“We were on schedule, too,” he said. “That’s the tough part of it. Made a good crossings—calm seas and we hit no coastal fog. But now we’ll be hours late when we hit Chicago. There’s overtime, of course, but who the hell wants any overtime.”
“You’re headed for Chicago?”
“Yeah. This time. Always different places. Never the same place twice.”
He reached up and pulled at the beak of his cap.
“I keep thinking of Mary and the kids,” he said.
“Your family? Surely you can get in touch with them, let them know what happened.”
“Tried to. But they aren’t home. Finally asked the operator to get someone to go out and tell them I wouldn’t be along. Not right away, at least. You see, whenever I take this road, they know when I’ll be coming and they go down to the road and stand there and wait and wave at me as I go through. The kids get an awful kick out of it, seeing their old man driving this monster.”
“You must live near here,” said Blake.
“Little town,” said the engineer. “Little backwater place a hundred miles or so from here. Old town, stuck out of the way. Just the way it was two hundred years ago. Oh, they put a new front on one of the buildings down on Main street every now and then, or someone remodels a house, but mostly the town just sits there, the way it always was. None of these big apartment complexes they are building everywhere. Nothing new at all. Good place to live. Easy-going place. No one doing any pushing. No Chamber of Commerce. No one lathering to get rich. Anyone who wants to get rich or get ahead or anything like that simply doesn’t stay there. Lots of fishing, some hunting. Some horseshoe pitching.”
He glanced at Blake. “I guess you get the picture.”
Blake nodded,
“Good place to raise kids,” said the engineer.
He picked up a dried weed stalk off the ground, poked gently at the earth with it.
“Town by the name of Willow Grove,” he said. “You ever hear of it?”
“No,” said Blake, “I don’t think I ever …”
But that was not correct, he realized suddenly. He had heard of it! That message on the P.G. that had been waiting for him when the guard had brought him home from the senator’s house had mentioned Willow Grove.
“You have heard of it, then,” said the engineer.
“I guess I have,” said Blake. “Someone mentioned it to me.”
“A good place to live,” said the man.
What had that message said? Contact someone in the town of Willow Grove and he’d learn something to his interest. And there had been the name of the man he should contact. What was that name again? Blake sought for it frantically, winnowing through his mind, but it wasn’t there.
“I must be getting on,” he said. “I hope the service crew shows up.”
The man spat in disgust. “Oh, they’ll be along all right. When they are good and ready.”
Blake trudged on, facing the long hill which rose above the valley. At the top of the hill, he saw, were trees, a humped line of autumn color ranging above the high horizon line, a break at last in the brown and yellow fields. Perhaps somewhere among those trees he could find a place where he could get some sleep.
Thinking back, Blake tried to call up the fantasy of the night, but there was still about it all an air of unreality. It was almost as if it were a series of incidents which had happened, not to him, but to someone else.
The hunt for him still was on, of course, but momentarily he must have slipped the clutches of authority. By now, perhaps, Daniels would have figured out what must have happened and now they’d be looking, not for a wolf alone, but for him as well.
He reached the top of the hill and ahead of him, down the slope, he saw the trees, not just a little grove of trees, but a woods that covered the greater part of the steep hillside on either side of the road. Below, where the valley leveled out, were fields, but beyond the valley the farther slop also was clothed with trees. Here, he realized, the folded hills began to rise too steeply for cultivation and that this alternating of cultivated valleys and wooded hills might be a pattern that would go on for miles.
He went down the hill and at the edge of the woods his eyes caught a furtive movement. Alerted and puzzled, he watched for it again. It could have been, he knew, a bird hopping from one branch to another in a low-growing shrub, or, perhaps, an animal. But the woods was now quiet, except for a slight stirring of the many-colored leaves by the whisper of a lazy wind.
He came opposite the edge of the woods and something hissed at him.
He stopped, half frightened, and shifted around to stare into the underbrush beneath the trees.
“Over here!” whispered a high and squeaky voice, and it was then, guided by the voice, that he saw the Brownie—brown fur and dark green trousers—camouflaged within the forest growth.
Another one of them, he thought. Good God, another one of them and this time he had no food to offer.
He stepped quickly off the shoulder of the road, across the ditch, and into the edge of the woods. The Brownie remained only a dim outline, blending with the woods, until he was quite close to him.
“I’ve been watching for you,” said the Brownie. “I understand you’re tired and might want a place to rest.”
“That is true,” said Blake. “There was nothing, until now, but fields.”
“You, then,” the Brownie said, “are welcome to my home. If you do not object to sharing it with an unfortunate creature which I offered my protection.”
“Not at all,” said Blake. “This other creature?”
“A raccoon,” said the Brownie, “chased most pitilessly by a pack of hounds and cornered and mauled considerably, but managing to escape. In these hills, you must understand, there is a popular human sport, which you may have heard of, known as coon hunting.”
“Yes,” said Blake, “I have heard of it.”
But he knew, well enough, that he had not remembered it until the Brownie spoke of it.
Once again, he thought, a phrase had triggered another memory, unsuspected until this moment, and another piece of his human background had fallen smoothly into place. He became aware of that memory, sharply aware of it—the lantern-lighted night, standing on a hilltop, with a gun clutched in one hand, waiting for the dogs to pick up the trail and then, suddenly, the far-off bugling of a hound that had struck a scent. And in a moment other dogs joining in until the hill and valley rang with baying. He smelled again the sweet, peculiar odor of frosted, fallen leaves, saw once again the bare branches of the trees against the risen moon, and the thrill of following the chase as the hounds ranged up the hill. Then the headlong plunge down the slope, guided only by the feeble lantern light, hurrying to close in with the hounds and not be left behind.
“I have tried to explain to the raccoon,” the Brownie said, “that if you came you would be a friend. I am not too sure, however, that he understood. He is not too bright an animal and he is, as you can well imagine, still suffering a trauma.”
“I will try not to alarm him,” Blake assured the Brownie. “I will make no sudden moves. Will there be room for the both of us?”
“Oh, most assuredly,” the Brownie said. “My home is a hollow tree. There is a great deal of room in it.”
Good Lord, thought Blake, could this be really happening—standing out here in the woods, talking to a thing that should be snared inside a children’s book, being invited to den up in a hollow tree and share it with a coon.
And from where had come the memory of the coon hunt? Had he ever, actually, been on such a hunt? It seemed impossible. For he knew what he was—a chemically-processed human, and processed for one purpose and for one purpose only, and it seemed unlikely, in view of that, he’d ever hunted coon.
“If you will follow me,” the Brownie said, “I will lead you to the tree.”
Blake followed the Brownie and it seemed to him that he had stepped into a mad painter’s fairyland. Jewel-like leaves of ever
y shade of gold and red hung on all the undergrowth, the saplings, the shrubby bushes, the very woodland plants—matching in finer detail and more delicate and brighter colors the riot of autumn pigments in the overhanging trees. And once again the memory of another place, or perhaps many other places, such as this, came back again to him. Memories with no detail as to time or place, but breath-catching in the remembered beauty of another woods on another day, caught in that instant of time when the autumn hues were at their brightest and their best, before the first hint of deterioration had touched them, at that exact moment before they would begin to fade.
They followed a faint trail, so faint that few eyes could have picked it out.
“It is pretty in here,” said the Brownie. “I like autumn best of all. I understand that on the old home planet there was no such thing as autumn.”
“You still know about your planet?”
“Of course,” the Brownie said. “The old stories are passed on. It is still our heritage. In time, I would imagine, we will forget about it, for Earth then will be our planet. But as yet, we must maintain a solid grip on the both of them.”
They came to a mammoth tree, a mighty oak eight feet or more across its trunk, gnarled and misshapen, twisted, with the heavy scales of lichen colonies turning its bark into brown and silver. Around its base grew heavy ranks of ferns. The Brownie pulled the ferns apart.
“In here,” he told Blake. “I apologize, but you must get down on your hands and knees and crawl. It is not a place that was designed for humans.”
Blake got down and crawled. The ferns rubbed across his face and brushed his neck and then he was in a soft, cool darkness that smelled of ancient wood. From someplace up above a little light filtered down to break up the darkness.
He twisted carefully around and sat down cautiously.
“In a little time,” the Brownie said, standing at his elbow, “your eyes will become accustomed to the gloom and you can see again.”
“I can see a little now,” said Blake. “There is some light.”
“From knotholes higher up the trunk,” the Brownie told him. “The tree is dying of old age. It is nothing but a shell. Once, long ago, it was scarred by a forest fire and that gave the rot a chance to work. But unless it is shaken by too great a wind, it will last for many years. And in the meantime it serves as a home for us, and higher up, there is a home for a family of squirrels. And the nests of many birds, although by now most of the birds have left. Through the years this tree has been home to many things. Living in it, there is a feeling of belonging.”
His eyes had become somewhat adjusted to the darkness and now Blake could see the inside of the tree. The inner surface was fairly smooth; all loose rot apparently had been removed. The hollow core rose like a shaft above his head and far up this tunnel, Blake could see small areas of brightness where knotholes let in the light.
“You will be undisturbed,” the Brownie said. “There are two others of us. I might suppose, in the human terminology, they would be described as wives. But they are rather shy of humans. And there are some children, too.”
“I’m sorry,” Blake said. “I would not think …”
“No need of sorrow,” said the Brownie. “The wives will turn their time to much good use in the gathering of roots and nuts and the children never stay here anyhow. They have so many woodland friends that they spend all their time with them.”
Blake looked about the tree. There was nothing in it.
“No furniture,” the Brownie told him, quietly. “No material possessions. We have never needed them; we do not need them now. We have some food—caches of nuts and corn and grain and roots—stored against the winter, but that is all we have. You will, I hope, think none the less of us for this improvidence.”
Blake shook his head, half in answer, half in bewilderment.
Something stirred quietly in a darkened angle of the tree-house and Blake turned his head. A masked, furry face peered out at him, eyes shining in the darkness.
“Our other friend,” the Brownie said. “He does not seem to be afraid of you.”
“I shall do nothing to harm him,” said Blake, a little stiffly.
“You are hungry?” asked the Brownie. “We have …”
“No, thanks,” said Blake. “I ate this morning, with a compatriot of yours.”
The Brownie nodded, sagely. “He told me you were coming. That’s why I waited for you. He could not offer you a place to sleep; he has nothing but a burrow, quite too small for humans.”
The Brownie turned to go.
“I don’t quite know,” said Blake, “how I am to thank you.”
“You have already thanked us,” the Brownie said. “You have accepted us and accepted aid from us. And that is most important, I assure you, for ordinarily it is we who seek help from humans. To pay back a fraction of that help is very precious to us.”
Blake looked around at the raccoon. It still was watching him with its fire-bright eyes. When he looked back, the Brownie was gone.
Blake reached out and pulled his knapsack to him, rummaged in its contents. A thin and compact blanket, unlike anything he had ever seen, with a strange metallic luster; a knife in a sheath; a folding axe; a small kit of cooking utensils; a lighter and a can of fluid; a folded map; a flashlight; a——.
A map!
He picked it up and unfolded it, used the flashlight to light it, leaning close to make out the place names.
Willow Grove, a hundred miles or so away, the engineer had said. And there it was, the place that he was going. Finally, he thought, a destination in this world and situation where there had seemed to be no destinations. A place upon a map and a person, with an unremembered name, who had information that might be of interest to him.
He laid the blanket to one side and put the rest of the items back into the knapsack.
The raccoon, he saw, had crept a little closer, its curiosity apparently aroused by the things he had taken from the knapsack.
Blake moved over close to the wall, unfolded the blanket and pulled it over his body, tucked it in and lay down. The blanket seemed to cling to him, as if his body were a magnet, and for all its thinness there was warmth in it. The floor was soft and there were no lumps in it. Blake picked up a handful of the substance that composed it, and let it run slowly through his fingers. Tiny fragments of rotted wood, he saw, fragments that for years had fallen down from the tunnel of the hollowed trunk.
He closed his eyes and sleep crept in on him. His consciousness seemed to sink into a pit and there was something in the pit—two other selves that caught and held him and surrounded him so that he became one with them. Like a coming home, like a meeting with old friends not seen for much too long. There were no words and no words were needed. There was a welcome and an understanding and a seeming oneness and he was no longer Andrew Blake, and was not even human, but a being for which there was no name, and something that measured greater than either Andrew Blake or human.
But through the oneness and the comfort and the welcome an intruding thought stole out to nag him. He struggled and was let go and became himself again, an identity once more—not Andrew Blake, but Changer.
—Quester, when we awake, it will be colder then. Could you take over for the night? You can travel faster and you can sense your way through the darkness and …
—I’ll take over. But there are your clothes and knapsack and you’ll be naked once again and …
—You can carry them. You have arms and hands, remember? You are all the time forgetting that you have your arms.
—All right! said Quester. All right! All right! All right!
—Willow Grove, said Changer.
—Yes, I know, said Quester. We read the map with you.
The sleep began closing in again, but something touched his arm and he let his eyes come open.
The raccoon, he saw, had crept across the space between them and now lay close against him.
He lifted a corner of the blank
et and tucked it about the furry body and then he went to sleep.
25
Changer had said that it would be cooler, and it was cooler, but still too warm for running, too warm for making any time. But, as Quester reached the ridgetop, the wind knifing from the north had a welcome bite to it.
He stopped and stood there, on the flinty ground, exposed to the wind, for here, for some reason of geology, the trees did not intrude, but stopped short of the crest, a somewhat unusual circumstance, since most of the hills were completely covered by the hardwood forest.
The skies were clear and there were stars this night, although it seemed to Quester not as many stars as could be seen from his native planet. And here, on this high piece of ground, he thought, one could stand and snare pictures from the stars, although now he knew from Thinker that they were not pictures only, but the kaleidoscopic impressions of other races and other cultures and that they supplied the raw, bare-bones data from which the truth of the universe might someday be deduced.
He shivered, thinking of it—thinking of how his mind and senses could reach across the light-years to harvest the fruits of other minds and senses. He shivered, but he knew even as he did that Thinker would not shiver, even had Thinker been so built, with muscle and with nerves, so that he could shiver. For there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could astonish Thinker; to him there was no mystic quality in the universe or life, but rather a mass of fact and data, of principle and method, which could be fed into his mind and be utilized by his faculty for logic.
But for me, thought Quester, for me it all is mystic. To me there is no need of reason, no compulsion reaching out for logic, no cold, no intensive drive to burrow to the heart of fact.
He stood on the flinty ridge, his tail drooping almost to the ground, his grizzled muzzle lifted to the sharp edge of the wind. For him it was enough, he thought, that the universe was filled with wonder and with beauty and he had never asked for more—and he knew now that it was his fervent hope that nothing ever would occur to blunt that wonder and the beauty.
Or had that process of blunting already taken place? Had he placed himself in a position (or been placed in a position) where he would find himself with a greater scope than ever to seek out new wonders and fresh mysteries, but with the wonder and the beauty watered down by the knowledge that he was providing material for Thinker to work out the logic?