“There is no need of that,” said the Parson. “We have no need of tea. We could eat cheese and biscuits as we walk along.”
“Sit down,” said the Brigadier. “Sit down and rest yourself. Rushing along as we have been is no way to approach a trek. You break yourself in slowly and take your time to start with.”
“I’m not tired,” snapped the Parson. “I need no breaking in.”
“But the ladies, Parson!”
“The ladies are doing fine,” said the Parson. “It’s you who’s caving in.”
They were still bickering when Lansing went down the road to find the dead tree he had spotted earlier. It was not as far down the trail as he had thought, and he quickly settled down to work, chopping dry branches into easy lengths for carrying. It would be only a short noontime fire and not much fuel would be needed. A small armload should do.
A dry stick cracked behind him and he swung around. Mary stood a few feet from him.
“I hope that you don’t mind,” she said.
“Not at all, glad of company.”
“It was getting uncomfortable up there — the two of them still quarreling. There’ll be trouble between them, Edward, before the trip is done.”
“They are two driven men.”
“And very much alike.”
He laughed. “They’d kill you if you told them so. Each thinks he despises the other.”
“Perhaps they do. Being so much alike, perhaps they do. Do they see themselves in one another? Self-hate, perhaps.”
“I don’t know,” said Lansing. “I know nothing of psychology.”
“What do you know? I mean, what do you teach?”
“English literature. At the college I was the resident authority on Shakespeare.”
“Do you know,” she said, “you even look the part. You have a scholarly look.”
“I think that’s about enough,” he said, kneeling and beginning to stack the wood on his arm.
“Can I help?” she asked.
“No, we only need enough to boil some tea.”
“Edward, what do you think we’ll find? What are we looking for?”
“Mary, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. There seems no reason that we should be here; no one, I think, really wants to be here. Yet here we are, the six of us.”
“I’ve thought a lot about it,” she said. “I barely got any sleep last night, wondering about it. Someone wants us here. Someone sent us here. We didn’t ask to come.”
Lansing rose to his feet, clutching the stack of wood piled on his arm. “Let’s not fret too much about it. Not yet. We’ll know more about it, maybe, in a day or two.”
They went back up the road. Jurgens was striding up the hill with four canteens hanging on a shoulder.
“I found a spring,” he said. “You should have left your canteens so I could have filled them, too.”
“Mine is almost full,” said Mary. “I’ve only had one little swallow out of it.”
Lansing busied himself starting a fire while Jurgens poured water into a kettle and planted a forked stick by which to hang it over the blaze.
“Did you know,” demanded the Parson, standing over the kneeling Lansing, “that this robot person brought along a canteen for himself?”
“What’s wrong with that?” asked Lansing.
“He doesn’t drink. Why do you think that he—”
“Maybe he brought it along so that you or the Brigadier could have water when your canteens are dry. Have you considered that?”
The Parson snorted in disgust, a sneering snort.
Lansing felt anger sweep quickly over him. He rose and faced the Parson deliberately. “I’m going to tell you something,” he said, “and I’m saying it only once. You’re a troublemaker. We don’t need a troublemaker here. You keep it up and I’ll wipe up the ground with you. Do you understand?”
“Here! Here!” cried the Brigadier.
“And you,” said Lansing to the Brigadier, “keep your damn mouth shut. You’ve set yourself up to be the leader of this group and you are doing badly at it.”
“I suppose,” said the Brigadier, “you think you should be the leader.”
“We don’t need a leader, General. When your pomposity threatens to overcome you, just remember that.”
A pall hung over the little band while they ate their lunch and drank the tea, then they took up the trek again, with the Brigadier still in the lead and the Parson following close upon his heels.
The rolling countryside continued, with the scattered groves of trees. It was a pleasant land, but the day was warm. Stumping on before them, the Brigadier proceeded at a slower pace than he had before they’d stopped for lunch.
The road had been climbing all the afternoon, up succeeding swales, each one higher than the last. Now, ahead of the others, the Brigadier stopped and raised a shout. The Parson loped to stand beside him and the others hurried to catch up.
The land tumbled down into a bowl, and at the bottom of the bowl stood a cube of heaven blue. Even from the ridgetop it appeared to be a massive structure. It was plain, not fancy — straight sides that rose up to a flat top. From the distance that they viewed it, it looked unadorned. But its size and intense blueness made it spectacular. The road they had been following went down the tumbled, tortured slope in angling curves and switchbacks. Once it reached the bottom of the slope, it arrowed toward the cube, but when it reached it, it swept out to run around one side of it, then continued across the bowl and went climbing up the slope beyond in a zigzag fashion.
Sandra squeaked. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
The Brigadier harumphed. “When the innkeeper mentioned it,” he said, “I never for a moment anticipated it would be anything like this. I didn’t know what to expect. A crumbling ruin, perhaps. I guess I really didn’t think too much about it. I was looking forward to the city.”
The Parson pulled the corners of his mouth down. “I don’t like the looks of it.”
“You don’t like the looks of anything,” said the Brigadier.
“Before we start passing opinions,” said Lansing, “let us go down there and have a look at it.”
It took awhile to get there. They had to follow the road because the sloping ground was too steep and treacherous to do otherwise. By following the road in all its wanderings, they traveled several times the distance between the slope’s summit and its base.
The cube sat in the center of a wide, sandy area that ran all around it, a circle of sand so precise that it seemed it must have been drawn carefully by a survey team — white sand, the kind of sand that one would expect to find in a children’s sandbox, a sugarlike sand that at one time might have been flattened out into a smooth surface but that now had been blown into a series of ripples by the wind.
The walls of the cube rose high. Lansing, measuring them with a careful eye, concluded they rose fifty feet or more. In them there were no breaks, nothing that would suggest a window or a door, and there was, as well, no ornamentation, no artful carving, no dedicatory plaque, no incised symbols that might announce a name by which the cube was known. Viewed close at hand the blueness of the walls held true — a celestial blue that could have represented the purest innocence. Likewise, the walls were smooth. Certainly not stone, Lansing told himself. Plastic, perhaps, although plastic seemed incongruous in this howling wilderness, or ceramic, a cube formed of the finest porcelain.
With scarcely a word spoken, the band walked around the cube, by some unspoken convention not stepping within the circle of sand that surrounded it. Back on the road again, they halted and all stood looking at the blueness.
“It’s beautiful,” said Sandra, drawing in her breath as a sign of continuing astonishment. “More beautiful than it seemed when we glimpsed it from the hilltop. More beautiful than you could expect anything to be.”