Destiny Doll

TWENTY-SEVEN

Sara had been right. There was nowhere to go. The worlds offered no way out. I had been through them all, driving myself, sleeping only in snatches when I became so worn-out that I was afraid I’d become negligent and sloppy in my evaluation of them. I did not hurry the work. I spent more time, most likely, than was absolutely necessary, in having a good look at each of them in turn.

It had taken a while to figure out how to operate the wheel to bring each world into being, but once I had done that I settled down to work, paying attention to nothing else. Roscoe did not bother me and I, in turn, paid slight attention to him except to note that much of the time he was not around. I got the impression, somehow, that he was prowling through the city, but did not take the time to wonder what might be the purpose of his prowling.

One could not say, of course, that no one of the worlds held the kind of technology I sought. Only a small portion of each stood revealed and it would have been foolhardy for me to have entered one of them unless there had been ample evidence that it was the kind of place I hunted. For once one entered one of them, the chances of escaping from it would have been almost nil. Without Hoot and the creature of the wheel we never would have escaped from the sand dune world. But the fact was that I found no world that tempted me in the least to enter it, not a single one that showed any sign of even the most rudimentary intelligence. All of them were vicious worlds, mostly primal worlds-jungle hells or frozen wastes or still in the state of crust formation. There were others that had thick atmospheres, with swirling clouds of gases that made me choke just to look at them. There were a few that were clearly dead worlds-great level plains without vegetation, dimly lighted by a dim and blood-red, dying sun. There was one charred cinder of a planet, burned out in a nova flare-up of its sun.

Why, I wondered, had the doorways to the worlds been fashioned? Certainly if anyone had wanted to use the doorways to these other planets, he would have planned for them to open on the outskirts of a city, or at least a village. He would not have settled for a jungle or an icy waste or a burned-out cinder. Could they have been there for no other reason than to get rid of unwelcome visitors? But if that had been the case, one world or at most a half a dozen would have been sufficient; there would have been no need of hundreds. There was no reason for that many worlds or those kind of worlds. Although I realized that there must, in the minds of that other race, have been logical reasons for it all, and these logical reasons could not possibly occur to me because they did not lie within the parameters of human logic.

So I came to an end of them and was no better off than I had been before; worse off, perhaps, for when I had started on it there had been hope and now the hope was gone.

I went back to the fire, but the fire was out. I pressed my palm down on the ashes and there was no warmth. Roscoe was gone; I could not remember seeing him for days.

Had he deserted me, perhaps not actually deserting me, but simply wandering off and not bothering to come back? This might be, I admitted to myself, the end of it. There might be no more that a man could do.

I sat down beside the dead ashes of the fire and stared out into the twilight of the street.

There still might be other possibilities-somewhere in the city a man might find a way or clue; out on the planet, traveling east or west or south rather than toward the mountains looming to the north, there might be an answer waiting. But I didn’t have the will for it. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to try again. I was ready to give up.

Move over, gnome, I said.

But that was wrong, I knew. It was defeatist talk. It was dramatizing. When the time came to try again, when and if I caught a glimmer of a hope, I’d get up and go.

But now I simply sat and felt sorry for myself-and not only for myself, but for all the rest of us. Although why I should feel sorry for Smith or Tuck or Sara, I didn’t really know. They’d gotten what they wanted.

Down in the twilight of the street a shadow moved, a darkness in the gray, and a twinge of terror went fluttering through me, but I didn’t stir. If whatever might be down there wanted to come up and get me it would find me here, beside the campfire ashes. I still had the sword and I was awkward with it, but I’d still put up a fight.

My nerves must have been worn down to frayed ends for me to be thinking this. There was no reason to believe there was anything in the city that was out to get me. The city was deserted and abandoned; nothing moved in it but shadows.

But the shadow, as I watched, kept on moving. It left the street and came up the ramp toward me, moving jerkily, like an old man stumping down a narrow lane that offered uneven footing.

I saw that it was Roscoe and, poor thing that be was, I was glad to have him back. As he came nearer I rose to greet him.

He stopped just before he reached the door and speaking carefully, as if he might be fighting against falling into his rhyming routine, he said, slowly and deliberate, with a pause between each word, “You will come with me.”

“Roscoe,” I said, “thanks for coming back. What is going on?”

He stood in the twilight, staring stupidly at me, then he said, still slowly, carefully, with each word forced out of him: “If the mathematics work ...” Then came to a halt. Mathematics had given him quite a bit of trouble.

“I had troubles,” he said. “I was confused. But I have worked it out and I am better now. Working it out helped to get me better.” He was talking with somewhat less difficulty, but it still wasn’t easy for him. The long speech had been an effort for him. You could feel him forcing himself to speak correctly.

“Take it easy, Roscoe,” I counseled. “Don’t try too hard. You are doing fine. Just take it easy now.”

But he wasn’t about to take it easy. He was full of what he had had to say. It had been bottled up inside of him for a long time and it was bubbling to get out.

“Captain Ross,” he said, “I was fearful for a time. Fearful I would never work it out. For there are two things on this planet and they both struggled for expression and I could not get them sorted, sported, forted, courted ...”

I moved forward quickly and grabbed him by the arm. “For the love of God,” I pleaded, “take it easy. You have all the time there is. There isn’t any hurry. I’ll wait to hear you out. Don’t try to talk too fast.”

“Thank you, captain,” he said with an effort at great dignity, “for your forebearance and your great consideration.”

“We’ve traveled a long road,” I told him. “We can take a little time. If you have any answers, I can wait for them. Myself, I’m fresh out of anything like answers.”

“There is the structure,” he said. “The white structure of which the city is made and the spaceport floored and the spaceships sealed.”

He stopped and waited for so long that I was afraid something might have happened to him. But after a time he spoke again.

“In ordinary matter,” he said, “the bonding between the atoms involves only the outer shells. Do you understand?’

“I think I do,” I said. “Rather foggily.”

“In the white material,” he said, “bonding extends deeper than the outer orbits of the electrons, down deep into the shell. You grasp the implication?”

I gasped as I understood at least a little of what he had just told me.

“All hell,” I said, “couldn’t break the bond.”

“Precisely,” he declared. “That is what was thought. Now you will come with me, captain, if you please.”

“But just a minute,” I protested. “You haven’t told it all. You said there were two things.”

He looked at me for a long moment, as if he might be debating if he should tell me further, then he asked a question, “What do you know, captain, of reality?”

I shrugged. It was a foolish question. “At one time,” I told him, doubtfully, “I would have told you I could recognize reality. Now I’m not so sure.”

“This planet,” he said, “is layered in realities. There are at least two realities. There may be many more.”

He was almost fluent now, although there still were times he stuttered and had to force his words out and his delivery of them was spaced imperfectly.

“But how,” I asked, “do you know all this? About the bonding and reality?”

“I do not know,” he said. “I only know I know it. And now, please, can we go?”

He turned and went down the ramp and I followed him. What had I to lose? I had nothing going for me and maybe he had nothing going for him, either, maybe all he said were just empty words born of an enlarged imagination, but I was at a point where I was ready to make a grab at any straw.

The idea of more tightly bonded atoms made a feeble sort of sense, although as I ran it through my mind I couldn’t figure out how it might be done. But this business of a many-layered reality was outright gibberish. It made no sense at all.

We reached the street and Roscoe headed for the spaceport. He was no longer mumbling to himself and he was walking rapidly, as if he might have a purpose-so rapidly that I had to hurry to keep up with him. He was changed- there was no doubt of that-but I had a hard time making up my mind whether it was an actual change or just a new phase of his madness.

When we emerged from the street onto the spaceport, I saw that it was morning. The sun was about halfway up the eastern sky. The spaceport, with its milky-white floor, surrounded by the whiteness of the city, was a place of glare and in that glare the whiteness of the ships stood up like daytime ghosts.

We headed out into the immensity of the port. Roscoe seemed to be moving just a little faster than he had before. Falling behind, I had to trot every now and then to keep up with him. I would have liked to ask him what it was all about, but I had no breath to waste in asking and, in any case, I wasn’t sure he would tell me.

It was a long hike. For a long time it seemed we had scarcely moved and then, rather suddenly, we were a long way from the city walls and closer to the ships.

We were fairly close to Sara’s ship before I saw the contraption at its base. It was a crazy-looking thing, with a mirror of some sort and what I took to be a battery (or at least a power source) and a maze of wires and tubing. It wasn’t very big, three feet or so in height and maybe ten feet square and from a distance it looked like an artistic junk heap. Closer up it looked less like a junk heap; it looked like something a couple of vacation-bored kids would rig up from assorted odds and ends they had managed to accumulate, pretending that they were building some sort of wondrous machine.

I stopped and stared at it, unable to say a word. Of all the goddamned foolishness I had ever seen, this was the worst. During all the time I had been sweating out my heart, running through the worlds, this silly robot had been hunting through the city to pick up all kinds of forgotten and discarded junk and had been lugging it out here and setting up this thing.

He had squatted down before what I imagine he imagined to be a control panel and was reaching out his hands to the knobs and switches on it.

“Now, captain,” he said, “if the mathematics should be right.”

He did something to the panel and here and there tubes flickered briefly and there was a sound like the sound of breaking glass and a shower of glasslike fragments were peeling off the ship and crashing to the ground and the ship stood free of the milk-white glaze the buglike machine had squirted over it.

I stood frozen. I couldn’t move. The fool machine had worked and the ship stood free and ready and I couldn’t move. It was incomprehensive. I could not believe it. Roscoe couldn’t do this. Not the fumbling, mumbling Roscoe I had known. I was only dreaming it.

Roscoe stood up and came over to me. He put out both his hands and gripped me by the shoulders, standing facing me.

“It is done,” he said. “Both for it and I. When I freed the ship, I freed myself as well. I am whole and well again. I am my olden self.”

And indeed he seemed so, although I’d not known his olden self. He had no difficulty talking and he stood and moved more naturally, more like a man, less like a clanking robot.

“I was confused,” he said, “by all that happened to me, by the changes in my brain, changes that I could not comprehend and did not know how to use. But now, having used them and proved that they are useful, I am quite myself once more.”

I found that the paralysis which had gripped me now was gone and I tried to turn so that I could run toward the ship, but he clung tightly to my shoulders and would not let me go.

“Hoot talked to you of destiny,” he said. “This is my destiny. This and more. The movers of the universe, whatever they may be, work in many ways to achieve each individual destiny. How other can one explain why the hammering of crude mallets on my brain could have so changed and short-circuited and altered the pattern of my brain as to have brought about an understanding I did not have before.”

I shook myself free of him.

“Captain,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You do not believe it even yet. You still think I am an oaf. And I may have been an oaf. But I am no longer.”

“No,” I said, “I guess you’re not. There is no way to thank you.”

“We are friends,” he said. “There is no need of thanks. You freed me of the centaurs. I free you of this planet. That should make us friends. We have sat by many campfires. That should make us friends...”

“Shut up!” I yelled at him. “Cut out the goddamned sentiment. You are worse than Hoot.”

I went around his ridiculous contraption and climbed the ladder of the ship, Roscoe climbing close behind me.

In the pilot chair I reached out and patted the panel.

This was it at last. We could take off any time we wanted. We could leave the planet and carry with us the secret of the planet’s treasure. Just how a man could turn a treasure such as that into a cash transaction I had no idea at the moment, but I knew I’d find a way. Whenever a man had a commodity to sell, he’d find a way to sell it.

And was this what it all had come to, I asked myself-that I should have something I could sell? Not another planet (although I suppose I could have sold the planet, too) but the knowledge and the information that was stored upon the planet in the form of seeds, knowledge collected by trees that were thought receivers, storing the knowledge they collected in the seeds they scattered and, that scattered, were collected by colonies of little rodents and not eaten, but deposited in great pits and granaries against the day of harvest.

But there was more to it than that, I told myself. More to the planet than a great white city and knowledge-grabbing trees. It also was a planet where a man might simply disappear (or fade away, as Tuck faded) and when they faded or they disappeared, where did they go? Did they move into another reality, into another life, as Hoot had moved into another life? There had been another culture, an earlier culture than the one that had built the city. This earlier culture had built the now-empty red-stone building at the outskirts of the city and had carved the doll that sagged out of the pocket of my jacket. Could that culture, if it had survived, have been able to tell the secret of how a man might fade away?

Roscoe had spoken of a many-layered reality and was that what it was all about? And if this were the case, did such a segmented reality exist only on this planet or might it exist as well on other planets?

I had thought of it as gibberish and perhaps it still was gibberish, but Roscoe had been right about the mathematics (or whatever one might call them) which had freed the ship. Might he not be right about the reality as well?

But all of this, I told myself, had nothing to do with me. I had wondered what I’d wanted back there on the trail and it had not been what Sara or Tuck or George, or even Hoot, had wanted. All I’d wanted was to get off the planet and now I had the means of getting off. All of us, at last, had found the thing we wanted. All that remained for me was to seal the hatch and activate the motors.

It was a simple thing and yet I hesitated. I stayed sitting in the pilot’s chair staring at the panel. Why, I asked myself, this reluctance to get started?

Could it be the others? There had been four of us to start with; did I shrink from only one returning?

I sat there and tried to be honest with myself and found that it was difficult to be honest with myself.

Tuck and George were out of reach and so was Hoot. There was no sense hunting them to bring them back. But there was Sara still. She could be reached and I could bring her back, somehow I still could manage that.

I sat and tried to fight it all out once again and there was a funny smarting in my eyes and with something close to horror I realized that tears were running down my cheeks.

Sara, I said to myself. Sara, for the love of Christ, why did you have to go and find what you were looking for? Why can’t you come back and go home with me? Why can’t I go and get you?

I remembered that last night as we’d sat beside the campfire and she had said it could have been so good between us-so good between us if we’d not gone charging out to chase a legend. And why did the stupid legend have to turn out to be true and spoil it all for us?

And I remembered, too, that first day when she’d met me in the hall of that house back on Earth and we’d walked down the hall together, arm in arm, to the room where Tuck and George had waited.

Not Tuck or George or Hoot, for they were out of reach. Not Sara, because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. But there was someone else.

I heaved out of the chair and went to the cabinet at the back of the cabin. From it I took the spare laser gun.

“We’re going back,” I said to Roscoe.

“Going back,” said Roscoe, “for Miss Foster?”

“No,” I said. “For Paint.”