He had agreed.
He had been good — so good that he hated them all at times and wondered if they knew he hated them. The hate never lasted, because the real people involved were too well-meaning, too kind, too ambitious for his own sake. He had to love them back.
Trying to think these things over, he loped around his estate on foot.
The big sheep lay on their platforms, forever sick, forever gigantic. Perhaps some of them remembered when they had been lambs, free to run through the sparse grass, free to push their heads through the pliofilm covers of the canals and to help themselves to water when they wanted to drink. Now they weighed hundreds of tons and were fed by feeding machines, watched by guard machines, checked by automatic doctors. They were fed and watered a little through the mouth only because pastoral experience showed that they stayed fatter and lived longer if a semblance of normality was left to them.
His aunt Doris, who kept house for him, was still away.
How workwoman Eleanor, whom he paid an annual sum larger than many planets paid for their entire armed forces, had delayed her time at market.
The two sheephands, Bill and Hopper, were still out.
And he did not want to talk to them, anyhow.
He wished that he could see the Lord Redlady, that strange offworld man whom he had met in the Garden of Death. The Lord Redlady just looked as though he knew more things than Norstrilians did, as though he came from sharper, crueler, wiser societies than most people in Old North Australia had ever seen.
But you can’t ask for a Lord. Particularly not when you have met him only in a secret hearing.
Rod had gotten to the final limits of his own land.
Humphrey’s Lawsuit lay beyond — a broad strip of poor land, completely untended, the building-high ribs of long-dead sheep skeletons making weird shadows as the sun began to set. The Humphrey family had been lawing over that land for hundreds of years. Meanwhile it lay waste except for the few authorized public animals which the Commonwealth was allowed to put on any land, public or private.
Rod knew that freedom was only two steps away.
All he had to do was to step over the line and shout with his mind for people. He could do that even though he could not really spiek. A telepathic garble of alarm would bring the orbiting guards down to him in seven or eight minutes. Then he would need only to say,
“I swear off title. I give up Mistership and Ownership. I demand my living from the Commonwealth. Watch me, people, while I repeat.”
Three repetitions of this would make him an Official Pauper, with not a care left — no meetings, no land to tend, no accounting to do, nothing but to wander around Old North Australia picking up any job he wanted and quitting it whenever he wanted. It was a good life, a free life, the best the Commonwealth could offer to Squatters and Owners who otherwise lived long centuries of care, responsibility, and honor. It was a fine life — but no McBan had ever taken it, not even a cousin.
Nor could he.
He went back to the house, miserable. He listened to Eleanor talking with Bill and Hopper while dinner was served — a huge plate of boiled mutton, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, station-brewed beer out of the keg (There were planets, he knew, where people never tasted such food from birth to death. There they lived on impregnated pasteboard which was salvaged from the latrines, reimpregnated with nutrients and vitamins, deodorized and sterilized, and issued again the next day.). He knew it was a fine dinner, but he did not care.
How could he talk about the Onseck to these people? Their faces still glowed with pleasure at his having come out the right side of the Garden of Death. They thought he was lucky to be alive, not even more lucky to be the most honored heir on the whole planet. Doom was a good place, even if it wasn’t the biggest.
Right in the middle of dinner he remembered the gift the snake soldier had given him. He had put it on the top shelf of his bedroom wall, and with the party and Beasley’s visit, he had never opened it.
He bolted down his food and muttered, “I’ll be back.”
The wallet was there, in his bedroom. The case was beautiful. He took it, opened it.
Inside there was a flat metal disk.
A ticket?
Where to?
He turned it this way and that. It had been telepathically engraved and was probably shouting its entire itinerary into his mind, but he could not hier it.
He held it close to the oil lamp. Sometimes disks like this had old-writing on them, which at least showed the general limits. It would be a private ornithopter up to Menzies Lake at the best, or an airbus fare to New Melbourne and return. He caught the sheen of old writing. One more tilt, angled to the light, and he had it. “Manhome and return.”
Manhome!
Lord have mercy, that was Old Earth itself!
But then, thought Rod, I’d be running away from the Onseck, and I’d live the rest of my life with all my friends knowing I had run away from Old Hot and Simple. I can’t. Somehow I’ve got to beat Houghton Syme CXLIX. In his own way. And my own way.
He went back to the table, dropped the rest of the dinner into his stomach as though it were sheep-food pellets, and went to his bedroom early.
For the first time in his life, he slept badly.
And out of the bad sleep, the answer came,
“Ask Hamlet.”
Hamlet was not even a man. He was just a talking picture in a cave, but he was wise, he was from Old Earth itself, and he had no friends to whom to give Rod’s secrets.
With this idea, Rod turned on his sleeping shelf and went into a deep sleep.
In the morning his aunt Doris was still not back, so he told the workwoman Eleanor,
“I’ll be gone all day. Don’t look for me or worry about me.”
“What about your lunch, Mister and Owner? You can’t run around the station with no tucker.”
“Wrap some up, then.”
“Where’re you going, Mister and Owner, sir, if you can tell me?” There was an unpleasant searching edge in her voice, as though — being the only adult woman present — she had to check on him as though he were still a child. He didn’t like it, but he replied with a frank enough air,
“I’m not leaving the station. Just rambling around. I need to think.”
More kindly she said, “You think, then, Rod. Just go right ahead and think. If you ask me, you ought to go live with a family—”
“I know what you’ve said,” he interrupted her. “I’m not making any big decisions today, Eleanor. Just rambling and thinking.”
“All right then, Mister and Owner. Ramble around and worry about the ground you’re walking on. It’s you that get the worries for it. I’m glad my daddy took the official pauper words. We used to be rich.” Unexpectedly she brightened and laughed at herself, “Now that, you’ve heard that too, Rod. Here’s your food. Do you have water?”
“I’ll steal from the sheep,” he said irreverently. She knew he was joking and she waved him a friendly goodbye.
The old, old gap was to the rear of the house, so he left by the front. He wanted to go the long wrong way around, so that neither human eyes nor human minds would stumble on the secret he had found fifty-six years before, the first time he was eight years old. Through all the pain and the troubles he had remembered this one vivid bright secret — the deep cave full of ruined and prohibited treasures. To these he must go.
The sun was high in the sky, spreading its patch of brighter grey above the grey clouds, when he slid into what looked like a dry irrigation ditch.
He walked a few steps along the ditch. Then he stopped and listened carefully, very carefully.
There was no sound except for the snoring of a young hundred-ton ram a mile or so away.
Rod then stared around.
In the far distance, a police ornithopter soared as lazy as a sated hawk.
Rod tried desperately much to hier.