they were, they were human beings and somehow or other I’d have to get them out of here. For they were counting on me. To them I was the guy who had barnstormed space and rode out all sorts of trouble. I was the rough, tough character who technically headed up the expedition. I was the captain and when the chips were down it was the captain who was expected to come through. The poor, damn, trusting fools, I thought-I didn’t have the least idea of what was going on and I had no plans and was as puzzled and beaten and hopeless as any one of them. But I couldn’t let them know it. I had to keep on acting as if at any moment I’d come up with a trick that would get us all home free.

I lifted a hand and waved to them and I tried to keep it jaunty, but I failed. Then I clambered up the dune and over the top of it and the desert stretched before me. In every direction that I looked, it was all the same-waves of dunes as far as I could see, each dune like the other and no break at all-no trees that might hint water, absolutely nothing but a sweep of sand.

I went plunging down the dune and climbed another and from its crest the desert looked the same as ever. I could go on; I admitted to myself, climbing dunes forever and there might never be a difference. The whole damn planet might be desert, without a single break. The hobbies, when, they’d bucked us through the gate or door or whatever it might be, had known what they were doing, and if they wanted to get rid of us, they could not have done a more efficient job of it. For they, or the world of which they were a part, hadn’t missed a lick. We had been tolled in by the beam and hustled off the ship and the ship been sealed and then, without the time to think, with no chance to protest, we had been heaved into this world. A bum’s rush, I thought, all worked out beforehand.

I climbed another dune. There always was the chance, I kept on telling myself, that in one of those little valleys which lay between the dunes there might be something worth the finding. Water, perhaps, for water would be the thing that we would need the most. Or a path that might lead us to better country or to natives who might be able to give us some sort of help, although why anyone would want to live in a place like this was more than I could figure.

Actually, of course, I expected nothing. There was nothing in this sweep of desert upon which a man could build much hope. But when I neared the top of the dune-near enough so that I could see over the top of it-I spotted something on the crest of the dune beyond.

A birdcage sort of contraption was half buried in the crest, with its metallic ribs shimmering in the moon and starlight, like the ribcage of some great prehistoric beast that had been trapped atop the dune, bawling out its fright until death had finally quieted it.

I slipped the rifle off my shoulder and held it ready. The sliding sand carried me slowly down the dune, whispering as it slid. When I had slid so far that I could no longer see over the crest of the dune, I set off at an angle to the left and began to climb again, crouching to keep my head down. Twenty feet from the top I got down and crawled flat against the sand. When my eyes came over the crest and I could see the birdcage once again, I froze, digging in my toes to keep from sliding back.

Below the cage, I saw, was a scar of disturbed sand and even as I watched, new blobs of sand broke loose beneath the, cage and went trickling down the slope. It had not been long ago, I was sure, that the cage had impacted on the dune crest-the sand disturbed by its landing had not as yet reached a state of equilibrium and the scar was fresh.

Impacted seemed a strange word, and yet reason told me that it must have impacted, for it was most unlikely that anyone had placed it there. A ship of some sort, perhaps, although a strange sort of ship, not enclosed, but fashioned only of a frame. And if, as I thought, it were indeed a ship, it must have carried life and the life it carried was either dead within it or somewhere nearby.

I glanced slowly up and down the length of the dune and there, far to the right of where the birdcage lay, was a faint furrow, a sort of toboggan slide, plunging from the crest downward into the shadow that lay between the dunes. I strained to penetrate the shadows, but could make out nothing. I’d have to get closer to that toboggan slide.

I backed off down the dune and went spidering across it, angling to the right this time. I moved as cautiously as I could to keep down the sound of the sliding sand that broke free and went hissing down the dune face as I moved. There might be something over on the other side of that dune, listening for any sign of life.

When I thrust the upper part of my head over the dune crest, I still was short of the toboggan slide, but much closer to it and from the hollow between the dunes came a sliding, scraping sound. Straining my ears, it seemed to me that I caught some motion in the trough, but could not be sure. The Sound of sliding and of scraping stopped and then began again and once more there was a hint of movement. I slid my rifle forward so that in an instant I could aim it down into the trough.

I waited.

The slithering sound stopped, then started once again and something moved down there (I was sure of it this time) and something moaned. All sound came to an end.

There was no use of waiting any longer.

“Hello down there!” I called.

There was no answer.

“Hello,” I called again.

It could be, I realized, that I was dealing with something so far removed from my own sector of the galaxy that the space patois familiar to that sector was not used by it and that we would have no communications bridge.

And then a quavering, hooting voice answered. At first it was just a noise, then, as I wrestled with the noise, I knew it to be a word, a single hooted question.

“Friend?” had been the word, “Friend,” I answered.

“In need am I of friend,” the hooting voice said. “Please to advance in safety. I do not carry weapon.”

“I do,” I said, a little grimly.

“Of it, there is no need,” said the thing down in the shadows. “I am trapped and helpless.”

“That is your ship up there?”

“Ship?”

“Your conveyance.”

“Truly so, dear friend. It have come apart. It is inoperative.”

“I’m coming down,” I told it. “I’ll have my weapon on you. One move out of you...”

“Come then,” the hooter croaked. “No move out of me. I shall lie supine.”

I came to my feet and went across the top of that dune as quickly as I could and plunging down the other slope, crouched to present as small a target as was possible. I kept the rifle trained on that shadowed area from which the voice came.

I slid into the trough and crouched there, bending low to sight up its length. Then I saw it, a hump of blackness lying very still.

“All right,” I called. “Move toward me now.”

The hump heaved and wallowed, then lay still again, “Move,” it said, “I cannot.”

“OK, then. Lie still. Do not move at all.”

I ran forward and stopped. The hump lay still. It did not even twitch.

I moved closer, watching it intently. Now I could see it better. From the front of its head a nest of tentacles sprouted, now lying limply on the ground. From its rather massive head, if the tentacle-bearing portion of it actually was its head, its body tapered back, four feet or so, and ended in a bluntness. It seemed to have no feet or arms. With those tentacles, perhaps, it had no need of arms. It wore no clothing, upon its body was no sign of any sort of harness. The tentacles grasped no tool or weapon.

“What is your trouble?” I asked. “What can I do for you?”

The tentacles lifted, undulating like a basketful of snakes. The hoarse voice came out of a mouth which the tentacles surrounded.

“My legs are short,” it said. “I sink. They do not carry me. With them I only churn up sand. I dig with them a deeper pit beneath me.”

Two of the tentacles, with eyes attached to their tips, were aimed directly at me. They looked me up and down.

“I can hoist you out of there.”

“It would be a useless gesture,” the creature said. “I’d bog down again.”

The tentacles which served as eye-stalks moved up and down, measuring me.

“You are large,” it croaked; “Have you also strength?”

“You mean to carry you?”

“Only to a place,” the creature said, “where there is firmness under me.”

“I don’t know of such a place,” I said.

“You do not know... Then you are not a native of this planet.”

“I am not,” I said. “I had thought, perhaps, that you...

“Of this planet, sir?” it asked. “No self-respecting member of my race would deign to defecate upon such a planet.”

I squatted down to face him.

“How about the ship?” I asked. “If I could get you back up the dune to it...”

“It would not help,” he told me. “There is nothing there.”

“But there must be. Food and water...”

And I was, I must admit, considerably interested in the water.

“No need of it,” he said. “I travel in my second self and I need no food or water. Slight protection from the openness of space and a little heat so my living tissues come to no great harm.”

For the love of God, I asked myself, what was going on? He was in his second self and while I wondered what it might be all about, I was hesitant to ask. I knew how these things went. First surprise or horror or amazement that there could exist a species so ignorant or so inefficient that it did not have the concept, the stammering attempt to explain the basics of it, followed by a dissertation on the advantages of the concept and the pity that was felt for ones who did not have it Either that or the entire thing was taboo and not to be spoken of and an insult to even hint at what it might entail.

And that business about his living tissues. As if there might be more to him than simply living tissues.

It was all right, of course. A man runs into some strange things when he wanders out in space, but when he runs into them he can usually dodge them or disregard them and here I could do neither.

I had to do something to help this creature out, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure just how I could help him much. I could pick him up and lug him back to where the others waited, but once I’d got him there he’d be no better off than he was right here. But I couldn’t turn about and walk away and simply leave him there. He at least deserved the courtesy of someone demonstrating that they cared what happened to him.

From the time I had seen the ship and had realized that it was newly crashed, the idea had arisen, of course, that aboard it I might find food and water and perhaps other articles that the four of us could use. But now, I admitted, the entire thing was a complete and total washout. I couldn’t help this creature and he was no help to us and the whole thing wound up as just another headache and being stuck with him.

“I can’t offer you much,” I told him. “There are four of us, myself and three others. We have no food or water-absolutely nothing.”

“How got you here?” he asked.

I tried to tell him how we had gotten there and as I groped and stumbled for a way to say it, I figured that I was just wasting my time. After all, what did it really matter how we had gotten there? But he seemed to understand.

“Ah, so,” he said.

“So you can see how little we can do for you,” I said. “But you would essay to carry me to this place where the others are encamped?”

“Yes, I could do that.”

“You would not mind?”

“Not at all,” I told him, “if you’d like it that way.”

I did mind, of course. It would be no small chore to wrestle him across the sand dunes. But I couldn’t quite see myself assessing the situation and saying the hell with it and then walking out on him.

“I would like it very much,” the creature said. “Other life is comfort and aloneness is not good. Also in numbers may lie strength. One can never tell.”

“By the way,” I said, “my name is Mike. I am from a planet called the Earth, out in the Carina Cygnus arm.”

“Mike,” he said, trying it out, hooting the name so it sounded like anything but Mike. “Is good. Rolls easy on the vocal cords. The locale of your planet is a puzzle to me. The terms I’ve never heard. The position of mine means nothing to you, too. And my name? My name is complicated matter involving identity framework that is of no consequence to people but my own. Please, you pick a name for me. You can call me what you want. Short and simple, please.”

It had been a little crazy, of course, to get started on this matter of our names. The funny thing about it was that I’d not intended to. It was something that had just come out of me, almost instinctively. I had been somewhat surprised when I’d heard myself telling him my name. But now that it had been done, it did make the situation a bit more comfortable. We no longer were two alien beings that had stumbled across one another’s paths. It gave each of us, it seemed, a greater measure of identity.

“How about Hoot?” I asked. And I could have kicked myself the minute I had said it. For it was not the best name in the world and he would have had every reason for resenting it. But he didn’t seem to. He waved his tentacles around in a snaky sort of way and repeated the name several times.

“Is good,” he finally said. “Is excellent for creature such as me.”

“Hello, Mike,” he said.

“Hello, Hoot,” I told him.

I slung the rifle on my shoulder and got my feet well planted and reached down to get both arms around him. Finally I managed to hoist him to the other shoulder. He was heavier than he looked and his body was so rounded that it was hard to get a grip on him. But I finally got him settled and well-balanced and started up the dune.

I didn’t try to go straight up, but slanted at an angle. With my feet sinking to the ankles with every step I took and the sand sliding under me, and fighting for every inch of progress, it was just as bad, or worse, than I had thought it would prove to be.

But I finally reached the crest and collapsed as easily as I could, letting Hoot down gently then just lying there and panting.

“I cause much trouble, Mike,” said Hoot. “I tax your strength, exceeding.”

“Let me get my breath,” I said. “It’s just a little farther.”

I rolled over on my back and stared up at the sky. The stars glittered back at me. Straight overhead was a big blue giant that looked like a flashing jewel and a little to one side was a dull coal of a star, a red supergiant, perhaps. And a million others-as if someone had sat down and figured out how to fill the sky with stars and had come up with a pattern.

“Where is this place, Hoot?” I asked. “Where in the galaxy?”

“It’s a globular cluster,” he said. “I thought you knew that.”

And that made sense, I ‘thought. For the planet we had landed on, the one that great fool of a Smith had led us to, had been well above the galactic plane, out in space beyond the main body of the galaxy-out in globular duster country.

“Is your home here,” I asked.

“No. Far away,” he said, and the way he said it, I asked him nothing more. If he didn’t want to talk about where he’d come from, it was all right with me. He might be on the lam, he might be a refugee, or he might have been banished as an undesirable. All of these things happened. Space was full of wanderers who could not go home again.

I lay looking at the stars and wondering exactly where we were. A globular cluster, Hoot had said, and there were a lot of them and it could be, I supposed, any one of them. Distance or proximity, I realized, would not make a great deal of difference when one was shunted from one place to another by the method that had been used to get us here.

Nor did it make a great deal of difference where we were. If we failed to locate water, we’d not be here for long. Food too, of course, but food was less critical than water. I wondered rather vaguely why I wasn’t more upset. It might be, I told myself, that I had been in so many scrapes in so many alien places and had always, somehow, gotten out of them, that I had come to think I’d always be able to get out of them. Or maybe it was the ingrown realization that my margin of good luck had been more than overrun, that I was overdue to meet the end I had escaped so many times-a realization that someday some planet or some ornery critter would finally do me in. And realizing that, deciding that there was no great point to worry over it, for when that day came I’d had it and prior worry would not help at all.

I was trying to figure which it might be when something touched me softly on the shoulder. I switched my head and saw that Hoot was tapping me with one of his tentacles.

“Mike,” he croaked, “you should take a look. We are not alone.”

I jerked bolt upright, grabbing at the rifle.

A wheel was coming up over the dune behind us, the one on which Hoot’s spacecraft had come to grief. It was a big wheel and a bright one and it had a green hub that glistened in the moonlight. I could see only part of it, but the monstrous, gleaming curve of it rose into the air above the dune a hundred feet or so. Its tread was broad-ten feet or more, I guessed-and it had the shine of polished steel. Hundreds of silvery spokes ran from the inside of the rim to the green and glistening hub.

It was not moving. It hung there in the air, poised above the dune. The moon-silvered ribs of Hoot’s ship looked like a smashed toy when measured by its size.

“Living?” asked Hoot.

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Then we best prepare to defend...”

“We sit right here,” I snapped. “We don’t raise a hand against it.”

It was watching us, I was sure. Whatever it was, it might have come out to investigate the wreckage of Hoot’s ship. There was nothing to indicate that any part of it was alive, but the greenish hub, for some reason I couldn’t put a finger on, had the look of life about it. It might turn around in a little while and go away. And even if it didn’t, we were in no position to start banging away at anything that moved.

“You better slide down into the trough,” I told Hoot. “If we have to make a run for it, I can scoop you up.”

He waggled a tentacle in disagreement. “I have weapon you may need.”

“You said you had no weapon.”

“Dirty lie,” he booted, cheerfully.

“You could have taken me,” I protested, angrily, “any time you wished.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “You came as my befriender. Had I told you, you might not have come.”

I let it pass. He was a tricky devil, but for the moment he was on my side and I had no objections.

Someone called back of me and I swiveled my bead around. Sara stood on top of the next dune and off to the left of her, two heads poked above the ridge. She was planted on the crest, with her silly rifle at the ready and I was scared stiff that any minute she might start throwing lead.

“Are you all right, captain?” she called to me.

“I’m all right,” I said.

“Can we be of any help?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can lug my pal back to camp with you.”

I said camp because, for the life of me, I could think of no other way to put it.

Out of the side of my mouth, I snarled at Hoot. “Cut out the goddamned foolishness and slide down into the trough.”

I switched my attention back to the wheel. It stayed where it was. I still had the feeling that it was looking at me. I twisted around and got my feet planted under me, ready to take off if the situation should demand.

I heard Hoot go sliding down the slope. A moment later Sara called to me.

“What is this thing? Where did you find it?”

I looked around and she was standing over Hoot, staring down at him.

“Tuck,” I yelled, “get down there and help Miss Foster. Tell Smith to stay exactly where he is.”

I could envision that damn fool of a blind man trying to follow Tuck and getting all fouled up.

Sara’s voice was plaintive and a little sharp. “But captain...”

“He’s lost just like us,” I told her. “He doesn’t belong here and he’s in trouble. Just get him back to camp.”

I looked back at the wheel. It had finally started to move, revolving slowly, almost majestically, walking up the dune slope and looming higher every minute.

“Get out of here,” I yelled at Tuck and Sara, without looking back.

The wheel stopped. It was almost at the crest. Very little of it was hidden by the dune. It loomed high into the sky.

Now that I had a better chance to look it over, I saw that the strange thing about it was that it was actually a wheel and not just something that might look like a wheel. Its outer rim was formed of some sort of very shiny substance, with a tread ten feet across, but perhaps no more than a foot thick. For all its massiveness, it had a slender look about it. As it had climbed slowly up the dune, the rim had picked up sand and carried it up its rearward surface, with the sand spilling free as the wheel moved forward. The greenish hub floated in the center of the wheel-and floated was the word for it, for the fragile spokes, despite the number of them, could not have held the hub in place. And now I saw that the spokes, thin as they were, were crisscrossed by even finer wires (if they, indeed, were wires) to make the entire area between the hub and rim a sort of spider web. The thought stopped there, however, for the hub itself had no semblance to a spider. It was simply a sphere of some sort, hanging in the center of the wheel.

I looked quickly over my shoulder and there was no sign of the others. The slope of the dune was scarred with deep tracks, where they had climbed it.

I got to my feet and went sliding down the slope and labored up the face of the dune. At the top, I turned and had a look. The wheel had stayed where it was. I went down the rope and climbed the dune behind which I had left the others. They were all down there, I saw, and the wheel still hadn’t moved. Maybe this was the end of it, I thought. The wheel might have come out to have a look and now, satisfied at what it had seen, might go about its business.

I went sliding down the slope and Sara came climbing up meet me.

Her face was very solemn. “We may have a chance,” she said.

“A chance of getting out of here?”

“You told this Hoot of yours what happened,” she said. “He seems to know about this sort of thing.”

I was astonished. “I wasn’t even sure he knew what I was talking about,” I told her.

“He didn’t understand entirely, but he asked some questions and now they’re working on it.”

“They?”

“Tuck and George are helping. George is very good at it. It seems he is able to pick out the door.”

“George would be able to,” I said.

“I wish you’d stop not liking George,” she said.

It was no time to get into a hassle with her, so I went on down the dune.

The three of them were squatting in a row-or at least the other two of them were squatting and Hoot was lying there, with his legs buried in the sand. Tuck was staring fixedly ahead and Smith had an intense, excited look upon his flabby face. All Hoot’s tentacles were extended straight in front of him and the tips of them were quivering.

I looked where Tuck was looking and I couldn’t see a thing. There was just the slope of the other dune pitching upward to the sky.

I stood quietly behind them and Sara came up and stood beside me. We didn’t stir a muscle. I didn’t know what was going on, but whatever it might be, I didn’t want to interfere. If they thought there was a chance to bust that door wide open, I was all in favor of it.

Suddenly Hoot’s tentacles went limp and sagged down to the ground. Tuck and Smith slumped in, upon themselves. It was quite apparent that whatever they had tried had failed.

“More strength we need,” said Hoot. “If all of us, perhaps...”

“All of us?” I asked. “I’m afraid Fm not good at this sort of thing. What is it you are trying?”

“We strain upon the door,” said Hoot. “We try to pull it

‘ open.”

“It still is there,” said George. “I can sense the edges of it.” “We can try,” said Sara. “That’s the least that we can do.” She squatted down beside Hoot.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“You try to visualize the door,” said Tuck.

“Then you pull,” said Hoot.

“Pull with what?’ I asked.

“With your mind,” Tuck said, nastily. “This is a time, captain, when a big mouth and muscles do not help at all.”

“Friar Tuck,” said Sara coldly, “that was very much uncalled for.”

“That’s all he’s been doing,” Tuck declared, “ever since we set foot upon the ship. Yelling at us and pushing us around.”

“Brother,” I said, “if that is what you thinks once we’re out of this...”

“Be quiet, the two of you,” said Sara. “Captain, if you please.”

She patted the sand beside her and I squatted down with the rest of them, feeling mortified and foolish. In all my life, I’d never seen such downright stupidity. Oh, there was no doubt about it-there were some alien folk who could accomplish wonders with their mental powers, but we were human beings (all of us but one) and the human race had never been noted for anything like that. Although, I thought, take a couple of jerks like Tuck and George and anything might happen.

“Now, please,” said Hoot, “all of us together leave us bring forth the door.”

His tentacles shot out in front of him, so fast they seemed to snap, standing out rigidly with their tips a-quiver.

God knows, I tried to concentrate. I tried to see a door in front of us, and, so help me, I did see it, a sort of ghostly door with a thin edge of light around it, and once I saw it, I fried to pull on it, but there was nothing on it for a man to grab a hold of and with nothing to grab a hold on there was little chance of pulling. But I tried just the same and kept on trying. I could almost feel the fingers of my mind trying to get hold of its smooth and slippery surfaces, then slowly sliding off.

We would never make it, I knew. The door seemed to be coming open a bit, for the crack of light around it appeared to have widened. But it would take too long; we never could hold out, to get it open wide enough so we could slide through.

I was getting terribly tired-both mentally and physically, it seemed-and I knew the others could be in no better shape. We would try again, of course, and again and again, but we’d be getting weaker all the time and if we couldn’t get it open in the first several tries, I knew that we were sunk. So I tried the harder and I seemed to get some small hold on it and pulled with all my might and could feel the others pulling, too-and the door began to open, swinging back toward us on invisible hinges until there was room enough for a man to get his hand into the crack, that is, if the door had been really there. But I knew, even as I pulled and sweated mentally, that the door had no physical existence and that it was something a man could never lay a hand on.

Then, with the door beginning to open, we failed. All of us together. And there was no door. There was nothing but the dune climbing up the sky.

Something crunched behind us and I jumped up and swung around. The wheel loomed tall above us, crunching to a halt, and swarming down from the green mass in the center, swinging down the silvery spider web between the rim and hub was a blob that dripped. It was not a spider, although the basic shape of it and the way it came scrambling down the web brought a spider to one’s mind. A spider would have been friendly and cozy alongside this monstrosity that came crawling down the web. It was a quivering obscenity, dripping with some sort of filthy slime, and it had a dozen legs or arms, and at one end of the dripping blob was what might have been a face-and there is no way to put into words the kind of horror that it carried with it, the loathsome feeling of uncleanliness just from seeing it, as if the very sight of it were enough to contaminate one’s flesh and mind, the screaming need to keep one’s distance from it, the fear that it might come close enough to touch one.

As it came down the web it was making a noise and steadily, it seemed, the noise became louder. Although it had what one could imagine was its face, it had no mouth with which to make the noise, but even with no mouth, the noise came out of it and washed over us. In the noise was the crunch of great teeth splintering bones, mixed with the slobbering of scavenger gulping at a hasty, putrid feast, and an angry chittering that had unreason in it. It wasn’t any of these things alone; it was all of them together, or the sense of all of them together, and perhaps if a man had been forced to go on listening to it for long enough he might have detected in it other sounds as well.

It reached the rim of the wheel and leaped off the web to land upon the dune-spraddled there, looming over us, with the filthiness of it dripping off its body and splashing on the sand. I could see the tiny balls of wet sand where the nastiness had dropped.

It stood there, raging at us, the noise of it filling all that world of sand and bouncing off the sky.

And in the noise there seemed to be a word, as if the word were hidden and embedded in the strata of the sound. Bowed down beneath that barrage of sound, it seemed that finally I could feel-not hear, but feel-the word.

“Begone!” it seemed to shout at us. “Begone! Begone! Begone!”

From somewhere out of that moonlit-starlit night, from that land of heaving dunes, came a wind, or some force like a wind, that hammered at us and drove us back-although, come to think of it, it could not have been a wind, for no cloud of sand came with it and there was no roaring such as a wind would make. But it hit us like a fist and staggered us and sent us reeling back.

As I staggered back with the loathesome creature still spraddled on the dune and still raging at us, I realized that there was no longer sand underneath my feet, but some sort of paving.

Then, quite suddenly, the dune was no longer there, but a wall, as if a door we could not see had been slammed before our faces, and when this happened the creature’s storm of rage came to an end and in its stead was silence.

But not for long, that silence, for Smith began an insane crying. “He is back again! My friend is back again! He’s is in my mind again! He has come back to me.”

“Shut up!” I yelled at him. “Shut up that yammering!”

He quieted down a bit, but he went on muttering, flat upon his bottom, with his legs stuck out in front of him and that silly, sickening look of ecstasy painted on his face.

I took a quick look around and saw that we were back where we had come from, in that room with all the panels and behind each panel the shimmering features of another world.

Safely back, I thought with some thankfulness, but through no effort of our own. Finally, given time enough, we might have hauled that door wide enough for us to have gotten through. But we hadn’t had to do it; it had been done for us. A creature from that desert world had come along and thrown us out.

The night that had lain over the white world when we had been brought there had given way to day. Through the massive doorway, I could see the faint yellow light of the sun blocked out by the towering structures of the city.

There was no sign of the hobbies or the gnomelike humanoid who had picked the world into which the hobbies threw us.

I shucked up my britches and took the gun off my shoulder. I had some scores to settle.