"Some of the trees are old and dying," Hezekiah said. "They do not perform perfectly, perhaps, not as they did in their younger days, but they still do well. And there are some young saplings that have not caught the knack."
"Why does no one help them?"
"There is no way to help them. Or if there is, no one knows of it. All things grow old and die, you from oldness, I from rust. They are not trees of Earth. They were brought here many centuries ago by one of those who travel to the stars."
And there, the young man thought, was the talk again of traveling to the stars. The buffalo hunters had told him there were men and women who traveled to the stars and again this morning the girl he had talked with had mentioned it again. Of them all, the girl might know; for she could talk with trees. Had she, he wondered, ever talked with the ghostly trees standing on the knoll?
She could talk with trees and he could kill the bears and suddenly the moment was with him once again when that last bear had reared up from the gully and had been far too close. But now, for some strange reason, it was not the bear at all, but the trees upon the knoll and in that instant the same thing happened as had happened with the bear, that same sense of going out and meeting. And the meeting of what? The bear? The trees?
Then it was all gone and he was back inside himself again and the wrongness of the trees was gone and everything was right. The music filled the world and thundered at the sky.
Hezekiah said, "You must be wrong about the trees. There can be no sickness in them. It seems to me, right now, they do as well as I ever can remember."
13
Jason woke in the night and could not go to sleep again. It was not his body that defied sleep, he knew; it was his mind, so filled with speculation, half numbed with apprehension, that it refused to rest.
Finally he got up and began to dress.
From her bed, Martha asked, "What is the matter, Jason?"
"Can't sleep," he told her. "I am going for a walk."
"Take your cape," she said. "The night wind might be chill. And try not to worry. It will work out all right."
Going down the stairs, he knew that she was wrong and knew she must be wrong; she spoke the way she did in an attempt to cheer him. It would not work out all right. When the People returned to Earth, life would be changed, it would never be the same again.
As he came out on the patio, old Bowser came wobbling around the corner of the kitchen. There was no sign of the younger dog that usually accompanied him on his walks, or of any of the others. They were either asleep somewhere or out exploring for a coon or maybe nosing out the mice from among the corn shocks. The night was quiet and slightly chilly and had at once a frosty and a melancholy feel about it. A thin moon hung in the west, above the darkness of the wooded bluff across the Mississippi. The faint, sharp tang of dying leaves hung in the air.
Jason went down the path that led to the point of rocks above the meeting of the rivers. The old dog fell in behind him. The crescent moon shed but little light, although, Jason told himself, he scarcely needed light. He had walked this path so many times he could find it in the dark.
The earth was quiet, he thought, not only here, but everywhere. Quiet and resting after the turbulent centuries when man cut down its trees, ripped out its minerals, plowed its prairies, built upon broad expanses of it and fished its waters. After this short rest, would it all begin again? The ship heading for the Earth from the human planets was only an exploratory probe, to find old Earth again, to make sure the astronomers were right in their calculations, to survey it and take back the word. And after that, Jason wondered, what would happen? Would the humans rest with having satisfied an intellectual curiosity, or would they reassert their ancient ownership—although he doubted very much that at any time man could have been said to have truly owned the Earth. Rather, they had taken it, wresting it from the other creatures that had as much right of ownership as they, but without the intelligence or the ingenuity or power to assert their rights. Man had been the pushy, arrogant interloper rather than the owner. He had taken over by the force of mind, which could be as detestable as the force of muscle, making his own rules, setting his own goals, establishing his own values in utter disregard of all other living things.
A shadow lifted out of a grove of oaks and sailed down into a deep ravine, to be swallowed by the shadow and the silence of which it was a part. An owl, Jason told himself. There were a lot of them, but no one but a night-roamer ever had a chance to see them, for they hid themselves by day. Something ran rustling through the leaves and Bowser cocked an ear at it and snuffled, but either knew too much or was too old and stiff to attempt a chase. A weasel more than likely, or possibly a mink, although this was a bit too far from water for a mink. Too big for a mouse, too silent for a rabbit or an otter.
A man got to know his neighbors, Jason told himself, when he no longer hunted them. In the old days he hunted them, and so had many of the others once the wildlife had been given the chance to grow back to numbers that made hunting reasonable. Sport, they called it, but that had been nothing more than a softer name for the bloodlust that man had carried with him from prehistoric days, when hunting had been a business of keeping life intact—man blood brother to the other carnivores. And man, he thought, the greatest carnivore of all. Now there was no need for such as he to prey upon his brothers of the woodland and the marsh. Meat was supplied by the herds and flocks, although even so he supposed that even this equated to a modified carnivorous mode of life. Even if one wanted to hunt he would have had to revert to the bow and arrow and the lance. The guns still rested in their cases and were meticulously cleaned and oiled by robotic hands, but the supply of powder long had been exhausted and no way, without much study and laborious effort, that it could be resupplied.
The path bent up the hill to the little field where the corn stood in scattered shocks, the pumpkins still upon the ground. In another day or two the robots would haul in the pumpkins for storage, but the com probably would be left in the shocks until all the other work of autumn had been done. It could be brought in later or, more likely, shucked in the field even after snow lay upon the ground.
In the dim moonlight, the shocks reminded Jason of an Indian encampment and the sight made him wonder if the robots had taken down to Horace Red Cloud's camp the flour and corn meal, the bacon and all the other supplies that he had ordered taken. The chances were they had. The robots were most meticulous in all matters and he fell to wondering, as he had many times before, exactly what they got out of such an arrangement as caring for him and Martha, the house and farm. Or, for that matter, what any robot got out of anything at all… Hezekiah and the others in the monastery, the robots at their mysterious building project up the river. This wonderment, he realized, grew out of the old profit motive which had been the obsession and the mainstay of the ancient human race. You didn't do a thing unless there was some material return. Which, of course, was wrong, but the old habit, the old way of thinking, sometimes still intruded and he felt a touch of shame that it should still intrude.
If the humans should repossess the Earth, the old profit motive and the subsidiary philosophies that depended on it would be reestablished, and the Earth, except for whatever benefits it might have gained from its five thousand years of rest from the human plague, would be no better off than it had been before. There was just a bare possibility, he knew, that there would be no move to repossess it. They would know, of course, that the bulk of its resources had been depleted, but even that consideration might not be taken into account. There might be (he could not be sure and John had said nothing about it) a yearning in many of them to return to the ancestral planet. Five thousand years should be a long enough span of time to make the planets on which they now resided seem like home, but one could not be certain. At the very best, Earth would be subjected, more than likely, to streams of tourists and of pilgrims coming back to pay sentimental homage to mankind's parent planet.