“I suppose we could,” said Lansing, “but the chances are she’d fight us. She’s not in her right mind. Even if she didn’t fight us, if all we had to do was haul her along, she would slow us up. This is bad country. There are long stretches between water. We have water here, but between here and the last water was two days.”
“Before we left we’d fill the canteens,” said Jorgenson. “We’d drink sparingly. We’d be all right. Farther on the water situation may improve.”
“It seems to me that Jorgenson may be right,” said Mary. “We can’t leave Sandra. I’ll stay with her. There seems to be no danger. The land is empty of any kind of life — only the Sniffler, and he is one of us.”
“I will not leave you here alone,” said Lansing.
“We could leave Jurgens,” suggested Jorgenson.
“No,” Mary told him. “Sandra knows me best. I’m the one she always turned to.” She said to Lansing, “All of us can’t stay here. We are wasting time. We must know what is north and west. If there is nothing there, then we’ll know and can make other plans.”
“I won’t go north,” Melissa said. “I simply will not go.”
“Then you and I’ll go west,” said Jorgenson. “Lansing and Jurgens north. We’ll travel light and fast. A few days only and then we’ll be back. By that time Sandra may be herself again.”
“I still have hopes,” said Mary, “that she is learning something, hearing something to which the rest of us are deaf. The answer, or part of the answer, may be here and she the only one to find it.”
“We stay together,” Lansing insisted. “We are not breaking up.”
“You’re being obstinate,” said Jorgenson.
“So I’m being obstinate,” said Lansing.
Before the end of the day, Sandra had abandoned her standing position and fallen to her knees. Every now and then she crawled, hitching herself closer to the singing tower.
“I’m worried about her,” Lansing told Mary.
“So am I,” said Mary, “but she seems to be all right. She talks a little, not much. She says that she must stay. The others of us should go on, she says, but she can’t leave. Leave her some food and water, she told me, and she’ll be all right. She did eat something this evening and drank some water.”
“Does she tell you what is happening?”
“No, she’s not told me that. I asked her and she either wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me. Couldn’t, I would guess. She may not as yet know herself what’s happening.”
“You’re convinced there is a happening, that it’s not just sheer fascination with the music?”
“I can’t be certain, but I think there is a happening.”
“It’s strange,” he said, “that we can gather no significant information from the tower. There’s nothing here, absolutely nothing to put a handle on. Like the cube. The two of them. Nothing from either one of them. Both of them are constructions. Someone built them for a purpose.”
“Jorgenson was talking about that, too. He thinks they are false clues. Constructions to confuse us.”
“The maze syndrome. Running in a maze. A test to sort us out.”
“He doesn’t say so, but that is what he means.”
They were sitting apart from the others, a short distance from the fire. Jurgens stood to one side, doing nothing, simply standing there. The other two were beside the fire, talking to one another occasionally, but mostly sitting silent.
Mary took Lansing by the hand. “We have to make some move,” she told him. “We can’t just sit here, waiting for Sandra. The man back at the first inn talked about winter coming. He said he closed up for the winter. Winter could be dreadful here. Our time may be short. This is already autumn. Maybe deep into autumn.”
He put an arm around her, drew her close. She rested her head on his shoulder.
“I can’t leave you here,” he said. “Not alone. It would tear me up inside to leave you here alone.”
“You have to,” she said.
“I could go north alone. Leave Jurgens here with you.”
“No, I want Jurgens with you. It’s safe here; there may be danger in the north. Don’t you see? It must be done.”
“Yes, I know. It makes sense. But I simply cannot leave you.”
“Edward, you must. We have to know. What we are looking for may be in the north.”
“Or in the west.”
“Yes, that’s true. It may even be here, but we can’t be certain. Sandra is a poor reed to lean upon. There is a chance she’ll come up with something, but only a chance. Nothing to wait around for.”
“You’ll be careful? You’ll stay right here? You’ll take no chances?”
“I promise you,” she said.
In the morning she kissed him good-bye and said to Jurgens, “You take care of him. I’m counting on you to take care of him.”
Jurgens told her, proudly, “We’ll take care of one another.”
25
From the inn to the tower the land had grown increasingly arid. North from the tower the aridness turned to desert. It was hard traveling. The sand slid underneath the feet, there were dunes to be climbed. The wind blew steadily from the northwest and swirled sand into their faces.
They did no talking. Heads bent against the wind, Jurgens checking compass readings and setting the course, they made dogged progress north. The robot limped ahead and Lansing staggered after him. At first Lansing had gone ahead, the robot limping behind him. But, as Lansing tired, Jurgens, his mechanical body never tiring, had taken the lead.
After several hours the dunes, in large part, disappeared and they came to firmer, although still sandy, footing.
Watching Jurgens as the robot hitched energetically ahead of him, Lansing fell to wondering about him. Jurgens was still a mystery — as, he admitted, all the rest of them were mysteries. He tried to bring into mind what he knew of each of them, and the facts that he could muster were sketchy. Mary was an engineer in a world where the old empires of the eighteenth century still persisted, making for a stable, but noncompassionate, world. Other than that he knew little about her except for one important fact — he loved her. No idea of what kind of job she may have worked in, what kind of engineering she might have practiced, nothing about her family or her former life, less, perhaps, about her than any of the others.
Sandra’s world was a fuzzy place, a culture that he could not understand, although, he told himself, the culture that she mirrored might be no more than a small subculture in which she had existed. The overall culture of her world might be something else entirely and she almost as unaware of it as he. They had not, he thought, been entirely fair to Sandra. The group, as a whole, largely had ignored her. Given a chance, she might have been able to make a significant contribution. If she had been exposed to the machines of the installation, rather than he and Mary, she might have brought back from her experience more than they had brought. Even now, through her close rapport with the music tower, she might supply the key to what they all had sought.
The Parson had been, it seemed to Lansing, an open book, although, once again, he might have been a reflection of a subculture. There was no evidence to suggest that the Parson’s entire world had been as bigoted, as narrow and as vicious as the Parson saw his world. Given time, they might have had a chance to comprehend the Parson, to have found with him some level of understanding, knowing his background, to have found some measure of sympathy with his cross-grained thinking.
The Brigadier, he told himself, had been another matter. Secretive — he had not attempted to explain his world, had refused to tell how he had been pitchforked into the present situation — domineering, with a fierce urge to mastery and command, unwilling to listen to reason other than his own, he had been an enigma. Undoubtedly he had not been a member of a subculture; his world sounded like a place of military anarchy in which hundreds of contending little warlords had battled one another. A game, he had said, not more than a game, but at best a deadly one.