From the time I had seen the ship and had realized that it was newly crashed, the idea had arisen, of course, that aboard it I might find food and water and perhaps other articles that the four of us could use. But now, I admitted, the entire thing was a complete and total washout. I couldn't help this creature and he was no help to us and the whole thing wound up as just another headache and being stuck with him.
"I can't offer you much," I told him. "There are four of us, myself and three others. We have no food or water—absolutely nothing."
"How got you here?" he asked.
I tried to tell him how we had gotten there and as I groped and stumbled for a way to say it, I figured that I was just wasting my time. After all, what did it really matter how we had gotten there? But he seemed to understand.
"Ah, so," he said.
"So you can see how little we can do for you," I said. "But you would essay to carry me to this place where the others are encamped?"
"Yes, I could do that."
"You would not mind?"
"Not at all," I told him, "if you'd like it that way."
I did mind, of course. It would be no small chore to wrestle him across the sand dunes. But I couldn't quite see myself assessing the situation and saying the hell with it and then walking out on him.
"I would like it very much," the creature said. "Other life is comfort and aloneness is not good. Also in numbers may lie strength. One can never tell."
"By the way," I said, "my name is Mike. I am from a planet called the Earth, out in the Carina Cygnus arm."
"Mike," he said, trying it out, hooting the name so it sounded like anything but Mike. "Is good. Rolls easy on the vocal cords. The locale of your planet is a puzzle to me. The terms I've never heard. The position of mine means nothing to you, too. And my name? My name is complicated matter involving identity framework that is of no consequence to people but my own. Please, you pick a name for me. You can call me what you want. Short and simple, please."
It had been a little crazy, of course, to get started on this matter of our names. The funny thing about it was that I'd not intended to. It was something that had just come out of me, almost instinctively. I had been somewhat surprised when I'd heard myself telling him my name. But now that it had been done, it did make the situation a bit more comfortable. We no longer were two alien beings that had stumbled across one another's paths. It gave each of us, it seemed, a greater measure of identity.
"How about Hoot?" I asked. And I could have kicked myself the minute I had said it. For it was not the best name in the world and he would have had every reason for resenting it. But he didn't seem to. He waved his tentacles around in a snaky sort of way and repeated the name several times.
"Is good," he finally said. "Is excellent for creature such as me."
"Hello, Mike," he said.
"Hello, Hoot," I told him.
I slung the rifle on my shoulder and got my feet well planted and reached down to get both arms around him. Finally I managed to hoist him to the other shoulder. He was heavier than he looked and his body was so rounded that it was hard to get a grip on him. But I finally got him settled and well-balanced and started up the dune.
I didn't try to go straight up, but slanted at an angle. With my feet sinking to the ankles with every step I took and the sand sliding under me, and fighting for every inch of progress, it was just as bad, or worse, than I had thought it would prove to be.
But I finally reached the crest and collapsed as easily as I could, letting Hoot down gently then just lying there and panting.
"I cause much trouble, Mike," said Hoot. "I tax your strength, exceeding."
"Let me get my breath," I said. "It's just a little farther."
I rolled over on my back and stared up at the sky. The stars glittered back at me. Straight overhead was a big blue giant that looked like a flashing jewel and a little to one side was a dull coal of a star, a red supergiant, perhaps. And a million others—as if someone had sat down and figured out how to fill the sky with stars and had come up with a pattern.
"Where is this place, Hoot?" I asked. "Where in the galaxy?"
"It's a globular cluster," he said. "I thought you knew that."
And that made sense, I 'thought. For the planet we had landed on, the one that great fool of a Smith had led us to, had been well above the galactic plane, out in space beyond the main body of the galaxy—out in globular duster country.
"Is your home here," I asked.
"No. Far away," he said, and the way he said it, I asked him nothing more. If he didn't want to talk about where he'd come from, it was all right with me. He might be on the lam, he might be a refugee, or he might have been banished as an undesirable. All of these things happened. Space was full of wanderers who could not go home again.
I lay looking at the stars and wondering exactly where we were. A globular cluster, Hoot had said, and there were a lot of them and it could be, I supposed, any one of them. Distance or proximity, I realized, would not make a great deal of difference when one was shunted from one place to another by the method that had been used to get us here.
Nor did it make a great deal of difference where we were. If we failed to locate water, we'd not be here for long. Food too, of course, but food was less critical than water. I wondered rather vaguely why I wasn't more upset. It might be, I told myself, that I had been in so many scrapes in so many alien places and had always, somehow, gotten out of them, that I had come to think I'd always be able to get out of them. Or maybe it was the ingrown realization that my margin of good luck had been more than overrun, that I was overdue to meet the end I had escaped so many times—a realization that someday some planet or some ornery critter would finally do me in. And realizing that, deciding that there was no great point to worry over it, for when that day came I'd had it and prior worry would not help at all.
I was trying to figure which it might be when something touched me softly on the shoulder. I switched my head and saw that Hoot was tapping me with one of his tentacles.
"Mike," he croaked, "you should take a look. We are not alone."
I jerked bolt upright, grabbing at the rifle.
A wheel was coming up over the dune behind us, the one on which Hoot's spacecraft had come to grief. It was a big wheel and a bright one and it had a green hub that glistened in the moonlight. I could see only part of it, but the monstrous, gleaming curve of it rose into the air above the dune a hundred feet or so. Its tread was broad—ten feet or more, I guessed—and it had the shine of polished steel. Hundreds of silvery spokes ran from the inside of the rim to the green and glistening hub.
It was not moving. It hung there in the air, poised above the dune. The moon-silvered ribs of Hoot's ship looked like a smashed toy when measured by its size.
"Living?" asked Hoot.
"Perhaps," I said.
"Then we best prepare to defend . . ."
"We sit right here," I snapped. "We don't raise a hand against it."
It was watching us, I was sure. Whatever it was, it might have come out to investigate the wreckage of Hoot's ship. There was nothing to indicate that any part of it was alive, but the greenish hub, for some reason I couldn't put a finger on, had the look of life about it. It might turn around in a little while and go away. And even if it didn't, we were in no position to start banging away at anything that moved.
"You better slide down into the trough," I told Hoot. "If we have to make a run for it, I can scoop you up."
He waggled a tentacle in disagreement. "I have weapon you may need."
"You said you had no weapon."
"Dirty lie," he booted, cheerfully.
"You could have taken me," I protested, angrily, "any time you wished."
"Oh, no," he said. "You came as my befriender. Had I told you, you might not have come."
I let it pass. He was a tricky devil, but for the moment he was on my side and I had no objections.
Someone called back of me and I swiveled m
y bead around. Sara stood on top of the next dune and off to the left of her, two heads poked above the ridge. She was planted on the crest, with her silly rifle at the ready and I was scared stiff that any minute she might start throwing lead.
"Are you all right, captain?" she called to me.
"I'm all right," I said.
"Can we be of any help?"
"Yes," I said. "You can lug my pal back to camp with you."
I said camp because, for the life of me, I could think of no other way to put it.
Out of the side of my mouth, I snarled at Hoot. "Cut out the goddamned foolishness and slide down into the trough."
I switched my attention back to the wheel. It stayed where it was. I still had the feeling that it was looking at me. I twisted around and got my feet planted under me, ready to take off if the situation should demand.
I heard Hoot go sliding down the slope. A moment later Sara called to me.
"What is this thing? Where did you find it?"
I looked around and she was standing over Hoot, staring down at him.
"Tuck," I yelled, "get down there and help Miss Foster. Tell Smith to stay exactly where he is."
I could envision that damn fool of a blind man trying to follow Tuck and getting all fouled up.
Sara's voice was plaintive and a little sharp. "But captain . . ."
"He's lost just like us," I told her. "He doesn't belong here and he's in trouble. Just get him back to camp."
I looked back at the wheel. It had finally started to move, revolving slowly, almost majestically, walking up the dune slope and looming higher every minute.
"Get out of here," I yelled at Tuck and Sara, without looking back.
The wheel stopped. It was almost at the crest. Very little of it was hidden by the dune. It loomed high into the sky.
Now that I had a better chance to look it over, I saw that the strange thing about it was that it was actually a wheel and not just something that might look like a wheel. Its outer rim was formed of some sort of very shiny substance, with a tread ten feet across, but perhaps no more than a foot thick. For all its massiveness, it had a slender look about it. As it had climbed slowly up the dune, the rim had picked up sand and carried it up its rearward surface, with the sand spilling free as the wheel moved forward. The greenish hub floated in the center of the wheel—and floated was the word for it, for the fragile spokes, despite the number of them, could not have held the hub in place. And now I saw that the spokes, thin as they were, were crisscrossed by even finer wires (if they, indeed, were wires) to make the entire area between the hub and rim a sort of spider web. The thought stopped there, however, for the hub itself had no semblance to a spider. It was simply a sphere of some sort, hanging in the center of the wheel.
I looked quickly over my shoulder and there was no sign of the others. The slope of the dune was scarred with deep tracks, where they had climbed it.
I got to my feet and went sliding down the slope and labored up the face of the dune. At the top, I turned and had a look. The wheel had stayed where it was. I went down the rope and climbed the dune behind which I had left the others. They were all down there, I saw, and the wheel still hadn't moved. Maybe this was the end of it, I thought. The wheel might have come out to have a look and now, satisfied at what it had seen, might go about its business.
I went sliding down the slope and Sara came climbing up meet me.
Her face was very solemn. "We may have a chance," she said.
"A chance of getting out of here?"
"You told this Hoot of yours what happened," she said. "He seems to know about this sort of thing."
I was astonished. "I wasn't even sure he knew what I was talking about," I told her.
"He didn't understand entirely, but he asked some questions and now they're working on it."
"They?"
"Tuck and George are helping. George is very good at it. It seems he is able to pick out the door."
"George would be able to," I said.
"I wish you'd stop not liking George," she said.
It was no time to get into a hassle with her, so I went on down the dune.
The three of them were squatting in a row—or at least the other two of them were squatting and Hoot was lying there, with his legs buried in the sand. Tuck was staring fixedly ahead and Smith had an intense, excited look upon his flabby face. All Hoot's tentacles were extended straight in front of him and the tips of them were quivering.
I looked where Tuck was looking and I couldn't see a thing. There was just the slope of the other dune pitching upward to the sky.
I stood quietly behind them and Sara came up and stood beside me. We didn't stir a muscle. I didn't know what was going on, but whatever it might be, I didn't want to interfere. If they thought there was a chance to bust that door wide open, I was all in favor of it.
Suddenly Hoot's tentacles went limp and sagged down to the ground. Tuck and Smith slumped in, upon themselves. It was quite apparent that whatever they had tried had failed.
"More strength we need," said Hoot. "If all of us, perhaps . . ."
"All of us?" I asked. "I'm afraid I’m not good at this sort of thing. What is it you are trying?"
"We strain upon the door," said Hoot. "We try to pull it open."
"It still is there," said George. "I can sense the edges of it."
"We can try," said Sara. "That's the least that we can do." She squatted down beside Hoot.
"What do we do?" she asked.
"You try to visualize the door," said Tuck.
"Then you pull," said Hoot.
"Pull with what?' I asked.
"With your mind," Tuck said, nastily. "This is a time, captain, when a big mouth and muscles do not help at all."
"Friar Tuck," said Sara coldly, "that was very much uncalled for."
"That's all he's been doing," Tuck declared, "ever since we set foot upon the ship. Yelling at us and pushing us around."
"Brother," I said, "if that is what you thinks once we're out of this . . ."
"Be quiet, the two of you," said Sara. "Captain, if you please."
She patted the sand beside her and I squatted down with the rest of them, feeling mortified and foolish. In all my life, I'd never seen such downright stupidity. Oh, there was no doubt about it—there were some alien folk who could accomplish wonders with their mental powers, but we were human beings (all of us but one) and the human race had never been noted for anything like that. Although, I thought, take a couple of jerks like Tuck and George and anything might happen.
"Now, please," said Hoot, "all of us together leave us bring forth the door."
His tentacles shot out in front of him, so fast they seemed to snap, standing out rigidly with their tips a-quiver.
God knows, I tried to concentrate. I tried to see a door in front of us, and, so help me, I did see it, a sort of ghostly door with a thin edge of light around it, and once I saw it, I tried to pull on it, but there was nothing on it for a man to grab a hold of and with nothing to grab a hold on there was little chance of pulling. But I tried just the same and kept on trying. I could almost feel the fingers of my mind trying to get hold of its smooth and slippery surfaces, then slowly sliding off.
We would never make it, I knew. The door seemed to be coming open a bit, for the crack of light around it appeared to have widened. But it would take too long; we never could hold out, to get it open wide enough so we could slide through.
I was getting terribly tired—both mentally and physically, it seemed—and I knew the others could be in no better shape. We would try again, of course, and again and again, but we'd be getting weaker all the time and if we couldn't get it open in the first several tries, I knew that we were sunk. So I tried the harder and I seemed to get some small hold on it and pulled with all my might and could feel the others pulling, too—and the door began to open, swinging back toward us on invisible hinges until there was room enough for a man to get his hand into the crack, that is, if
the door had been really there. But I knew, even as I pulled and sweated mentally, that the door had no physical existence and that it was something a man could never lay a hand on.
Then, with the door beginning to open, we failed. All of us together. And there was no door. There was nothing but the dune climbing up the sky.
Something crunched behind us and I jumped up and swung around. The wheel loomed tall above us, crunching to a halt, and swarming down from the green mass in the center, swinging down the silvery spider web between the rim and hub was a blob that dripped. It was not a spider, although the basic shape of it and the way it came scrambling down the web brought a spider to one's mind. A spider would have been friendly and cozy alongside this monstrosity that came crawling down the web. It was a quivering obscenity, dripping with some sort of filthy slime, and it had a dozen legs or arms, and at one end of the dripping blob was what might have been a face—and there is no way to put into words the kind of horror that it carried with it, the loathsome feeling of uncleanliness just from seeing it, as if the very sight of it were enough to contaminate one's flesh and mind, the screaming need to keep one's distance from it, the fear that it might come close enough to touch one.
As it came down the web it was making a noise and steadily, it seemed, the noise became louder. Although it had what one could imagine was its face, it had no mouth with which to make the noise, but even with no mouth, the noise came out of it and washed over us. In the noise was the crunch of great teeth splintering bones, mixed with the slobbering of scavenger gulping at a hasty, putrid feast, and an angry chittering that had unreason in it. It wasn't any of these things alone; it was all of them together, or the sense of all of them together, and perhaps if a man had been forced to go on listening to it for long enough he might have detected in it other sounds as well.
It reached the rim of the wheel and leaped off the web to land upon the dune-spraddled there, looming over us, with the filthiness of it dripping off its body and splashing on the sand. I could see the tiny balls of wet sand where the nastiness had dropped.
It stood there, raging at us, the noise of it filling all that world of sand and bouncing off the sky.