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state, but let's not talk about it."
She caught my meaning and nodded.
Tuck came up beside me and squatted down. "That looks to be good wood," he
said. "Where did you find it?"
"There's a heap of junk back there. All sorts of stuff."
I squatted down and took out my knife. Picking up one of the smaller sticks, I
began to whittle off some shavings. I pushed them in a pile, then reached for
the piece of wood that had the fiber tied to it. I was about to rip some of
the fiber loose when Tuck put out a hand to stop me.
"Just a second, captain."
He took the piece of wood out of my hands and turned it so that it caught some
of the feeble light still coming from the doorway. And now, for the first
time, I saw what it was that I had picked up. Until that moment it had been
nothing more than a stick of wood with some straw or grass tied to it. "A
doll," said Sara, in surprise.
"Not a doll," said Tuck. His hands were shaking and he was clutching the doll
hard, probably in an attempt to keep his hands from shaking. "Not a doll. Not
an idol. Look at its face!"
In the twilight the face was surprisingly plain to see. It was barely human.
Primate, perhaps, although I couldn't be sure it was even that. But as I
looked at it, I felt a sense of shock; human or not, it was an expressive
face, and never had I seen a face with so much sadness in it or so much
resignation to the sadness. It was no fancy carving. The face, in fact, was
crude, it had been simply hacked out of a block of wood.
The whole thing had about it the look of a primitive corncob doll. But the
knowing hands that had carved the face, driven by God knows what sadness of
their own, had caught within its planes a misery of existence that wrenched
one's heart to see.
Tuck slowly raised the doll in both his hands and clutched it tight against
his breast. He looked from one to the other of us.
"Don't you see?" he cried at us. "Don't you understand!"
SIX
Night had fallen. The fire carved a magic circle of light out of the darkness
that pressed in all about us. Back of me I could hear the gentle creak as the
hobbies rocked gently back and forth. Smith still sprawled limp against the
wall. We had tried to rouse him to give him food, but there was no such thing
as rousing him. He was simply a sack, still with us in body, but certainly not
in mind; his mind was somewhere else. Beside him leaned the metallic body of
the mindless robot, Roscoe. And off a little ways sat Tuck with that doll of
his clutched tight against his breast, not moving, with his eyes staring out
into the darkness.
We were off to a damn poor start, I thought. Already the expedition had
started to fall apart.
"Where is Hoot?" asked Sara.
"Off somewhere," I said. "Prowling. He's a restless sort of being. Hadn't you
ought to try to get some sleep?"
"And you'll sit up and watch?"
"I'm not Launcelot," I told her. "if that's what you're getting at. You can
depend on it-I'll rout you out later on so I can get some sack time."
"In a little while," she said. "Did you happen to notice this place is built
of stone?"
"I suppose I had," I said. "I hadn't thought about it."
"Not like the buildings in the city," she said. "This one is made of honest
stone. I'm not up on stone. Looks like granite, maybe. You have any idea what
the city might be made of?"
"Not stone," I said. "That stuff was never quarried from the ground. Some sort
of fabricated material, most likely. Chemical, perhaps. The atoms bonded more
tightly than anything we know. Nothing in God's world, more than likely, could
pull that stuff apart. When I fired the laser bolt into the landing field, the
field wasn't even scorched."
"You know chemistry, captain?"
I shook my head. "Not so you would notice."
"The people who built this building didn't build the city. A more ancient
people. . ."
"We can't know that," I said. "There is no way of knowing how long the city's
stood. It would take millions of years for it to show any wear or erosion-if
it would ever show it."
We sat in silence for a moment. I picked up a stick of wood and poked the
sticks in the fire together. The fire blazed up.
"Come morning, captain?" she asked.
"What do you mean come morning?"
"What do we do' then?"
"We go on if the tree will let us. We have some footloose centaurs to find, to
see if they have a braincase and if we can get the braincase. . ."
She nodded her head in Smith's direction. "What of him?" she asked.
"Maybe he'll come to by then. If not we sling him on a hobby. And if Tuck
doesn't snap out of his trance by then, I'll kick him back to life."
"But George was looking for something, too. And he has found what he was
looking for."
"Look," I said, "who was it that bought the, ship and paid the bill? Who
brought Smith to this place? Don't tell me that you are ready to cave in and
stop short of what you are looking for because a creep like Smith goes all of
a sudden limp on us."
"I don't know," she said. "If it hadn't been for him..."
"All right, then." I said. "Let's just leave him here. If that is what he
wants. If he's gotten to the place he was aiming for..."
"Captain!" 'she gasped. "You wouldn't do a thing like that!"
"What makes you think I wouldn't?"
"There must be some humanity in you. You wouldn't turn your back..."
"He's the one who is turning his back on us. He has what he wants. . ."
"How do you know he has?"
That's the trouble with women. No logic. She had told me that this silly Smith
had gotten where he was going. But when I said the same thing, she was set to
argue.
"I don't know anything," I said. "Not for certain."
"But you'll go ahead and make decisions."
"Sure," I said. "Because if I don't we could sit here forever. And we're in no
situation to be sitting still. We may have a long way to go and we've got to
keep on moving."
I got up and walked over to the door and stood there, looking out. There was
no moon and the night was dark and there were no stars. A whiteness of the
city was distinguishable in the darkness. A hazy and uncertain horizon led off
beyond the city. There was nothing else that could be seen.
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