The old man turned around and headed back toward the doorway in the building. He went without a word of farewell and his sandaled feet left a tiny, ragged trail across the shifting sand.
Chapter Thirteen
The black tunnel of the space-time wheel ended and the ship was in normal space again. Normal, but not right.
Gary, hunched over the controls, heard Caroline's quick gasp of surprise.
"There's something wrong!" she cried.
There was a world, but it was not the planet of the Engineers. No great city grew upon it from horizon to horizon. Instead of three blue suns, there was one and it was very large and red, a dull brick red, and its rays were so feeble that one could stare straight into it and at the edges it seemed that one could see straight through the fringe of gases.
There was no Hellhounds fleet, no flashing ships of the defender… no war.
There was peace upon this world… a quiet and deadly peace. The peace, thought Gary, of the never-was, the peace of all-is-over.
It was a flat splotched world with a leprous look about it, not gray, but colored as a child with water paints might color a paint book page when he was tired and all the need of accuracy and art were things to be forgotten.
Something happened, Gary told himself. And he felt the chill of fear in his veins.
Something happened and here we are — in what strange corner of the universe?
"Something went wrong," Caroline said again. "Some inherent weakness in the co-ordinates, some streak of instability in the mathematics themselves, perhaps.”
"More likely," Gary told her, "the fault lies in the human brain — or in the brain of the Engineer. No man, no being, can see far enough ahead, think so clearly that be will foresee each eventuality. And even if he did, he might be inclined to let some small factor slip by with no other thought than that it was so small it could do no harm.”
Caroline nodded at him. "The mistakes creep in so easy," she admitted.
"Like mice… mice running in the mind.”
"We can turn around and go back," said Gary, but even as he said it he knew that it was no good. For if the tunnel of distorted time-space through which they had come was jiggered out of position at this end, it would be out of focus at the other end as well.
"But we can't," said Caroline.
"I know we can't," said Gary. "I spoke too quickly. Without thinking.”
"We can't even try," said Caroline. "The wheel is gone." He saw that she was right. The wheel of light was no longer in the sky. It had snuffed out and they were here alone.
Here? he asked. And where was here?
There was a simple answer. They simply did not know. At the moment, there was no way of telling.
"Lost," said Caroline. "Like the babes in the woods. The robins came, you remember, and covered them with leaves.”
The ship was gliding down toward the planet and Gary swung around to the controls again.
"We'll look it over," he said.
"There may be someone there," said Caroline.
Someone, Gary thought, was not quite the word. Something would be more like it. Something.
The planet was flat, a world without mountains, without rivers, without seas. There were great green bogs instead of seas and flat arid plains with splotches of color that might be vegetation or might be no more than the outcropping of different geological strata.
The ship took up its descent spiral and Gary and Caroline hung close above the visor, watching for some sign of habitation, for some hint of life. A road, perhaps. Or a building. Or a vehicle moving on the ground or in the air. But there was nothing.
Finally Gary shook his head. "There's nothing here," he said. "We might as well go down. One place on this planet is as good as any other.”
They landed on a flat expanse of sand between the shore of one of the green bogs and the edge of a patch of splotched vegetation, for by now it was apparent that the color spots on the planet's surface were vegetation of a sort.
"Toadstools," said Caroline, looking out the vision plate. "Toadstools and that other kind of funny stuff, like asparagus spears, only it's not asparagus.”
"Like something out of a goblin book," said Gary.
Like something that you thought about when you were a kid and couldn't go to sleep after grandmother had read you some story about a shivery place and you had pulled the covers up over your head and listened for the footsteps to start coming through the dark.
They made the tests and the planet was livable without their suits — slightly high in oxygen, a little colder and a slighter gravity than Earth, but livable.
"Let's go out," said Gary, gruffly, "and have a look around.”
"Gary, you sound as if you might be scared.”
"I am," he admitted. "Pink with purple spots.”
The silence smote them as they stepped outside the ship. An awesome and abiding silence that was louder than a shattering sound.
There was no sound of wind, and no sound of water. No song of birds. No grass to rustle.
The great red sun hung in the sky above them and their shadows were soft and fuzzy on the sand, the faint, fugitive shadows of a cloudy day.
On one hand lay the stagnant pools of water and the hummocks of slimy vegetation that formed the bog and on the other stretched the forest of giant mushrooms, towering to the height of an average man.
"You'd expect to see a goblin," Caroline said, and she shivered as she said it.
All at once the goblin was there.
He stood underneath one of the toadstools and he was looking at them. When he saw that they had seen him, he lowered one eyelid in a ponderous and exaggerated wink and his slobbering mouth twisted into a grimace that might have been a smile. Its skin was mottled and its eyes were narrow, slitted eyes and even as they watched, an exudation of slimy substance welled out of one of the gland-like openings which pitted its face and ran down its cheek and dripped onto its chest.
"Good Lord!" said Gary. "I know that fellow!”
The goblin leaped into the air and cracked its heels together and gobbled like an excited turkey.
"He's the one that was there the day the Engineers held the conference,”
said Gary. "You remember, when they got all the aliens together — all those that had come through space to the city of the Engineers. It was him — or one just like him. He sat opposite me and he winked at me, just like he did now, and I thought that…
"There's another one," said Caroline.
The second one was perched on top of one of the mushrooms, with his splayed feet swinging over the edge.
Then there was a third one peeping from behind a stem and still another one, sitting on the ground and leaning against a stem. All of them were watching and all of them were grinning, but the grins were enough to strike terror and revulsion into one's soul.
Caroline and Gary retreated backward to the ship, step by slow step until they stood with their backs against it.
Now there was sound, the soft padding of feet coming through the toadstool forest, the clucking noises that the goblins made.
"Let's go away," said Caroline. "Let's get in the ship and go.”
"Wait," counseled Gary. "Let us wait a while. We can always go. These things are intelligent. They have to be, since they were among the ones the Engineers called in.”
He stepped out from the ship two slow paces and called.
"Hello," he called.
They stopped their clucking and their running and stood and looked at him out of slitted eyes.