Special Deliverance

25

From the inn to the tower the land had grown increasingly arid. North from the tower the aridness turned to desert. It was hard traveling. The sand slid underneath the feet, there were dunes to be climbed. The wind blew steadily from the northwest and swirled sand into their faces.

They did no talking. Heads bent against the wind, Jurgens checking compass readings and setting the course, they made dogged progress north. The robot limped ahead and Lansing staggered after him. At first Lansing had gone ahead, the robot limping behind him. But, as Lansing tired, Jurgens, his mechanical body never tiring, had taken the lead.

After several hours the dunes, in large part, disappeared and they came to firmer, although still sandy, footing.

Watching Jurgens as the robot hitched energetically ahead of him, Lansing fell to wondering about him. Jurgens was still a mystery — as, he admitted, all the rest of them were mysteries. He tried to bring into mind what he knew of each of them, and the facts that he could muster were sketchy. Mary was an engineer in a world where the old empires of the eighteenth century still persisted, making for a stable, but noncompassionate, world. Other than that he knew little about her except for one important fact — he loved her. No idea of what kind of job she may have worked in, what kind of engineering she might have practiced, nothing about her family or her former life, less, perhaps, about her than any of the others.

Sandra’s world was a fuzzy place, a culture that he could not understand, although, he told himself, the culture that she mirrored might be no more than a small subculture in which she had existed. The overall culture of her world might be something else entirely and she almost as unaware of it as he. They had not, he thought, been entirely fair to Sandra. The group, as a whole, largely had ignored her. Given a chance, she might have been able to make a significant contribution. If she had been exposed to the machines of the installation, rather than he and Mary, she might have brought back from her experience more than they had brought. Even now, through her close rapport with the music tower, she might supply the key to what they all had sought.

The Parson had been, it seemed to Lansing, an open book, although, once again, he might have been a reflection of a subculture. There was no evidence to suggest that the Parson’s entire world had been as bigoted, as narrow and as vicious as the Parson saw his world. Given time, they might have had a chance to comprehend the Parson, to have found with him some level of understanding, knowing his background, to have found some measure of sympathy with his cross-grained thinking.

The Brigadier, he told himself, had been another matter. Secretive — he had not attempted to explain his world, had refused to tell how he had been pitchforked into the present situation — domineering, with a fierce urge to mastery and command, unwilling to listen to reason other than his own, he had been an enigma. Undoubtedly he had not been a member of a subculture; his world sounded like a place of military anarchy in which hundreds of contending little warlords had battled one another. A game, he had said, not more than a game, but at best a deadly one.

And Jurgens? No subculture there, but a world that had been abandoned for the stars, with the rejects left behind to slide down into an uncomprehending barbarism. Freedom, Jurgens had said — he finally had gained freedom from the implicit responsibility he and the other robots had felt toward the sad remnants of humanity. Freedom? Lansing wondered. He wondered if Jurgens even now realized he had not regained his freedom. He still played shepherd to his humans, even as he played it now, plunging ahead through this desert heading for a Chaos that he or no one else could claim to understand. Ever since they had come to this unlikely world, he had stood by, always ready to serve, always with the needs and hopes of others, of his humans, foremost in his mind.

For some reason, however, he had not put his entire trust in these humans of his. To him, Lansing, he had told at least part of his story — what his world was like, his hobby of making humanoid puppets, fashioned from the old tales of mankind. (Puppets, Lansing wondered, like the puppet Melissa?) To all the others he had not told a thing, had remained stubbornly silent even when Mary had asked him, more or less, point blank.

That was puzzling, Lansing told himself. Why had the robot confided in one of them and no one else? Was there between the two of them a bond that the robot saw and the man could not?

Up ahead of him, Jurgens had halted at the foot of a small dune. When Lansing came up, the robot pointed at an object protruding from the dune. It was a heavy glass or clear plastic bubble, resembling the helmet of a space suit, and inside it, facing them, was a human skull. The grinning row of teeth flashed a wide-spaced smile at them and one of the teeth, Lansing saw, was gold, glinting in the sun. Hunched out of the dune was a rounded piece of metal and farther along the dune, toward the right, another chunk of metal.

Jurgens took a shovel from his pack and began to dig away the sand. Lansing, saying nothing, stood and watched.

“In a minute we will see,” said Jurgens.

In a few minutes they did see.

The metal contraption was vaguely human-shaped. There were three legs, not two, and two arms, a torso. It measured ten or twelve feet in length, and in the upper part of it was a space in which a skeleton that once had been a man had ridden. The bones that belonged to the skeleton were jumbled all about, disarticulated, in that space the man had occupied. The skull was captured in the bubble.

Jurgens, squatting beside it, looked up at Lansing.

“A guess?” he asked.

Lansing shuddered. “Your guess, not mine.”

“All right,” the robot said. “A walking machine.”

“A walking machine?”

“It could be. That’s the first thing that came to mind.”

“But what is a walking machine?”

“Something akin to this was developed by the humans of my planet. Before they went out to the stars. To be used on other planets. In a hostile environment, I suppose. I never saw one. I only heard about them.”

“A machine to move about in on a hostile planet?”

“That’s right. Tied in with the human nervous system. Intricate circuitry that would respond in the same way as a human body would respond. The human wants to walk, so the machine walks. The arms the same.”

“Jurgens, if this is true, we may be looking at one of the original people of this planet. No other human could have been brought here as we were brought, encased in a contraption such as this. We came in the clothes we stood in, of course, but…”

“You can’t rule it out, however,” Jurgens said.

“Perhaps,” said Lansing, “but such a man, if he came from elsewhere, would have had to come from an alternate world that had become hostile to man. So polluted, so dangerous…”

“A world at war,” said Jurgens. “Full of dangerous rays and gases.”

“Yes, I suppose that would be possible. But once he reached this world, he would have needed it no longer. The air here is not polluted.”

“You must realize,” said Jurgens, “that it might have been impossible for him to separate himself from it. He may have been so biologically tied to it that there was no escape from it. He probably would not have minded it too much. He would have been accustomed to it. And such a machine would have some advantages. In a place like this it would.”

“Yes,” said Lansing, “yes, it would.”

“Here he came to grief,” said Jurgens. “Here, in all his arrogance, he came to final grief.”

Lansing looked at the robot. “You think that all humans are arrogant. That it’s a mark of the human race.”

“Not all humans,” Jurgens said. “You can understand if I hold some bitterness. To be left behind…”

“It has festered all these years?”

“Not festered,” Jurgens said.

They were silent for a time, then the robot said, “Not you. You are not arrogant. You never have been. The Parson was, so was the Brigadier. Sandra, in her gentle way…”

“Yes, I know,” said Lansing. “I hope you can forgive them.”

“You and Mary,” Jurgens said. “I’d lay down my life for you and Mary.”

“And yet you would not tell Mary about yourself. You refused to tell her.”

“She would have pitied me,” said Jurgens. “I could not have withstood her pity. You have never pitied me.”

“No, I haven’t,” Lansing said.

“Edward, let us leave the arrogance behind. The two of us now should be upon our way.”

“You lead, I follow,” Lansing said. “We have no time to waste. I didn’t like leaving Mary. Even now I find it hard not to turn back.”

“Three days more and we’ll be back. We’ll find her safe and sound. Four days is all we’ll give ourselves.”

They found no wood along the way. The land was scoured bare of everything. That night they made camp without a fire.

In a hard, enameled way, the night was beautiful. Empty sand and a soaring moon, while out toward the edges of the sky, undimmed by the white brilliance of the moon, the stars shone with a fierce intensity.

Lansing felt the essence of the night soaking into him — the hard, the cruel, the classic beauty of it. Once he heard what he thought was wailing. It came from the south, and it sounded like the wailing of the great lost beast that had wailed above the city and again from the badlands butte. He listened intently, not certain he had heard it, but it did not come again.

“Did you hear anything?” he asked Jurgens.

Jurgens said he hadn’t.

The robot woke Lansing well before dawn. The moon was hanging just above the western horizon and the stars were paling in the east.

“Eat something,” Jurgens told him, “and we’ll be on our way.”

“Nothing now,” said Lansing. “A drink of water’s all. I’ll eat later while we walk.”

The going was fairly easy to start with, but by noon they began to encounter dunes again, small ones at first, growing larger as they went along. They were in a world of shifting yellow sand, with the pale blue of the sky a dome that came down and enclosed the sand. The land ahead of them gradually sloped upward until it seemed they were climbing into the hard blue sky. Ahead of them a narrow strip of sky above the northern horizon assumed a darker, deeper shade of blue, and as they climbed over the treacherous dunes, the sand sliding underneath their feet, so did the darker strip climb higher in the sky, turning from dark blue at its top to black a little lower down.

Vague, muted mumblings came from the north. As they fought to make their way against the dunes, the mumbling grew louder.

Jurgens stopped at the top of one high dune and waited for Lansing to catch up. Lansing pulled up beside him, panting with the climb.

“That sounds like thunder up ahead,” said Jurgens. “A heavy storm may be coming up.”

“The color of the sky looks right,” said Lansing, “but it doesn’t look like a storm cloud. I never saw one with an edge that runs straight across. There usually are big thunderheads boiling up, and I see no thunderheads.”

“I thought awhile ago,” Jurgens said, “that I saw a lightning flash, not the bolt itself, but a nicker, like the reflection of a flash.”

“Heat lightning,” Lansing told him. “A reflection against the clouds of lightning far away.”

“In a while we’ll see what it is,” said Jurgens. “Are you ready to go on? Or shall we rest awhile?”

“Go on. I’ll tell you when I need to rest.”

By midafternoon, the great black cloud had climbed well above the horizon. In places it had tinges of deep purple and was, in all, a frightening phenomenon. It appeared to have no motion, no roiling clouds, no wind-driven banks of scudding vapor, although at times it seemed to Lansing, when he stopped for a moment to watch it, to have an almost imperceptible downward movement, as if a thin film of some substance was running down across the blackness, as a thin sheet of water would run down a window-pane during a summer shower. A sense of terrible violence seemed inherent in the cloud itself, the overwhelming threat of heavy weather, and yet there was no visible violence or even threat of violence except for the massive lightning strokes that at intervals ran across the face of darkness. Now the rumble of thunder was continuous.

“Most unusual,” Jurgens said. “I have never seen the like of it.”

“Chaos?” Lansing asked. Asking it, he remembered the chaos, or the sense of chaos (for he doubted now that he’d really seen it) he had glimpsed when he had stood for a moment on the hill of suns above the universe. And that glimpsed chaos, that glimpsed universal chaos had not been anything like this, although he realized that if he were called upon to describe it, he would be unable to tell a single thing about it.

“Perhaps,” said Jurgens. “I ask you: What is Chaos?”

Lansing did not attempt to answer.

They climbed on, and now the way was steeper than it had been at any time since they had started out. They toiled upward over a series of ever higher dunes, and ahead of them the horizon curved away from them to both left and right, as if they were climbing one continuous dune, the rim of which ran in a semicircle, either side of it impinging on the blackness in the sky.

Late in the afternoon they reached the top of the great ridge they had been climbing. Lansing, exhausted, slumped down to the sand, leaning against a large boulder. A large boulder? he asked himself. A boulder here when there had been up to this time nothing larger than a grain of sand? He staggered to his feet, amazed, and the boulder was there — not one boulder, but a clump of them, perched just below the ultimate height of the dune they had been climbing. Resting in the sand, as if someone had, perhaps in ages past, carefully placed them there.

Jurgens stood on top of the dune, straddle-legged, with his crutch dug deep into the sand to prop him up and keep his balance.

To right and left swept the curving edge of the dune that they had climbed, while in front of them the surface broke sharply to plunge downward in an unbroken slope until it reached the bottom of the massive cloud that loomed in front of them.

Looking directly at the cloud, Lansing saw that it was not a cloud, although what it was he did not know. It was a massive wall of utter blackness that rose from where it met the surface of the downward-sloping sand far into the sky, so far that he was forced to crane his neck to see the top of it.

Lightning bolts still slashed across its face with devastating ferocity, and thunder crashed and rumbled. The wall, he saw or thought he saw, was a monstrous dam raised against the sky, and over the lip of it was pouring something that was not water, a gigantic waterfall of a blackness that was not water, crashing down across the face of it, a waterfall so solid and unbroken that he did not see the actual falling of it, but only had the hypnotic sense of its falling. Watching it, he realized that it was not only thunder that he heard, but the deep, awful roar of whatever was falling over the lip of the dam, the Niagara-like rushing sound of something falling from great height, falling from the unknown into the unknown. It seemed to him that the very ground beneath him was trembling with the roar.

He turned his head and looked at Jurgens, but the robot did not notice him. He was leaning heavily upon his crutch, staring at the blackness, seemingly entranced and hypnotized by it, rigid with his watching.

Lansing shifted his gaze back to the blackness and now, clearer than ever, it seemed to be a dam, although a moment later he was not sure it was a dam. First a cloud and then a dam and now, he wondered, what could it be now?

One thing he knew — it was not the answer that they sought or even a clue that in time might provide the answer. Like the cube and doors, like the installation and the singing tower, it was meaningless. Perhaps not meaningless entirely, but meaningless to him and Jurgens and the other humans, to the intelligence and perception that resided in the human mind.

“The end of the world,” said Jurgens, speaking with a strange catch in his voice.

“The end of this world?” asked Lansing, and having said it, was sorry that he had, for it was a silly thing to say. Why he had said it, he could not imagine.

“Perhaps not only of this world,” said Jurgens. “Not of this world alone. The end of all worlds. The end of everything. There goes the universe. Eaten by a blackness.”

The robot moved forward a step, lifting his crutch and probing for a solid place to set it. He did not find a solid place. The crutch skidded and went flying from his hand. The bad leg collapsed under him and sent him lurching forward. He fell and somersaulted on the slope. His pack came off his shoulders and went skidding down the slope before him. Jurgens’s hands were working frantically, clawing at the slope to stop his slide, but there was nothing he could grasp. There was only sand to grasp and it was sliding all about him, sliding with him. His clutching hands left long print marks in the sand.

Lansing, who had been crouching, came swiftly to his feet. If he could remain upright, he thought, driving his feet deep into the sand beneath the sliding surface, there would be a chance to reach Jurgens and halt his slide, drag him back to safety.

He took a downward step and his forward-reaching foot found no solid footing. The sand was like so much powder. There was no walking on it, no standing on it. He tried to throw himself backward, stretching desperately to reach the top of the dune, hoping to use it to lever himself off the moving surface. But his foot was slipping faster now, plowing a deep furrow in the sand, and he came down on the face of the slope and slid, slowly, ever so slowly, but with no hope of stopping. Not only was he sliding, but all the sand about him made a slow but inexorable response to the pull of gravity.

He thrust out his legs and arms to present a wider resistance to the surface on which he slid, and it seemed, when he did so, that he might be moving just a bit more slowly, although it was hard to tell. It was hopeless, he told himself, being honest with himself. Any effort on his part to claw his way upward would do no more than disturb the sand, making it slide the faster, carrying him with it.

But now he knew that the downward movement had slowed somewhat and for a moment it seemed that the slide had stopped. He lay spread-eagled on the sand, fearful of moving, apprehensive that any movement on his part would start the slide again.

He did not know where Jurgens was, and when he did try to move his head in an effort to look down the slope, in the hope of catching a glimpse of him, the sand began to slide again, so he threw back his head and held it hard against the surface and the sliding stopped.

Eternities passed, or what seemed to be eternities. The ground still seemed to shiver with the thundering of the great black waterfall. The noise blotted out much of his perception of who or where he was. Lying as he did, he could see, just barely, the top of the dune up which he and Jurgens had climbed. A couple of hundred feet away, he estimated. If he could only crawl those two hundred feet — but the two hundred feet, he knew, were impossible.

He concentrated his attention on that impossible dune top, as if by concentrating on it, he somehow could achieve it. It stayed unmoving and empty, a sandy line against the blueness of the sky.

For a moment he swiveled his eyes to look away, to peer along the seemingly never-ending expanse of slope to which he clung. When he looked back to the top of the dune, someone was standing there — four someones lined against the sky, standing there and peering down at him out of faces that were silly, devastating travesties of human faces.

Only slowly did he realize who they were — the four card players who had sat around a table, set apart from the others who were there, in two different inns and now staring down at him with their skull-like faces.

Why should they be here? he wondered. What had brought them? What could possibly be here that would be of any interest to them? He thought momentarily of calling out to them, then decided there would be no point in doing so. If he did, they would only ignore him and that would make the situation worse. For a moment he wondered if they were really there. Could his imagination be playing tricks on him? He looked away and then looked back; they were still there.

One of them, he saw, held something in his hand, and he tried to make out what it was but was unable to. Then the player who was holding whatever it was he had in his hand lifted it above his head and twirled it. When he did that, Lansing knew what it was; it was a coil of rope. The card players were throwing him a rope!

Then the rope was in the air, uncoiling as it flew toward him. He’d have just one chance, he knew, certainly no more than a couple. If he had to lunge to catch the rope, that would start him sliding once again, and by the time the rope had been pulled in, coiled again and thrown, he would be beyond its reach.

The rope seemed to hang in the air, scarcely moving, uncoiling as it came. When it struck, it was on top of him; a perfect throw. He reached out more desperately than was needful, grasped it in one hand, rolled over to get into position to grasp it with the second hand. He was sliding while he did this, and sliding very fast. He tightened his one-handed hold upon the rope in a death-stricken grip. Then he had the second hand upon it and was stopped with a tooth-rattling jolt as the length of the rope ran out. He hung to it with a fierce grip and slowly began to pull himself up the slope. He kept his body low, not risking any accident that might cause him to lose the rope. Foot by foot he hauled himself along. Finally he halted to regain his breath and looked up the slope. The ridge was empty; the card players were gone. Who, then, he wondered, was holding the rope? He had a sudden, sickening vision of the far end of the rope coming free, to send him hurtling down the slope. Breath sobbing in his throat, he climbed like a madman, unthinkingly, carelessly. The only thing that mattered was to get to the top of the dune before the rope came free. He felt his body slide over the ridge. Only then did he quit climbing.

He rolled over and sat up. He did not let loose of the rope until he was sitting flat upon his bottom, on the solid surface on the safe side of the slope. Then he did let loose of it. He saw that the rope was tied around one of the boulders that he had noticed with some surprise when he and Jurgens had climbed to reach the ridge that stood above the deadly slope.

Jurgens! he thought. Jurgens, oh, my God! During the last few minutes of his desperate climb (could it have been only minutes rather than hours?), all thought of Jurgens had been wiped out of his mind.

He went on hands and knees up the slope to reach the dune top and lay there, gazing down over the long, smooth chute of sand. The trail that he had left in hauling himself to the top was rapidly being smoothed out by the slow creep of the flowing sand. In a few more minutes there would be no evidence that he had ever been there.

There was no sign of Jurgens, no evidence of the track that he had made in his slide down the slope. Jurgens, he knew, was gone — gone into whatever had awaited him in that boundary area where the great blackness came down to the sand.

The robot had not cried out, he remembered, had not cried for rescue, had not called his name for help. He had gone silently to his doom — or, if not doom, whatever waited for him at the bottom of the slope. This, Lansing was certain, had been out of consideration for him, out of a wish not to involve him, the human Lansing, in the accident.

Had it been an accident? he wondered. He remembered once again how Jurgens had stood entranced before the face of the awful thundering darkness — even as Sandra had stood entranced before the singing tower. Lansing remembered, too, how Jurgens had taken that first step forward even as he stood — as he must have known he stood — on the final edge of safety, but taking the step, nevertheless, to draw closer to this terrible thing that fascinated him.

Had he been lured as Sandra had been lured? Had there been something in the curtain of blackness that had called out to him? Had he taken that step quite willingly, not expecting that he would be plunged down the slope, but quite willingly now that it had happened — in an unconscious, an unknowing but all-engrossing urge to come closer to whatever it had been that had captured him?

Lansing shook his head. There was no way to know.

But if all this should be true, he thought, then at last the robot, Jurgens, had made a move upon his own, acting for himself and not for the humans who were in his custody. He had acted as he had always wanted, not as his loyalty to humans had insisted. In that final moment Jurgens had found the freedom that he sought.

Lansing climbed slowly to his feet. He nipped the tied end of the rope off the boulder and methodically began to coil it. There was, perhaps, no need to coil it, he could simply have dropped it and left it where it fell. But coiling it gave him a job to do.

Having coiled it, he laid it on the ground and looked around to see if he could locate the card players. But they were not there, there was nothing to indicate they ever had been there. Later on, he told himself, he would worry about them. He had no time now to puzzle over them. There was a task he had to do and as swiftly as he could.

He had to get back to the singing tower, where Mary still was standing watch over the entranced Sandra.