"Open the port," he said, "and when you do stand back against the wall.
I'll need all the arm room I can get.”
He waited, bow in hand, arrow nocked against the cord.
Not much of a bow, he thought. Nothing you would want to try against a willow at three hundred paces. But these things outside aren't willow wands. It will last for a shot or two… I hope it lasts for a shot or two.
The port clanged open as Caroline shoved the lever over. Smoke billowed in the opening and in the smoke he saw the bulk of the ones who waited.
He brought the bow up and the wood bent with the sudden surge of hate and triumph that coursed in his being… the hate and fear of fire, the hate of things that wait to do a man to death, the fury of a human being backed into a corner by a thing that is not human.
The arrow made a whispering sound and was a silver streak that spurted through the smoke. The bow bent again and there was another whisper, the whisper of cord and wood and the creak of human muscles.
On the ground outside, two dark shapes were threshing in the smoke.
It was just like shooting rabbits.
Chapter Fifteen
"Very ingenious," said the voice. "You won fair and square. You did much better than I thought you would.”
"And now," said Caroline, "you will send us back again. Back to the city of the Engineers.”
"Why, certainly," said the voice. "Why, of course, I will. But first, I have to clean up the place. The bodies, first of all. Cadavers are such unsightly things.”
Fire puffed briefly and the bodies of the two Hellhounds were gone. A tiny puff of yellow smoke hung over where they had been and a tiny flurry of ashes eddied in the air.
"I asked you once before," said Caroline, "and you didn't tell me. What are you? We looked for signs of culture and…”
"You are befuddled, young human," the voice told her. "You seek for childish things. You looked for cities and there are no cities. You looked for roads and ships and farms and there are none of these. You expected to find a civilization and there is no civilization such as you would recognize.”
"You are right," said Gary. "There are none of those.”
"I have no city," said the voice, "because I need no city. Although I could build a city at a second's notice. The mushroom forests are the only farms I need to feed my little pets. I need no roads and ships because I can go anywhere I wish without the aid of them.”
"You mean you can go in your mind," said Caroline.
"In my mind," the voice said. "I go wherever I may wish, in either time or space, and I am there. I do not merely imagine that I am there; I am really there. Long ago my race forsook machines, knowing that in its mental ability, within the depth of its collective mind it had more potentiality than it could ever get from a clattering piece of mechanism. So the race built minds instead of machines. Minds, I say. But mind, one mind, a single mind, is the better explanation. I am that mind today. A single racial mind.
"I used that mind to pluck you from the space-time tunnel at the very moment you were about to emerge above the city of the Engineers. I used that mind to bring the Hellhounds here. That mind grounded your ship and blanketed your guns and that mind could kill you in a moment if I thought the thought.”
"But you," said Caroline. "The personal pronoun that you use. The 'I' you speak of. What is that?”
"I am the mind," the voice told them, "and the mind is me. I am the race. I have been the race for many million years.”
"And you play God," said Caroline. "You bring lesser things together, into the arena of this world, and you make them fight while you sit and chuckle…”
"Why, of course," the voice said. "Because, you see, I'm crazy. I'm really, at times, quite violently insane.”
"Insane!”
"Why, certainly," the voice told them. "It's what would be bound to happen.
You can't perfect a mind, a vast communal mind, a mighty racial mind to the point that my mind is perfected and expect it to keep a perfect balance as a good watch would keep perfect time. But the mind's behavior varies.
Sometimes," the voice said, quite confidentially, "I'm battier than a bedbug.”
"And how are you now?" asked Gary.
"Why, now," the voice said, "as funny as it seems, I'm quite rational. I'm very much myself.”
"Then how about fixing it up so that we can get back?”
"Right away," said the voice, very businesslike. "I'll just clean up a thing or two. Don't like the residue of my irrationality cluttering up the planet. That Hellhound ship over there….”
But instead of the Hellhound ship, it was the Earth ship that went skyward in a terrific gout of flame that sent a wash of heat across the barren land.
"Hey, there…" yelled Gary and then stood stock still as the enormity of what had happened crackled in his mind.
"Tsk, tsk," said the voice. "How very stupid of me. How could I have done a thing like that! Now I'll never be able to send you home again.”
His cackling laughter filled the sky and beat like a mighty drum.
"The Hellhound ship!" yelled Gary. "Run… run…”
But even as they whirled to race toward it, it was gone in a blaze of fire, followed by a trail of smoke that hung briefly above the scorched piece of the ground where the ship had lain.
"You couldn't have operated it, anyhow," said the voice. "It wouldn't have done you a single bit of good.”
He laughed again and the laughter trailed off into distance, like a retreating thunderstorm.
Gary and Caroline stood side by side and looked at the emptiness of the bog and mushroom forest. A goblin ducked out of a clump of mushrooms and hooted at them, then dashed back in again.
"What do we do?" asked Caroline and it was a question that went echoing down the long corridor of improbability, a question for which there was, at the moment, no satisfactory answer.
Swiftly, Gary made an inventory:
The clothes they stood in.
A few matches in his pocket.
A bow and some arrows, but the bow didn't count for much.
And that was all. There was nothing else.
"More pets," said Caroline, bitterly.
"What's that?" asked Gary, not sure he heard her right.
"Let it go," she said. "Forget I ever said it.”
"There's nothing to get hold of," Gary said. "Nothing you can touch. The voice… the voice is nothing.”
"It's a horrible thing," said Caroline. "Don't you see, Gary, what a horrible thing it is. The tag end of some great race. Think of it. Millions of years, millions of years to build up a mighty mental civilization. Not a mechanical civilization, not a materialistic culture, but a mental civilization. A striving toward understanding rather than toward doing.
"And now it's a senile thing, an insane thing that has gone back to its second childhood, but its power is too great for a child to wield and it is dangerous… dangerous…”
Gary nodded. "It could masquerade as anything it pleased. It sent one of the goblins to the city of the Engineers and the Engineers thought the goblin was the mentality that they had contacted. But it wasn't. It was a simple, foolish puppet, but the voice moved it as it wished, talked through its flimsy mind.”
"The Engineers must have sensed the inherent insanity of that mind," said Caroline. "They may not have been sure, but they must, at least, have sensed it, for they sent it away with all the rest of them. The voice could have worked with us. You notice how it talks the way a human talks…
that's because it picked our minds, because it found the thoughts and words we used, because it was able to know everything we know.”
"It could see everything in the universe," said Gary. "It could know everything that there was to know.”
"Perhaps it did," Caroline told him. "Perhaps the weight of the knowledge was too great. When you overload an engine, the engine will burn out. What would happen if you should overload a mind, even a great communal mind such as we have here?”