“You don’t think this, do you?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think machines have a capacity for evil. But the city is no place to stay and I am leaving it, right now. Are you coming, Edward?”
“You lead the way. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Now wait a minute!” stormed the Brigadier. “You can’t desert me now. Not when we are on the brink.”
“The brink of what?” asked Jurgens.
“The brink of finding the answer we seek.”
“It’s not here,” said Jurgens. “The machines may be a part of it, but they’re not all of it and you can’t get the solution from them.”
The Brigadier sputtered at him, but no words came out. His face was puffed and red with anger and frustration. Then suddenly his sputtering stopped and he shouted at them. “We’ll see about that! I’ll show you. I’ll show all of you!”
As he shouted at them he leaped forward, running down the walkway, straight between the two banks of machines.
Jurgens took two quick steps in pursuit, struggling to get solid footing with his crutch on the smoothness of the metal walkway. Moving deliberately, Lansing kicked the crutch out from under him and sent the robot sprawling.
The Brigadier still was running. He was far down the walkway when suddenly he sparkled all along his entire body. The sparkle flared for a small fraction of a second and the Brigadier was gone.
Blinded by the flare, they all stood stockstill, horrified. Jurgens, using the crutch to pull himself erect, scrambled to his feet.
“I think,” he told Lansing, “that I must thank you for my life.”
“I told you, long ago,” said Lansing, “that if you ever tried another stupid trick, I’d clobber you with whatever was at hand.”
“I can’t see him,” said Sandra. “The Brigadier’s not there.”
Mary directed a flashlight beam down the walkway. “Neither can I,” she said. “The beam doesn’t carry far enough.”
“I think it does,” said Jurgens. “The Brigadier is gone.” “But it wasn’t that way with us,” Mary said to Lansing. “Our bodies stayed behind.”
“We weren’t as far down the walkway as the general was.”
“That may be it,” she said. “You spoke of the machines being able to take over the body as well as the mind. I told you it would be impossible. Maybe I was wrong.”
“Two of us gone,” said Sandra. “The Parson and the Brigadier.”
“The Brigadier may come back,” said Lansing.
“Somehow I don’t think so,” said Mary. “There was a lot of energy involved. The Brigadier could very well be dead.”
“You can say this for him,” said Jurgens. “He went out in a blaze of glory. No! No! I’m sorry. I apologize. I did not mean that; I should not have said it.”
“You’re forgiven,” Lansing said. “You just beat another one of us to saying it.”
“Now what?” asked Sandra. “What do we do now?”
“That’s a problem,” Mary told her. “Edward, do you have any kind of hunch that he’ll be coming back? As we came back.”
“No hunch. Since we came back, I thought…”
“But this was different.”
“The damn fool,” said Lansing. “The poor, pitiful damn fool. The leader to the end.”
They stood, huddled together, looking down the walkway in all its emptiness. The cat eyes glowed, the machines kept up their crooning.
“Maybe we should wait awhile,” said Mary, “before we leave the city.”
“I think we should,” said Jurgens.
“If he does come back, he’ll need us,” Sandra said.
“Edward,” Mary asked, “what do you think?”
“That we should wait,” he said. “At a time like this, we can’t desert the man. I can’t imagine he’ll come back, but if he should…”
They moved their camp into the alley, near the stairs that went down into the cavern where the machines sang softly to themselves. Each night the lonesome beast came out on the hills above the city and cried out its bitterness and lostness.
On the morning of the fourth day, after consulting the map that might have represented this part of the world, they left the city and found the westward continuation of the road they’d walked to reach it.
21
Early in the afternoon they reached the summit of the hills that ringed in the city and entered a grotesque world of erosion carving. The trail plunged downward through a colorful nightmare of earthen turrets, castles, battlements, towers and other fantastic shapes, tinted by the unending range of hues exhibited by the many geological layers of the different earths.
The going was slow; they did not try to hurry. The trail no longer could claim the distinction of being called a road. At times they would come out into the flatness of small floodplains, but then they would leave them to drop again into the weird, color-riotous madness of the tortured terrain.
Well before night closed in, they chose a camping place in the angle of a soaring clay cliff. Wood they found in tangled heaps of drift, deposited at some time long ago when great trees had come riding on the crests of the raging torrents that had carved the land. Wood, but no water. The day had not been excessively hot, however, and their canteens were almost full.
Vegetation grew sparse. Except for occasional patches of stout grasses and a few clumps of small conifers, hugging close against the ground, the sculptured earth was bare.
After supper they sat and watched the glory of the colors fade. When night fell, the stars came out bright and hard. Searching the skies, Lansing spotted familiar constellations. There could be no doubt, he told himself, that this place was Earth, but not the old familiar Earth that he had known. It was not another planet in another solar system; it was one of the alternate Earths that Andy had talked about, never for a moment suspecting there could be such other Earths.
The time factor bothered Lansing. With the constellations so little changed, if changed at all, the time differential between this Earth and the one that he had known must be no greater than a few tens of thousands of years at most. And yet, on this Earth, a great civilization had risen to heights as great or greater than had been the case on his Earth — had risen, developed, flourished and died. Could it be, he asked himself, that here Man had gotten an earlier start? Could the race of man here have developed some millions of years earlier? Was it possible, he wondered, that the crisis point between the two had been the dying out of mankind on his Earth, necessitating a starting over? That idea bothered him. If man died out on one Earth, what would be the chance of starting over again, of being given a second chance? Reason told him that the chance would be well nigh impossible.
“Edward,” Mary called, “you’ve scarcely said a word. What is going on?”
He shook his head. “A few random thoughts. Nothing of any great importance.”
“I’ll never feel quite right,” said Sandra, “for having left so soon. We really didn’t give the Brigadier much chance of getting back.”
“Why didn’t you speak up?” asked Mary. “You never said a word. We would have listened to you.”
“I was as anxious as the rest of you to get away. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending another day in the city.”
“For my part,” said Jurgens, “I think we wasted time waiting for him. He’s gone and gone for good.”
“What will happen to us now?” asked Sandra.
“Because the Parson and the Brigadier are gone?” asked Jurgens.
“Not that the two of them are gone, not those two alone. But there were six of us and now there are four. When will there be only three of us, or two?”
“We’ll have a better chance out here than we had in the city,” Mary said. “The city was a killer. We lost our people in the city.”