And there was another knowledge…the knowledge of the endless reaches and the savage loneliness that was the Martian wilderness. The knowledge of that and the queer, almost non-human detachment that it fused into the human soul.
Lessons, he thought.
The lesson that one man is an insignificant flyspeck crawling across the face of eternity. The lesson that one life is a relatively unimportant thing when it stands face to face with the over-riding reality of the miracle of all creation.
He got up and stood at his full height and knew his insignificance and his humility in the empty sweep of land that fell away on every side and in the arching sky that vaulted overhead from horizon to horizon and the utter silence that lay upon the land and sky.
Starving was a lonely and an awful business.
Some deaths are swift and clean.
But starving is not one of these.
The seven did not come. Webb waited for them, and because he still felt kindly toward them, he found excuses for them. They did not realize, he told himself, how short a time a man may go without nourishment. The strange mating, he told himself, involving seven personalities, probably was a complicated procedure and might take a great deal more time than one usually associated with such phenomena. Or something might have happened to them, they might be having trouble of their own. As soon as they had worked it out, they would come, and they would bring him food.
So he starved with kindly thoughts and with a great deal more patience than a man under dissimilar circumstances might be expected to.
And he found, even when he felt the lassitude of under-nourishment creeping along his muscles and his bones, even when the sharp pangs of hunger had settled to a gnawing horror that never left him, even when he slept, that his mind was not affected by the ravages that his body was undergoing; that his brain, apparently, was sharpened by the lack of food, that it seemed to step aside from his tortured body and become a separate entity that drew in upon itself and knotted all its faculties into a hard-bound bundle that was scarcely aware of external factors.
He sat for long hours upon a polished rock, perhaps part of that once proud city, which he found just a few yards from the tunnel mouth, and stared out across the sun-washed wilderness which stretched for miles toward a horizon that it never seemed to reach. He sought for purpose with a sharp-edged mind that probed at the roots of existence and of happenstance and sought to evolve out of the random factors that moved beneath the surface of the universe’s orderliness some evidence of a pattern that would be understandable to the human mind. Often he thought he had it, but it always slid away from him like quicksilver escaping from a clutching hand.
If Man ever was to find the answer, he knew, it must be in a place like this, where there was no distraction, where there was a distance and a barrenness that built up to a vast impersonality which emphasized and underscored the inconsequence of the thinker. For if the thinker introduced himself as a factor out of proportion to the fact, then the whole problem was distorted and the equation, if equation there be, never could be solved.
At first he had tried to hunt animals for food, but strangely, while the rest of the wilderness swarmed with vicious life that hunted timid life, the area around the city was virtually deserted, as if some one had drawn a sacred chalk mark around it. On his second day of hunting he killed a small thing that on Earth could have been a mouse. He built a fire and cooked it and later hunted up the sun-dried skin and sucked and chewed at it for the small nourishment that it might contain. But after that he did not kill a thing, for there was nothing to be killed.
Finally he came to know the seven would not come, that they never had intended to come, that they had deserted him exactly as his two human companions had deserted him before. He had been made a fool, he knew, not once, but twice.
He should have kept on going east after he had started. He should not have come back with seven to find the other six who waited at the canyon’s mouth.
You might have made it to the settlements, he told himself. You just might have made it. Just possibly have made it.
East. East toward the settlements.
Human history is a trying…a trying for the impossible, and attaining it. There is no logic, for if humanity had waited upon logic it still would be a cave-living and an earth-bound race.
Try, said Webb, not knowing exactly what he said.
He walked down the hill again and started out across the wilderness, heading toward the east. For there was no hope upon the hill and there was hope toward the east.
A mile from the base of the hill, he fell. He staggered, falling and rising, for another mile. He crawled a hundred yards. It was there the seven found him.
“Food!” he cried at them and he had a feeling that although he cried it in his mind there was no sound in his mouth. “Food! Water!”
“We take care,” they said, and lifted him, holding him in a sitting position.
“Life,” Seven told him, “is in many husks. Like nested boxes that fit inside each other. You live one and you peel it off and there’s another life.”
“Wrong,” said Webb. “You do not talk like that. Your thought does not flow like that. There is something wrong.”
“There is an inner man,” said Seven. “There are many inner men.”
“The subconscious,” said Webb, and while he said it in his mind, he knew that no word, no sound came out of his mouth. And he knew now, too, that no words were coming out of Seven’s mouth, that here were words that could not be expressed in the patois of the desert, that here were thoughts and knowledge that could not belong to a thing that scuttled, fearsome, through the Martian wilderness.
“You peel an old life off and you step forth in a new and shining life,” said Seven, “but you must know the way. There is a certain technique and a certain preparation. If there is no preparation and no technique, the job is often bungled.”
“Preparation,” said Webb. “I have no preparation. I do not know about this.”
“You are prepared,” said Seven. “You were not before, but now you are.”
“I thought,” said Webb.
“You thought,” said Seven, “and you found a partial answer. Well-fed, earth-bound, arrogant, there would have been no answer. You found humility.”
“I do not know the technique,” said Webb. “I do not…”
“We know the technique,” Seven said. “We take care.”
The hilltop where the dead city lay shimmered and there was a mirage on it. Out of the dead mound of its dust rose the pinnacles and spires, the buttresses and the flying bridges of a city that shone with color and with light; out of the sand came the blaze of garden beds of flowers and the tall avenues of trees and a music that came from the slender bell towers.
There was grass beneath his feet instead of sand blazing with the heat of the Martian noon. There was a path that led up the terraces of the hill toward the wonder city that reared upon its heights. There was the distant sound of laughter and there were flecks of color moving on the distant streets and along the walls and through the garden paths.
Webb swung around and the seven were not there. Nor was the wilderness. The land stretched away on every hand and it was not wilderness, but a breath-taking place with groves of trees and roads and flowing water courses.
He turned back to the city again and watched the movement of the flecks of color.
“People,” he said.
And Seven’s voice, coming to him from somewhere, from elsewhere, said:
“People from the many planets. And from beyond the planets. And some of your own people you will find among them. For you are not the first.”