“We’ll be all right,” said Jurgens. “We’ll feel our way along. We’ll keep close watch and we won’t take chances.”
“But we don’t know where we’re going,” Sandra wailed.
“We never have,” said Jurgens. “Not since we were first thrown into this world have we known where we were going. Maybe the next bend down the trail will tell us. Maybe the day after tomorrow or the day after that.”
That night the Sniffler came back again. It sniffed all around the camp but did not intrude. They sat and listened to it. There was something comforting about its presence, as if an old friend had come back, as if a straying dog had come home again. There was no terror in the sniffling. The Sniffler had not entered the city with them; perhaps it liked the city no more than they had. But now that they were on the trail again, it had returned to join them.
Well before dark on the second day, they came on a tumbled ruin that sat on a small terrace above the trail.
“A place to spend the night,” said Jurgens.
They climbed the terrace and came to a rubble of fallen stones, soft sandstone blocks that at one time had formed a low wall around the small, ruined building that stood in the center of the rectangle formed by the scattered wall.
“Sandstone,” said Lansing. “Where could it have come from?”
“Over there,” said Jurgens, pointing to a low clay cliff that formed a backdrop for the place. “A strata of sandstone in the clay. There are signs, old signs, of quarrying.”
“Strange,” said Lansing.
“Not so strange,” Jurgens told him. “Here and there, along the way, there have been sandstone outcrops.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“You have to look sharp to see them. They are of the same color as the clay. I saw the first one by accident and then kept looking for them.”
The area within the shattered walls might have covered half an acre, scarcely more. The ruin standing in its center at one time had been a one-room structure. The roof had fallen in, part of the walls had tumbled down. Some broken crockery was scattered about on what once had been a well-trodden earthen floor, and in one corner of it Jurgens found a tarnished, battered metal pot.
“A stopping place for travelers,” said Sandra. “A caravansary.”
“Or a fort,” said Jurgens.
“A fort against what?” asked Lansing. “There is nothing here to fort up against.”
“At one time there might have been,” the robot said.
Outside the ruined building they found evidence of an old campfire, a bed of ash and smoke-blackened stones placed at intervals around it, perhaps to serve as cooking hearths. Beside the fire site was piled some driftwood.
“The last party through,” said Jurgens, “gathered more than was needed. It should last us out the night.”
“How about water?” Lansing asked.
“I think we have enough,” said Mary. “We’ll have to find some tomorrow.”
Lansing walked out to the ruined wall and stood, looking out over the monstrously sculptured terrain. Badlands, he thought, that was the word he had been searching for during the last two days and that had eluded him till now. Out in the western area of the two Dakotas were stretches of such lands as these that the first explorers — French, perhaps, although he could not remember with any certainty — had called badlands, bad lands to travel through. Here, unknown years ago great freshets of water, probably originating in torrential rains, had chewed up the land, gouging it out, washing it away, with a few areas of more resistant material withstanding the raging waters to finally turn into the twisted shapes that now remained.
Here, once, in days long gone, this trail they followed might have been an artery of trade. If Sandra had been right, if this ruin once had been a caravansary, then it had been a stopping place for caravans that carried precious freight, perhaps from the city, perhaps to the city. But if to the city, where had been the origin of the caravans? Where lay the other terminus of the route?
Mary came up from behind and stood beside him. “Other nonimportant thoughts?”
“Only trying to look back into the past. If we could see the past, what this place was like some thousands of years ago, we might know somewhat better what is happening now. Sandra suggested that this once had been a stopping place for travelers.”
“It is a stopping place for us.”
“But before us? I just now was speculating that caravans could have passed this way, perhaps many centuries ago. To them it would have been a known land. To us it is unknown.”
“We’ll be all right,” she reassured him.
“We’re moving deeper into the unknown. We have no idea what’s ahead. Someday our food will come to an end. What do we do then?”
“We still have the food the Parson and the Brigadier were carrying. It’ll be a long time before we’ll run out of food. Water is our big concern right now. We must find water tomorrow.”
“Somewhere this desolate land must end,” he said. “We’ll find water when it does. Let’s go back to the fire.”
The moon came up early, a full moon or almost full, flooding the badlands with its unearthly, ghostly light. On the other side of the trail lay a mighty butte, the side presented to them still in darkness, but its shape sharply outlined by the rising moon.
Sitting close beside the fire, Sandra shivered. “It’s a fairyland,” she said, “but a vicious fairyland. It never occurred to me that a fairyland could have a vicious aspect.”
“Your viewpoint,” Lansing said, “is colored by the world you lived in.”
Sandra flared at him. “There is nothing wrong with the world I lived in. It was a beautiful world, filled with beautiful things and beautiful people.”
“That’s what I meant. You have no comparison.”
His words were blotted out by a sudden wail that seemed to come from almost on top of them.
Sandra leaped to her feet and screamed. Mary took a quick step forward, seized her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Shut up!” Mary yelled at her. “Keep quiet!”
“It followed us!” Sandra shrieked. “It is trailing us!”
“Up there,” said Jurgens, pointing toward the butte. The wail had died and for a moment there was silence.
“Up on the rim,” said Jurgens, speaking quietly.
And there it was, the thing that wailed, a monstrous creature outlined against the rising moon, a black cutout against the big face of the moon.
It was wolflike, but much too large to be a wolf, heavier, more full-bodied than a wolf and yet it held the sense of strength and agility that was the mark of wolf. It was a great shaggy beast, unkempt, as if it might have fallen on hard times, foraging desperately for the little food it found, skulking to locate a place to sleep and raked by an agony that drove it to lament against the world.
It flung back its head, lifting its muzzle, and cried again. Not a wail this time, but a sobbing ululation that wavered across the land and quivered among the stars.
Lansing felt a chill run through him and he struggled to remain erect, for his knees were buckling. Sandra was crouched upon the ground, her head shielded by her arms. Mary was bending over her. Lansing felt an arm thrown around his shoulders. Turning his head, he saw that Jurgens was beside him.
“I’m all right,” said Lansing.
“Of course you are,” said Jurgens.
The Waller howled and whimpered, bawled and brayed its grief. It went on forever, or seemed to go on forever, and then, as suddenly as it had come, was gone. The moon, swimming up the east, showed only the smooth, humped line of the looming butte.
That night, after the three humans were in their sleeping bags and Jurgens stood on watch, the Sniffler came out of the night and sniffed all about the firelit circle of the camp. Lying in their bags, they listened to the sniffling and were undismayed. After the Wailer on the butte top, he was a welcome friend come visiting.