Special Deliverance

8

They were late in getting started. Breakfast had been unaccountably delayed and there had been much haggling over the purchase of items they would need upon the road — food, clothing, hiking shoes, sleeping bags, belt knives, hatchets, matches, cooking gear, a long list of equipment. The Brigadier had insisted on a gun and had become quite worked up when informed by the innkeeper that no weapons were for sale.

“That’s ridiculous!” stormed the Brigadier. “Who ever heard of an expedition starting out without an adequate defense?”

Mine Host attempted to reassure him. “There’s no danger along the way. There is no need to fear.”

“How would you know that?” demanded the Brigadier. “When we questioned you on other matters you were singularly bereft of knowledge. Knowing nothing else, how can you be so certain that there is no danger?”

When it came time to pay for the supplies, Lansing got down to painful dickering. The innkeeper seemed determined to make an extra profit to compensate for his failure at extracting a higher price for their lodging. In his efforts Lansing was backed up vehemently by the Parson, who was of the general opinion that everyone was out to gouge him.

Finally the transaction was concluded to no one’s liking and they started out.

The Brigadier led the way, with the Parson close behind him. Mary and Sandra followed, while Jurgens and Lansing brought up the rearguard. Jurgens carried a heavy pack that was jammed with food. He alone of them had needed almost nothing — no food or sleeping bag, for he neither ate nor slept. He had no need, as well, of clothing, but he did choose a hatchet and a knife, both of which were bound by a belt about his waist.

“I am intrigued by your first words to me,” Lansing said to the robot as they walked along together. “You asked me if I was a crackpot. You said you collected crackpots. Yet later on you said that in your world there are few humans left. If that is the case—”

“I made a bad joke, only,” the robot told him. “I am sorry now I did. I don’t actually collect humans. What I do is collect crackpot humans I find in literature.” “You make a list of crackpot characters?” “Oh, I do more than that. I construct miniatures of them. Miniatures of the kind of humans I conceive they would have been in actual life.” “A doll collector, then?”

“More than a doll collection, Mr. Lansing. They move about and talk, they act out little scenes. It is most amusing. I use them by the hour for my entertainment Also, I think I may get some further insight into the human condition from the interplay among them.” “Mechanical dolls?”

“I suppose you could say so. Basically mechanical. Although in some of their aspects they are biological.”

“That is amazing,” said Lansing, somewhat shocked. “You create living beings.”

“Yes. They are alive in many different ways.” Lansing said nothing further, reluctant to expand upon the subject.

The road was little more than a trail. Occasionally the double ruts cut by wheeled vehicles could be seen, but in most places the wheel traces were obliterated by erosion, with grass and creeping vines growing over them. For a time the road climbed through forestland that after a couple of hours of travel began to dwindle, gradually giving way to a rolling, grassy countryside, spotted with small groves of trees. The day, at first comfortably warm, grew hotter as the hour of noon approached.

The Brigadier, still in the lead, halted at a grove, carefully let himself to the ground and leaned against a tree.

As the others came up, he explained the stop. “I thought we had best halt in consideration of the ladies. The sun has proved uncommonly warm.”

He hauled a large, white handkerchief from a tunic pocket and wiped his streaming face. Then he hoisted his canteen around in front of him, unscrewed the cap and gulped at the water.

“We can rest for a while,” said Lansing. “If we want to take the time, we could eat some lunch.”

The Brigadier responded eagerly. “A capital idea,” he said.

Jurgens already had his pack open, was slicing cold meat and cheese. He found a tin of hard biscuits and opened it.

“Should I make some tea?” he asked. “We haven’t the time,” said the Parson. “We should be pushing on.”

“I’ll rustle up some wood,” said Lansing, “so we can have a fire. I saw a dead tree back a ways. Some tea would be good for all of us.”

“There is no need of that,” said the Parson. “We have no need of tea. We could eat cheese and biscuits as we walk along.”

“Sit down,” said the Brigadier. “Sit down and rest yourself. Rushing along as we have been is no way to approach a trek. You break yourself in slowly and take your time to start with.”

“I’m not tired,” snapped the Parson. “I need no breaking in.”

“But the ladies, Parson!”

“The ladies are doing fine,” said the Parson. “It’s you who’s caving in.”

They were still bickering when Lansing went down the road to find the dead tree he had spotted earlier. It was not as far down the trail as he had thought, and he quickly settled down to work, chopping dry branches into easy lengths for carrying. It would be only a short noontime fire and not much fuel would be needed. A small armload should do.

A dry stick cracked behind him and he swung around. Mary stood a few feet from him.

“I hope that you don’t mind,” she said.

“Not at all, glad of company.”

“It was getting uncomfortable up there — the two of them still quarreling. There’ll be trouble between them, Edward, before the trip is done.”

“They are two driven men.”

“And very much alike.”

He laughed. “They’d kill you if you told them so. Each thinks he despises the other.”

“Perhaps they do. Being so much alike, perhaps they do. Do they see themselves in one another? Self-hate, perhaps.”

“I don’t know,” said Lansing. “I know nothing of psychology.”

“What do you know? I mean, what do you teach?”

“English literature. At the college I was the resident authority on Shakespeare.”

“Do you know,” she said, “you even look the part. You have a scholarly look.”

“I think that’s about enough,” he said, kneeling and beginning to stack the wood on his arm.

“Can I help?” she asked.

“No, we only need enough to boil some tea.”

“Edward, what do you think we’ll find? What are we looking for?”

“Mary, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. There seems no reason that we should be here; no one, I think, really wants to be here. Yet here we are, the six of us.”

“I’ve thought a lot about it,” she said. “I barely got any sleep last night, wondering about it. Someone wants us here. Someone sent us here. We didn’t ask to come.”

Lansing rose to his feet, clutching the stack of wood piled on his arm. “Let’s not fret too much about it. Not yet. We’ll know more about it, maybe, in a day or two.”

They went back up the road. Jurgens was striding up the hill with four canteens hanging on a shoulder.

“I found a spring,” he said. “You should have left your canteens so I could have filled them, too.”

“Mine is almost full,” said Mary. “I’ve only had one little swallow out of it.”

Lansing busied himself starting a fire while Jurgens poured water into a kettle and planted a forked stick by which to hang it over the blaze.

“Did you know,” demanded the Parson, standing over the kneeling Lansing, “that this robot person brought along a canteen for himself?”

“What’s wrong with that?” asked Lansing.

“He doesn’t drink. Why do you think that he—”

“Maybe he brought it along so that you or the Brigadier could have water when your canteens are dry. Have you considered that?”

The Parson snorted in disgust, a sneering snort.

Lansing felt anger sweep quickly over him. He rose and faced the Parson deliberately. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “and I’m saying it only once. You’re a troublemaker. We don’t need a troublemaker here. You keep it up and I’ll wipe up the ground with you. Do you understand?”

“Here! Here!” cried the Brigadier.

“And you,” said Lansing to the Brigadier, “keep your damn mouth shut. You’ve set yourself up to be the leader of this group and you are doing badly at it.”

“I suppose,” said the Brigadier, “you think you should be the leader.”

“We don’t need a leader, General. When your pomposity threatens to overcome you, just remember that.”

A pall hung over the little band while they ate their lunch and drank the tea, then they took up the trek again, with the Brigadier still in the lead and the Parson following close upon his heels.

The rolling countryside continued, with the scattered groves of trees. It was a pleasant land, but the day was warm. Stumping on before them, the Brigadier proceeded at a slower pace than he had before they’d stopped for lunch.

The road had been climbing all the afternoon, up succeeding swales, each one higher than the last. Now, ahead of the others, the Brigadier stopped and raised a shout. The Parson loped to stand beside him and the others hurried to catch up.

The land tumbled down into a bowl, and at the bottom of the bowl stood a cube of heaven blue. Even from the ridgetop it appeared to be a massive structure. It was plain, not fancy — straight sides that rose up to a flat top. From the distance that they viewed it, it looked unadorned. But its size and intense blueness made it spectacular. The road they had been following went down the tumbled, tortured slope in angling curves and switchbacks. Once it reached the bottom of the slope, it arrowed toward the cube, but when it reached it, it swept out to run around one side of it, then continued across the bowl and went climbing up the slope beyond in a zigzag fashion.

Sandra squeaked. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

The Brigadier harumphed. “When the innkeeper mentioned it,” he said, “I never for a moment anticipated it would be anything like this. I didn’t know what to expect. A crumbling ruin, perhaps. I guess I really didn’t think too much about it. I was looking forward to the city.”

The Parson pulled the corners of his mouth down. “I don’t like the looks of it.”

“You don’t like the looks of anything,” said the Brigadier.

“Before we start passing opinions,” said Lansing, “let us go down there and have a look at it.”

It took awhile to get there. They had to follow the road because the sloping ground was too steep and treacherous to do otherwise. By following the road in all its wanderings, they traveled several times the distance between the slope’s summit and its base.

The cube sat in the center of a wide, sandy area that ran all around it, a circle of sand so precise that it seemed it must have been drawn carefully by a survey team — white sand, the kind of sand that one would expect to find in a children’s sandbox, a sugarlike sand that at one time might have been flattened out into a smooth surface but that now had been blown into a series of ripples by the wind.

The walls of the cube rose high. Lansing, measuring them with a careful eye, concluded they rose fifty feet or more. In them there were no breaks, nothing that would suggest a window or a door, and there was, as well, no ornamentation, no artful carving, no dedicatory plaque, no incised symbols that might announce a name by which the cube was known. Viewed close at hand the blueness of the walls held true — a celestial blue that could have represented the purest innocence. Likewise, the walls were smooth. Certainly not stone, Lansing told himself. Plastic, perhaps, although plastic seemed incongruous in this howling wilderness, or ceramic, a cube formed of the finest porcelain.

With scarcely a word spoken, the band walked around the cube, by some unspoken convention not stepping within the circle of sand that surrounded it. Back on the road again, they halted and all stood looking at the blueness.

“It’s beautiful,” said Sandra, drawing in her breath as a sign of continuing astonishment. “More beautiful than it seemed when we glimpsed it from the hilltop. More beautiful than you could expect anything to be.”

“Amazing,” said the Brigadier. “Truly amazing. But does anyone have the foggiest notion what it is?”

“It must have a function,” said Mary. “The size, the mass of it would argue that. If it were merely symbolic, it would not have to be this large. And were it only symbolic, it would be placed where it could be seen from a distance, atop the highest elevation rather than being tucked away down here.”

“It has not been visited recently,” said Lansing. “There are no tracks in the circle of sand around it.”

“If there were tracks,” said the Brigadier, “they would soon be covered by the drifting sand. Even recent tracks.”

“Why are we standing here, simply looking at it?” asked Jurgens. “As if we might be afraid of it.”

“I think, perhaps, we are standing here because we are afraid of it,” said the Brigadier. “It seems quite evident that it was placed here by sophisticated builders. This is no fumbling job such as might have been done by benighted heathens intent on raising a memorial to their deity. Such a great accomplishment, logic says, must be protected in some manner. Otherwise there would be graffiti scribbled all across the walls.”

“There is no graffiti,” Mary said. “Not a single mark upon the walls.”

“Perhaps the walls are of a substance that will not take a mark,” said Sandra. “Any marking device would slide right over them.”

“I still think,” said the robot, “that we should examine it more closely. If we moved close up to it, we might find an answer to some of the questions we are asking.”

Having said that, he began to stride across the circle of sand. Lansing shouted a warning, but Jurgens made no sign that he had heard. Lansing sprang forward, sprinting to catch him. For that circle of sand, he now realized, held a subtle threat, something that all of them, with the exception of Jurgens, must have recognized as well. Jurgens was still striding ahead. Lansing closed on him, reached out a hand to grasp his shoulder. But in the instant before his fingers could close upon the shoulder, some obstruction buried in the sand caught his toe and threw him on his face.

As he struggled to his hands and knees, shaking his head to dislodge the sand that stuck to it, he heard the others shouting back of him. The Brigadier’s voice boomed above all the others: “You damn fool, come back! That place could be booby trapped!”

Jurgens was almost at the wall; he had not slacked his sturdy trudging. As if, Lansing thought, the fool planned to walk head on, full tilt into it. Then, in that instant that he conceived the thought, the robot was tossed into the air, twisting backward and falling in the sand. Lansing put up his hand as if to scrub his eyes, as if to clear his vision, for in that spilt second when Jurgens had been tossed, he had thought he’d seen something (like a snake, perhaps, although it could not have been a snake) emerge momentarily from the sand, striking from the sand and then being there no longer, too quick for the eye to catch, no more than a flicker in the air.

Jurgens, lying on his back, now was turning over, clawing with both hands and thrusting with one leg to skid himself back from the wall. The other leg dragged limply.

Lansing leaped to his feet and ran forward. He grasped the robot by one clawing arm and started dragging him back toward the road.

“Let me,” said someone, and looking up, Lansing saw the Parson standing over him. The Parson stooped, seized Jurgens about his waist and heaved him to his shoulder like a bag of grain, staggering slightly under the robot’s weight.

On the road the Parson let Jurgens down. Lansing knelt beside him.

“Tell me where you hurt,” he said.

“I do not hurt,” said Jurgens. “I am not equipped to hurt.”

“One leg was dragging,” said Sandra. “The right leg. He can’t use it.”

“Here,” said the Brigadier, “let me stand you up. Put you on your feet, see if you can bear your weight.”

He hauled mightily, pulling the robot to his feet, supporting him. Jurgens tottered on his left leg, seeking to put his weight on the right. The right leg folded under him. The Brigadier eased him to a sitting position.

Mary said, “It’s a mechanical problem. We can have a look at it. Or is it entirely mechanical? How about it, Jurgens?”

“I think it is mostly mechanical,” said Jurgens. “There might be some biologies involved. Some biological nerve function. I can’t be sure.”

“If we only had some tools,” said Mary. “Dammit, why didn’t we think to buy some tools?”

“I have a kit of tools,” said Jurgens. “A small kit. Perhaps sufficient of them.”

“Well, that’s better,” said Mary. “Maybe we can do something for you.”

“Did anyone see what happened out there?” Sandra asked.

The others shook their heads. Lansing said nothing; he could not be certain what he’d seen, if anything at all.

“Something hit me,” said Jurgens.

“Did you see what it was?” Sandra asked.

“I saw nothing. I just felt the hit.”

“We don’t want to stay out here in the road,” said the Brigadier. “It may take a while to make repairs on him. Let’s find a place to camp. It’s drawing on toward evening.”

They found a place to camp at the edge of a grove about half a mile distant. A nearby brook supplied water. Downed trees provided wood. Lansing helped Jurgens hobble to the site, sat him down beside a tree he could lean against.

The Brigadier took over. He said to Mary, “The rest of us will get the fire going and do the cooking and whatever else needs doing. Why don’t you get to work on Jurgens? Lansing can help you if you wish.”

He started to walk away and then came back. He said to Lansing, “The Parson and I talked it over. Not too amiably, but we talked. That little incident back on the trail: We agreed that we’d both been out of line. I thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks for telling me,” said Lansing.