Destiny Doll

EIGHTEEN

We arrived the second morning after Tuck bad disappeared-arrived and knew that we were there, that we had reached the place we had struggled to reach all the endless days that stretched behind us. There was no great elation in us when we topped a little rise of ground and saw against a swale the gateway where the trail plunged downward between two great cliffs and recognized that here was the gateway to the place we had set out to reach.

Beyond us the mountains climbed up into the sky-those mountains which back at the city had first appeared as a purple smudge which could be seen fleetingly on the northern horizon. And the purple still remained, reflecting a dusk upon the blue land through which we had been traveling. It all felt so exactly right-the mountains, the gate, the feeling of having arrived-that I seemed to sense a wrongness in it, but try as I might I could not tell why there was a wrongness.

“Hoot,” I said, but he did not answer. He was standing there beside us, as motionless and quiet as we were. To him it must have seemed entirely right as well.

“Shall we go?” asked Sara, and we went, stepping down the trail toward the great stone portals which opened on the mountains.

When we reached the gate formed by the towering cliffs between which the trail went on, we found the sign. It was made of metal, affixed to one of the cliff walls, and there were a dozen or more paneled legends that apparently carried identical information in different languages. One was in the bastard script that went with space patois and it said:

All Biological Creatures Welcome, Mechanicals, Synthetic Forms, Elementals of Any Persuasions Whatsoever Cannot Be Allowed to Enter. Nor May Any Tools or Weapons, of Even the Simplest Sort, Be Allowed Beyond This Point.

“I care not,” said Paint. “I keep goodly company of great lumbering mumbler of rhyming words. And I watch most assiduously over rifle, sword, and shield. I pray you not be long, for following extended sojourn upon my back I shiver from apprehension at absence of biologic persons. There be strange comfort in the actual protoplasm.”

“I don’t like it,” I said. “We’ll be walking naked down that path.”

“This,” Sara reminded me, “is what we started out to find. We can’t quibble at a simple regulation. And it’ll be safe in there. I can feel it. Can’t you feel the safety, Mike?’

“Sure I can feel it,” I told her, “but I still don’t like it. The way you feel is no sure thing to go on. We don’t know what we’ll find. We don’t know what is waiting for us. What say we pay no attention to the sign and. . .”

“BEEP,” said the sign, or the cliff, or whatever.

I swung around and there, on the panel where the regulations had been posted, was another message:

The Management Will Not Be Responsible for the Consequences of Willful Disregarding of Regulations.

“All right, Buster,” I asked, “what kind of consequences do you have in mind?”

The panel didn’t deign to answer; the message just stayed put.

“I don’t care what you do,” said Sara. “I am going on. And I’m doing what they say. I didn’t come all this way to turn back now.”

“Who said anything about turning back?” I asked.

BEEP, said the panel and there was another message:

Don’t Try It, Buster!

Sara leaned the rifle against the wall of the cliff underneath the, sign, unfastened the cartridge belt and dropped it at the rifle’s butt.

“Come on, Hoot,” she said.

BEEP, and the panel said:

The Many-Legged One? Is It a True Biologic?

Hoot honked with anger. “Know it you do, Buster. I be honest hatched!” .

BEEP!

But You Are More Than One.

“I be three,” said Hoot, with dignity. “I be now a second self. Much preferable to first self and unready yet for third.”

The sign flashed off and there was a sense of someone or something pondering. You could feel the pondering.

BEEP! and the panel said:

Proceed, Sir, With Our Apology.

Sara turned around and looked at me. “Well?” she asked.

I threw the shield down beside the rifle and unbuckled the sword belt and let it fall. Sara led the way and I let her lead it. It was, after all, her show; this was what she’d paid for. Hoot ambled along at her heels and brought up the rear.

We went down the trail in a deepening dusk as the towering walls of stone shut out the light. We moved at the bottom of a trench that was less than three feet wide. Then the trench and trail took a sudden turn and ahead was light.

We left the towering walls and the narrow trail and came into the Promised Land.