But not for a great deal longer. In the summer that Tom was sixteen he came home at noon from plowing corn to find the old man fallen from his rocking chair, sprawling on the porch, no longer suffering any indignity other than the indignity of death, if death can be thought of as an indignity. Tom dug the grave and buried him beneath the same oak tree where the mother had been buried, and hauled boulders, smaller boulders this time, for he was the only one left to handle them, to be piled upon the grave.
“You grew up fast,” said Monty.
“Yes,” said Cushing, “I suppose I did.”
“And then you took to the woods.”
“Not right off,” said Cushing. “There was the farm, you see, and the animals. I couldn’t run off and leave the animals. They get so they depend on you. You don’t just walk away and leave them. There was this family I had heard of, on a ridge about ten miles away. It was hard scratching there. A poor spring they had to walk to for their water about a mile away. The land stony and thin. A tough clay that was hard to work. They stayed there because there were buildings to give them warmth and shelter, but there wasn’t much else. The house stood there on the ridge, swept by every wind that came along. The crops were poor and they were out where any wandering band could see them. So I went to see the family and we made a deal. They took over my farm and animals, with me getting half the increase from my livestock, if there was any increase and if I ever came back to claim it. They moved down to the coulee and I took off. I couldn’t stay. There were too many memories there. I saw too many people and I heard too many voices. I had to have something to do to keep busy. I could have stayed on the farm, of course, and there’d have been work to do, but not enough work and wondering why I did it and looking at the two graves and thinking back. I don’t believe I reasoned it out at the time. I just knew I had to walk away, but before I went, I had to be sure there was someone to care for the animals. I suppose I could just have turned them loose, but that wouldn’t have been right. They would have wondered what had happened. They get used to people and they sort of count on them. They are lost without them.
“Nor do I think I even tried to figure out what I would do once I was free of the farm. I just took to the woods. I was well trained for it. I knew the woods and river. I had grown up with them. It was a wild, free life, but at first I drove myself. Anything to keep busy, to put the miles behind me. But finally I eased off and drifted. I had no responsibility. I could go anywhere I wished, do anything I wished. Over the course of the first year I fell in with two other runners, young twerps like myself. We made a good team. We went far south and roamed around a bit, then we wandered back. We spent some time one spring and summer along the Ohio. That’s good country to be in. But as time went on, we drifted apart. I wanted to go north and the others didn’t. I’d got to thinking about the story my grandfather told about the university and I was curious. From things I’d picked up I knew it was a place where you could learn to read and write and I thought those might be handy things to have. In one tribe down south—in Alabama, maybe, I can’t be sure—I found an old man who could read. He read the Bible mostly and did a lot of preaching. I thought what a fine thing that would be, not the Bible, you understand, nor the preaching, but being able to read.”
“It must have seemed a good Life,” Monty said. “You enjoyed it. It helped to wipe away the memories. Buried them to some extent; softened them, perhaps.”
Cushing nodded. “I suppose it was a good life. I still think back on it and recall how good it was, remembering the good things only. Not all of it was good.”
“And now perhaps you want to go again just to see how good it was. To find out if it was as good as you remembered it. And the Place of Going to the Stars, of course.”
“The Place of Stars,” said Cushing, “has haunted me ever since I found Wilson’s notes. I keep asking myself, what if there should be such a place and no one went to find it?”
“You plan to be leaving, then?”
“Yes, I think I will. But I’ll be back. I won’t stay away forever. Only until I’ve found the Place or know it can’t be found.”
“You’ll be going west. Have you ever gone into the West?”
Cushing shook his head.
“It’s different from the woods,” said Monty. “When you get out a hundred miles or so, you come to open prairie. You’ll have to watch yourself. We have word, remember, that there is something stirring out there. Some warlord pulling some of the tribes together and going on the prod. They’ll be heading east, I would imagine, although one can never know what goes on in a nomad’s head.”
“I’ll watch myself,” said Cushing.
5
The Team rolled along the boulevard, as they did each morning. It was their time for cogitation, for the absorption and classification of all that they had learned or sensed or otherwise acquired the day before.
The sky was clear, without a cloud in sight, and once the star got up it would be another scorcher. Except for the birds that chirped discontentedly in the scraggly trees and the little rodents that went skittering through the tunnels in the grass, there was nothing else astir. Rank grass and lusty weeds grew in the pavement cracks. Time-grimed statuary and no-longer-operative fountains lurked in the jungle of unattended shrubbery. Beyond the statuary and the fountains the great piles of the buildings went up against the sky.
“I have thought much upon the situation,” said #1, “and still I fail to comprehend the logic of the Ancient and Revered in pretending to be hopeful. By all the criteria that we have developed in our millennia of study throughout the galaxy, the dominant race upon this planet is lost beyond redemption. The race has gone through basically the same process that we have witnessed elsewhere. They built their civilization without realizing the inherent flaw that brought them to destruction. And yet the A and R insists that what has happened is no more than a temporary setback. He tells us that there have been many other setbacks in the history of the race and that in each case it has triumphed over them and emerged in greater strength than it knew before. I sometimes wonder if his thinking could be twisted by the loyalty he still carries in this precious race of his. Certainly one can understand his ingrained faith in these creatures, but the evidence all would indicate the faith is wrongly placed. Either he is unconsciously being intellectually dishonest or is naive beyond our estimation of him.”
#2, who had been gazing up into the sky, now floated a group of eyes down across the smooth ball of his body and stared in some disbelief at his companion.
“I am surprised at you,” he said. “You surely must be jesting or are under greater strain than I had thought you were. The A and R is neither naive nor dishonest. On the face of what we know, we must accord him the honor of believing in his sincerity. What is more likely is that he has some knowledge that he has chosen not to communicate to us, perhaps an unconscious knowledge that we have failed, with all our investigation and our probing, to uncover. We could have erred in our assessment of the race.…”
“I think,” said #1, “that is quite unlikely. The situation fits a classic pattern that we have found time and time again. There are, I grant you, some disturbing factors here, but the pattern is unmistakable. We know beyond any question that the race upon this planet has arrived at the classic end of a classic situation. It has gone into its last decline and will not recover.”
“I would be inclined to agree with you,” said #2, “except for certain doubts. I am inclined to believe that there are hidden factors we have not recognized, or worse, factors that we have glimpsed and paid no attention to, considering them to be only secondary.”
“We have found our answer,” #1 said, stubbornly, “and we should long since have been gone from here. Our time is wasted. This history is but little different from the many other histories that we have collected. What is it that worries you so much?”
“The robots, for one thing,” said #2. “Have we accorded them the full consideration they deserve, o
r have we written them off too hastily? By writing them off too quickly, we may have missed the full significance of them and the impact they may have had—or still may have—upon the situation. For they are, in fact, an extension of the race that created them. Perhaps a significant extension. They may not, as we have told ourselves, be playing out previously programmed and now meaningless roles. We have been unable to make any sense out of our interviews with them, but—”
“We have not, in a certain sense, actually interviewed them,” #1 pointed out. “They have thrust themselves upon us, each one intent on telling us meaningless stories that have no coherence in them. There is no pattern in what they tell us. We don’t know what to believe or if we should believe any of it at all. All of it is gibberish. And we must realize, as well, that these robots can be no more than they seem. They are machines and, at times, atrociously clumsy machines. As such, they are only an embodied symptom of that decay which is characteristic of all technological societies. They are a stupid lot and, what is more, arrogant. Of all possible combinations, stupidity and arrogance is the worst that can be found. The basic badness of them is that they feed on one another.”
“You generalize too much,” protested #2. “Much of what you say may be quite correct, but there are exceptions. The Ancient and Revered is neither arrogant nor stupid, and though somewhat more sophisticated than the others, he is still a robot.”
“I agree,” said #1, “that the A and R is neither arrogant nor stupid. He is, by every measure, a polished and well-mannered gentleman, and yet, as I pointed out, he fails of making sense. He is involved in fuzzy thinking, basing his viewpoints on a slender reed of hope that is unsupported by any evidence—that, in fact, flies in the face of evidence. We are trained observers with a long record of performance. We have existed for a much longer span of time than the A and R and during that existence we have always striven for strict objectivity—something that is alien to the A and R, with all his talk of faith and hope.”
“I would judge,” said #2, “that it is time for us to cease this discussion. We have fallen into crude bickering, which will get us nowhere. It is amazing to me, and a source of sorrow, that after all the time we have worked together we still are capable of falling into such a state. I take it as a warning that in this particular study there is something very wrong. It indicates that we still have failed to reach that state of crystal perfection we attempt to put into our work and the reason for that, in this study, must be that there are underlying truths we have failed to come to grips with and that in our subconscious they rise up to plague us.”
“I do not,” said #1, “agree with you at all, but what you say about the futility of continuing this discussion is very solemn truth. So let us, for the moment, derive whatever enjoyment we may from our morning stroll.”
6
Cushing had crossed the river, using a crudely constructed log raft to protect his bow and quiver and to help him in his swimming. He had started opposite the wall of the university and allowed the swift current to carry him downstream as he kicked for the other shore, calculating in his mind that he would reach it at about the point where a creek cut through the walls of the bluff. This way there’d be no bluffs to climb, the valley of the creek giving him easy access across the southern limits of the city. He’d not been in this part of the city before and he wondered what he’d find, although he was fairly certain it would not be a great deal different from those fringe sections of the city he had seen—a tangle of olden houses falling in upon themselves or already fallen, faint trails leading in all directions, the remnants of ancient streets where, even to this day, the hard surface of the paving kept them free of heavy growth.
Later on the moon would rise, but now blackness lay across the land. Out on the river the choppiness of the water had caught and shattered into tiny rainbows the faint glimmer of the stars, but here, underneath the trees that grew along the left bank of the creek at the point where it joined the river, the reflected starlight could no longer be seen.
He retrieved the quiver from the raft and slung it across his shoulder, shrugged into the shoulder harness that supported his small backpack, picked up the bow, then nudged the raft with a cautious toe out into the river. He crouched at the water’s edge and watched until, in half a dozen feet or so, the raft was swallowed by the darkness and the river. The sweep of current from the inflowing creek would carry it out into the center of the stream and there’d be nothing to show that someone had crossed the river under the cover of night.
Once the raft had disappeared, he continued in his crouch, all senses alert. Somewhere to the north a dog was barking with determination, barking with a steady cadence—not excited, not even sensible, as if it were its duty to be barking. Something across the creek was rustling in the bushes, cautiously but purposefully. An animal, Cushing knew, not a human. More than likely a coon come down off the bluff to fish for clams. Mosquitoes buzzed about his head, but he paid them no attention. Out in the potato patch, day after day, he had become accustomed to mosquitoes and their venom. They were no more than a nuisance, with their high-pitched, vicious singing.
Satisfied that he had crossed unobserved, he rose and made his way along the shingle at the river’s edge, reaching the creek and stepping into it. The water came no higher than his knees and he began working his way upstream, on guard against sudden dropoffs.
His eyes by now had become somewhat adapted to the dark and he could make out the blacker bulk of trees, the faint gleam of rapidly running water. He did not hurry. He felt his way along, making no noise. Low-hanging branches caught at him and he ducked under them or held them to one side.
A mile or so from where he had entered the creek, he came to what he made out to be an old stone bridge. Leaving the water, he climbed the incline to the bridge to reach the street that at one time had passed over it. Beneath his moccasins he could feel the broken hardness of the paving, covered now by grass and weeds and hemmed in by briars. To the north the dog went on with its chugging and now, to the south and west, other distant dogs had chimed in to answer. Off in the bushes to his right, a bird twittered in alarm, startled by some birdish fear. Through the treetops to the east Cushing saw the first flush of the rising moon.
He went north until he found an intersecting street and then turned to his left, traveling west. He doubted that he could clear the city before morning light, but he wanted to be as far along as he could manage. Well before dawn he would have to find a place to hole up during daylight hours.
He was surprised to find himself, now that he was on his way, filled with a strange exhilaration. Freedom, he thought. Was that it, after all the years—the freedom—that exhilarated him? Was this the way, he wondered, that the ancient American long hunters had felt once they had shaken the dust of the eastern settlements off their feet? Was this the feeling of the old-time mountain man, equally mythical as the long hunters, when he had headed for the beaver streams? Was this the feeling that had been experienced by the astronauts when they had pointed the noses of their ships toward the distant stars? If they had, in fact, pointed at any stars at all.
Occasionally, as he slipped along, he caught glimpses, on either side, of dark bulks looming among the trees. As the moon moved higher in the sky, he saw that the bulks were what was left of houses. Some of them still held the shape of houses and others were little more than piles of debris, not yet having settled into mounds or fallen into basements. He was, he knew, moving through a residential section and tried to picture in his mind what it might have looked like at another time—a tree-lined street with houses sitting, new and shining, in the greenness of their lawns. And the people in them—over there a doctor, across the street a lawyer, just down the street the owner of a hardware store. Children and dogs playing on the lawn, a mailman trudging on his rounds, a ground vehicle parked beside the curb. He shrugged, thinking of it, wondering how nearly he was right, how much the picture he was building in his mind might be romanticized. There had
been pictures of such streets in the old files of magazines he’d read, but were these, he wondered, no more than highly selective pictures, unrepresentative of the general scene.
The moonlight was stronger now and he could see that the street he moved along was filled with clumps of small bushes and with patches of briars through which a narrow trail snaked along, weaving from side to side to avoid the heavier growth that had intruded on the street. A deer path, he wondered, or was it one primarily used by men? If it were a man path, he should not be on it. He pondered that, deciding to stay on it. On it he could cover a fair amount of ground; off to one side of it, his way impeded by heavy growths of trees, fallen timber, the old houses and, worse, the gaping basements where houses had once stood, his progress would be slowed.