He had waited for the frost and when it came had gone out again and sat beneath the tree with the leaves falling through the air like slow-paced drops of rain. He had closed his eyes and had smelled the autumn air tainted with the faintest touch of smoke, and had felt the sunlight falling warm about him and it was exactly as it had been that day so long ago. The autumn day of boyhood had not been lost; it was with him still.
He had sat there with his hands held out and with the card across one palm and nothing happened. Then, as it had failed to do that day of long ago, a leaf came fluttering down and fell atop the card. It lay there for an instant, a perfect goldenness.
Then suddenly it was gone and in its place atop the card was the object that had been printed on the card—a ball of some sort, three inches in diameter, and with prickly spikes sticking out over it, like an outsize gooseberry. Then it buzzed at him and he could feel the buzzing spreading through his body.
It seemed in that instant that there was something with him, or that he was part of something—some thinking, living, (perhaps even loving) thing that quivered somewhere very close to him and yet very far away. As if this thing, whatever it might be, had reached out a finger and had touched him, for no other purpose than to let him know that it was there.
He crouched down to dip the water with the battered, blackened pan from a pool that appeared to be just a little cleaner and a little clearer than it had seemed elsewhere.
And there had been something there, he thought. Something that through the years he had become acquainted with, but never truly known. A gentle thing, for it had dealt with him gently. And a thing that had a purpose and had driven him toward that purpose, but kindly, as a kindly teacher drives a student toward a purpose that in the end turns out to be the student’s own.
The little buzzing gooseberry was the gateway to it, so long as the gooseberry had been needed. Although, he thought, such a word as gateway was entirely wrong, for there had been no gateway in the sense that he had ever seen this thing, or come close to it or had a chance to find out what it was. Only that it was, that it lived and that it had a mind and could communicate.
Not talk—communicate. And toward the end, he recalled, the communication had been excellent, although the understanding that should have gone with communication had never quite come clear.
Given time, he thought. But there had been an interruption and that was why he must get back, as quickly as he could. For it would not know why he had left it. It would not understand. It might think that he had died, if it had a concept that would encompass a condition such as death. Or that he had deserted it. Or that somehow it had failed.
He dipped the sauce pan full of water and straightened, standing in the great hush of the morning.
He remembered now. But why had he not remembered sooner? Why had it escaped him? How had he forgotten?
From far away he heard it and, hearing it, felt the hope leap in him. He waited tensely to hear it once again, needing to hear it that second time to know that it was true.
It came again, faint, but carrying unmistakably in the morning air—the crowing of a rooster.
He swung around and ran back to the camping site.
Running, he stumbled, and the pan flew from his hand. He scrabbled to his feet and left the pan where it had fallen.
He rushed to Kitty and fell on his knees beside her.
“Just a few more miles!” he shouted. “I heard a rooster crowing. The edge of the swamp can’t be far away.”
He reached down and slid his hands beneath her, lifted her, cradling her, holding her tightly against him.
She moaned and tossed.
“Easy, girl,” he said. “We’re almost out of it.”
He struggled from his knees and stood erect. He shifted her body so that it rode the easier in his arms.
“I’ll carry you,” he said. “I can carry you all the way.”
It was farther than he’d thought. And the swamp was worse than it had ever been—as if, sensing that this stumbling, stubborn creature might slip out of its grasp, it had redoubled its trickery and its viciousness in a last attempt to seize and swallow him.
He had left the little food they’d had behind. He’d left everything behind. He had taken only Kitty.
When she achieved a sort of half consciousness and cried for water, he stopped beside a pool, carried water to her in his cupped hands, bathed her face and helped her drink, then went on again.
Late in the afternoon the fever broke and she regained full consciousness.
“Where am I?” she asked, staring at the green-blackness of the swamp.
“Who are you?” she asked, and he tried to tell her. She did not remember him, or the swamp, or Limbo. He spoke to her of Eric and she did not remember Eric.
And that, he recalled, had been the way it had been with him. He had not remembered. Only over hours and days had it come back to him in snatches.
Was that the way it would be with her? Had that been the way it had been with Eric? Had there been no self-sacrifice, no heroism in what Eric did? Had it been a mere, blind running from the pit of horror in which he awoke to find himself?
And if all of this were true, whatever had been wrong with him, whatever caused the fever and forgetfulness, was then the same as had happened to Kitty and to Eric.
Was it, he wondered, some infection that he carried?
For if that were true, then it was possible he had infected everyone in Limbo.
He went on into the afternoon and his strength amazed him, for he should not be this strong.
It was nerve, he knew, that kept him going, the sheer excitement of being almost free of this vindictive swamp.
But the nerve would break, he knew. He could not keep it up. The nerve would break and the excitement would grow dull and dim and the strength would drain from him. He’d then be an aged man carrying an aged woman through a swamp he had no right to think he could face alone, let alone assume the burden of another human.
But the strength held out. He could feel it flowing in him. Dusk fell and the first faint stars came out, but the going now was easier. It had been easier, he realized, for the last hour or so.
“Put me down,” said Kitty. “I can walk. There’s no need to carry me.”
“Just a little while,” said Alden. “We are almost there.”
Now the ground was firmer and he could tell by the rasp of it against his trouser legs that he was walking in a different kind of grass—no longer the harsh, coarse, knife-like grass that few in the swamp, but a softer, gentle grass.
A hill loomed in the darkness and he climbed it and now the ground was solid.
He reached the top of the hill and stopped. He let Kitty down and stood her on her feet.
The air was clean and sharp and pure. The leaves of a nearby tree rustled in a breeze and in the east the sky was tinged with the pearly light of a moon.
Back of them the swamp, which they had beaten, and in front of them the clean, solid countryside that eventually would defeat them. Although eventually, Alden told himself, sounded much too long. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, they would be detected and run down.
With an arm around Kitty’s waist to hold her steady as she walked, he went down the hill to eventual defeat.
The rattletrap pickup truck stood in the moonlit farmyard. There were no lights in the house that stood gaunt upon the hilltop. The road from the farmyard ran down a long, steep hill to join the main road a half mile or so away.
There would be no ignition key, of course, but one could cross the wires, then shove the truck until it started coasting down the hill. Once it was going, throw it into gear and the motor would crank over and start up.
“Someone will catch us, Alden,” Kitty told him. “There is no more certain way for someone to find out about us. Stealing a truck…”
; “It’s only twenty miles,” said Alden. “That’s what the signpost said. And we can be there before there is too much fuss.”
“But it would be safer walking and hiding.”
“There is no time,” he said.
For he remembered now. It had all come back to him—the machine that he had built in the dining room. A machine that was like a second body, that was like a suit to wear. It was a two-way schoolhouse, or maybe a two-way laboratory, for when he was inside of it he learned of that other life and it learned of him.
It had taken years to build it, years to understand how to assemble the components that those others, or that other, had provided. All the components had been small and there had been thousands of them. He had held out his hand and thought hard of yellow leaves falling in the blue haze of autumn air and there had been another piece of that strange machine put into his hand.
And now it stood, untenanted, in that faded, dusky room and they would be wondering what had happened to him.
“Come on,” he said to Kitty, sharply. “There is no use in waiting.”
“There might be a dog. There might be a…”
“We will have to chance it.”
He ducked out of the clump of trees and ran swiftly across the moonlit barnyard to the truck. He reached it and wrenched at the hood and the hood would not come up.
Kitty screamed, just once, more a warning scream than fright, and he spun around. The shape stood not more than a dozen feet away, with the moonlight glinting off its metal and the Medic Disciplinary symbol engraved upon its chest.
Alden backed against the truck and stood there, staring at the robot, knowing that the truck had been no more than bait. And thinking how well the medics must know the human race to set that sort of trap—knowing not only the working of the human body but the human mind as well
Kitty said: “If you’d not been slowed up. If you’d not carried me…”
“It would have made no difference,” Alden told her. “They probably had us spotted almost from the first and were tracking us.”
“Young man,” the robot said, “you are entirely right. I have been waiting for you. I must admit,” the robot said, “that I have some admiration for you. You are the only ones who ever crossed the swamp. There were some who tried, but they never made it.”
So this was how it ended, Alden told himself, with some bitterness, but not as much, perhaps, as he should have felt. For there had been, he thought, nothing but a feeble hope from the first beginning. He had been walking toward defeat, he knew, with every step he’d taken—and into a hopelessness that even he admitted.
If only he had been able to reach the house in Willow Bend, that much he had hoped for, that much would have satisfied him. To reach it and let those others know he had not deserted.
“So what happens now?” he asked the robot. “Is it back to Limbo?”
The robot never had a chance to answer. There was a sudden rush of running feet, pounding across the farmyard.
The robot swung around and there was something streaking in the moonlight that the robot tried to duck, but couldn’t.
Alden sprang in a low and powerful dive, aiming for the robot’s knees. His shoulder struck on metal and the flying rock clanged against the breastplate of the metal man. Alden felt the robot, already thrown off balance by the rock, topple at the impact of his shoulder.
The robot crashed heavily to the earth and Alden, sprawling on the ground, fought upright to his feet.
“Kitty!” he shouted.
But Kitty, he saw, was busy.
She was kneeling beside the fallen robot, who was struggling to get up and in her hand she held the thrown rock, with her hand raised above the robot’s skull. The rock came down and the skull rang like a bell—and rang again and yet again.
The robot ceased its struggling and lay still, but Kitty kept on pounding at the skull.
“Kitty, that’s enough,” said another voice.
Alden turned to face the voice.
“Eric!” he cried. “But we left you back there.”
“I know,” said Eric. “You thought I had run back to Limbo. I found where you had tracked me.”
“But you are here. You threw the rock.”
Eric shrugged. “I got to be myself again. At first I didn’t know where I was or who I was or anything at all. And then I remembered all of it. I had to make a choice then. There really wasn’t any choice. There was nothing back in Limbo. I tried to catch up with you, but you moved too fast.”
“I killed him,” Kitty announced, defiantly. “I don’t care. I meant to kill him.”
“Not killed,” said Eric. “There’ll be others coming soon. He can be repaired.”
“Give me a hand with the hood on this truck,” said Alden. “We have to get out of here.”
Eric parked the rattletrap back of the house and Alden got out.
“Come along now,” he said.
The back door was unlocked, just as he had left it. He went into the kitchen and switched on the ceiling light.
Through the door that opened into the dining room, he could see the shadowy framework of the structure he had built.
“We can’t stay here too long,” said Eric. “They know we have the truck. More than likely they’ll guess where we were headed.”
Alden did not answer. For there was no answer. There was no place they could go.
Wherever they might go, they would be hunted down, for no one could be allowed to flaunt the medic statutes and defy the medic justice. There was no one in the world who would dare to help them.
He had run from Limbo to reach this place—although he had not known at the time what he was running to. It was not Limbo he had run from; rather, he had run to reach the machine that stood in the dining room just beyond this kitchen.
He went into the room and snapped on the light and the strange mechanism stood glittering in the center of the room.
It was a man-size cage and there was just room for him to stand inside of it. And he must let them know that he was back again.
He stepped into the space that had been meant to hold him and the outer framework and its mysterious attachments seemed to fold themselves about him.
He stood in the proper place and shut his eyes and thought of falling yellow leaves. He made himself into the boy again who had sat beneath the tree and it was not his mind, but the little boy mind that sensed the goldenness and blue, that smelled the wine of autumn air and the warmth of autumn sun.
He wrapped himself in autumn and the long ago and he waited for the answer, but there was no answer.
He waited and the goldenness slid from him and the air was no longer wine-like and there was no warm sunlight, but a biting wind that blew off some black sea of utter nothingness.
He knew—he knew and yet he’d not admit it. He stood stubbornly and wan, with his feet still in the proper place, and waited.
But even stubbornness wore thin and he knew that they were gone and that there was no use of waiting, for they would not be back. Slowly he turned and walked out of the cage.
He had been away too long.
As he stepped out of the cage, he saw the vial upon the floor and stooped to pick it up. He had sipped from it, he remembered, that day (how long ago?) when he had stepped back into the room after long hours in the cage.
They had materialized it for him and they’d told him he should drink it and he could remember the bitter taste it had left upon his tongue.
Kitty and Eric were standing in the doorway, staring at him, and he looked up from the vial and stared in their direction.
“Alden,” Kitty asked, “what has happened to you?”
He shook his head at her. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Nothing’s happened. They just aren’t there, is all.”
“Something happened,” sh
e said. “You look younger by twenty years or more.”
He let the vial fall from his hand. He lifted his hands in front of him and in the light from overhead he saw that the wrinkles in the skin had disappeared. They were stronger, firmer hands. They were younger hands.
“It’s your face,” Kitty said. “It’s all filled out. The crow’s feet all are gone.”
He rubbed his palm along his jaw and it seemed to him that the bone was less pronounced, that the flesh had grown out to pad it.
“The fever,” he said. “That was it—the fever.”
For he remembered dimly. Not remembered, maybe, for perhaps he had never known. But he was knowing now. That was the way it had always worked. Not as if he’d learned a thing, but as if he’d remembered it. They put a thing into his mind and left it planted there and it unfolded then and crept upon him slowly.
And now he knew.
The cage was not a teacher. It was a device they had used to study man, to learn about his body and his metabolism and all the rest of it.
And then when they had known all that need be known, they had written the prescription and given it to him.
Young man, the robot in the barnyard had said to him. But he had not noticed. Young man, but he had too many other things to think about to notice those two words.
But the robot had been wrong.
For it was not only young.
Not young alone—not young for the sake of being young, but young because there was coursing in his body a strange alien virus, or whatever it might be, that had set his body right, that had tuned it up again, that had given it the power to replace old and aging tissue with new.
Doctors to the universe, he thought, that is what they were. Mechanics sent out to tinker up and renovate and put in shape the protoplasmic machinery that was running old and rusty.
“The fever?” Eric asked him.
“Yes,” said Alden. “And thank God, it’s contagious. You both caught it from me.”