Destiny Doll

FOURTEEN

We decided to go on, following the trail. We threshed it out as we sat around the smoky campfire, with Paint standing beside the pile of our supplies, gently rocking back and forth. Actually there wasn’t much threshing out to do. Tuck didn’t really care. He sat a little apart from us, clutching his doll tight against him and silently rocking back and forth. It was enough to give a man the jitters, watching the two of them, Paint and Tuck, rocking back and forth. Sara and I made the decision and there was no real argument. There was nothing, we were convinced, for us back there in the city. And so far as we knew, there was nothing for us up there on the trail, unless it were the sort of thing that had happened to those men back there in the gully. But the very fact that other humans, Lord knows how long ago, had followed this same trail, apparently for the selfsame reason that we followed it, seemed at least to Sara a powerful argument that we should continue.

But there was one thing, I figured, I should get straight with her.

“Knight must be dead,” I said. “Surely you know that. You must have known it back on Earth when we started out.”

She flared at me. “There you go again! Can’t you let loose! You’ve been against this idea from the start. Why did you ever come with us?”

“I told you that before,” I said. “The money.”

“Then what do you care if he’s dead or alive? What do you care if we find him or we don’t?”

“That’s an easy one,” I told her. “I don’t give a damn one way or the other.” ‘

“But you’re willing to go on? You sounded just a while ago as if you preferred going on.”

“I think I do,” I said. “We might find something up ahead. We’ll find nothing going back.”

“We might round up the hobbies.”

I shook my head. “if either the hobbies or the gnome found we were coming back, we’d never see them, much less lay a hand on them. There must be a million places in that city where you could hide an army.”

“The hobbies must be the ones who ran away,” she said, “down there in the gully. Do you suppose that they remembered when they saw the bones? Do you suppose they might have forgotten, but when they saw the bones remembered and it was such a shock to them, this old memory from the past . . .”

“There were eight of them,” I said, “and Paint makes nine. He said there were ten. Where did the other go?”

“We may never know,” she said.

I couldn’t figure out what difference all this made, why we should be sitting here and speculating. I didn’t really see what difference anything could make. We would go on and we’d not know where we were going, but we could always hope that we’d find a better place than this bone-dry wilderness with its flinty ridges and its twisted badlands, we could always hope that we might get a break somehow and that we’d recognize it soon enough to take advantage of it.

The fact that the men whose bones lay there in the gully’s end had been seeking someone did not necessarily mean they knew he’d come this way. Probably they had been as confused as we were. And there was no real evidence that Knight had been the one they had been looking for.

So we sat there by the campfire and planned it out.

We would load Paint with Roscoe’s useless carcass and all the water and food that he could carry. Tuck and I would carry heavy packs while Sara, the only one of us with a weapon, would carry a light load, so that in a moment of emergency she could drop her pack and be ready with the rifle. Hoot would carry nothing. He would be our scout, ranging out ahead of us and spying out the land.

That afternoon, much as we disliked the doing of it, we went down the gully and dug through the fort. We found three human skulls and half a dozen rusted weapons that were too far gone to determine what kind of guns they might have been. Paint recalled that there had been eight humans and the large number of scattered bones seemed to bear him out. But three skulls were all we found.

Back at camp we made up our packs and hauled the rest of the supplies off the trail, caching them in a narrow fissure than ran down into the gully. Using branches, we brushed out our tracks leading off the trail. Neither the caching job or the brushing out of tracks was done too expertly. But I had the feeling that it was all a waste of time, that the trail had been long abandoned and that we might have been the first to travel it for a century or more.

The day was far gone, but we loaded up and left. There was none of us who wanted to stay in that camp for a minute longer than was necessary. We fled from it, glad to get away, to be free of the depressing walls of barren earth and the sense of ancient doom one could feel hanging over it. And there was, as well, a sense of urgency, a never-expressed, perhaps never-admitted feeling that we were running out of time.