But Sam said suddenly, "It is almost finished. Just a little farther and you'll have to go the rest of the way alone."
Terror struck at Baker. He had reached a point where he was absolutely sure he could not go on alone without Sam's supporting presence. "You tricked me!" Baker cried. "You tricked me! You didn't tell me I would have to be reborn alone!"
"Doesn't every man?" said Sam. "Is there any way to be born, except alone?"
Slowly, the world closed in about Baker.
Light. Sounds.
Wet. Cold.
The impact of a million idiot minds. The coursing of cosmic-ray particles. The wrenching of Earth's magnetic and gravitational fields. Old and sluggish memories were renewed, memories meant to be buried for all of his life.
Baker felt as if he were suddenly running down a dark and immense corridor. Behind were all the terrors spawned since the beginning of time. Ahead were a thousand openings of light and safety. He raced for the nearest and brightest and most familiar.
"No," said Sam Atkins. "You cannot go that way again. It is the way you went before—and it led to this—to a search for death. For you, it will lead only to the same goal again."
"I can't go on!" Baker cried. The terrors seemed to be swiftly closing in.
"Take my hand a moment longer," said Sam. "Inspect these more distant paths. There are many of them that will be agreeable to you."
Baker felt calmer now in the renewed presence of Sam Atkins. He passed the branching pathway that Sam had forbidden, that had seemed so bright. He sensed now why Sam had cautioned him against it. Far down, in the depths of it, he glimpsed faintly a dark ugliness that he had not seen before. He shuddered.
Directly ahead there seemed to be the opening of a corridor of blazing brightness. Baker's calmness increased as he approached. "This one," he said.
He heard nothing, but he sensed Sam Atkins' smile and nod of approval.
He remembered now for the first time why he had wanted to die. It was to avoid the very terrors by which he had been pursued through the dark corridor. All this had happened before, and he had gone down the pathway Sam had forbidden. Somehow, like a circle, it had come back to this very point, to this forgotten experience for which he had been willing to die rather than endure again.
It was very bewildering. He did not understand the meaning of it. But he knew he had corrected a former error. He was back in the world. He was alive again.
Sam Atkins looked up at his companions through eyes that seemed all but dead. "He's going to make it," he said. "We can get the car out and pick up Baker now."
They used Sam's panel truck, which had a four-wheel drive and mud tires. Nothing else could possibly get through. Fenwick left his own car at Ellerbee's.
It was still raining lightly as the truck sloshed and slewed through the muck that was hardly recognizable now as a road. For an hour Sam fought the wheel to hold the car approximately in the middle of the brownish ooze that led them through the night. The three men sat in the cab. Behind them, a litter and first-aid equipment had been rigged for Baker. Sam told them nothing would be needed except soap and water, but Fenwick and Ellerbee felt it impossible to go off without some other emergency equipment.
After an hour, Sam said, "He's close. Just around the next bend. That's where his car went off."
Baker loomed suddenly in the lights of the car. He was standing at the edge of the road. He waved an arm wearily.
Fenwick would not have recognized him. And for some seconds after the car had come to a halt, and Baker stood weaving uncertainly in the beam of the lights, Fenwick was not sure it was Baker at all.
He looked like something out of an old Frankenstein movie. His clothes were ripped almost completely away. Those remaining were stained with blood and red clay, and soaked with rain. Baker's face was laced with a network of scars as if he had been slashed with a shower of glass not too long ago and the wounds were freshly healed. Blood was caked and cracked on his face and was matted in his hair.
He smiled grotesquely as he staggered toward the car door. "About time you got here," he said. "A man could catch his death of cold standing out here in this weather."
Dr. William Baker was quite sure he had no need of hospitalization, but he let them settle him in a hospital bed anyway. He had some thinking to do, and he didn't know of a better place to get it done.
There was a good deal of medical speculation about the vast network of very fresh scars on his body, the bones which X rays showed to have been only very recently knit, and the violent internal injuries which gave some evidence of their recent healing. Baker allowed the speculation to go on without offering explanations. He let them tap and measure and apply electrical gadgets to their heart's content. It didn't bother the thinking he had to get done.
Fenwick and Ellerbee came back the next day to see him. The two approached the bed so warily that Baker burst out laughing. "Pull up chairs!" he exclaimed. "Just because you saw me looking a shade less than dead doesn't mean I'm a ghost now. Sit down. And where's Sam? Not that I don't appreciate seeing your ugly faces, but Sam and I have got some things to talk about."
Ellerbee and Fenwick looked at each other as if each expected the other to speak.
"Well, what's the matter?" demanded Baker. "Nothing's happened to Sam, I hope!"
Fenwick spoke finally. "We don't know where Sam is. We don't think we'll be seeing him again."
"Why not?" Baker demanded. But in the back of his mind was the growing suspicion that he knew.
"After your—accident," said Fenwick, "I went back to the farm with Ellerbee and Sam because I'd left my car there. I went back to bed to try to get some more shut-eye, but the storm had started up again and kept me awake. Just before dawn a terrific bolt of lightning seemed to strike Sam's silo. Later, Jim went out to check on his cows and help his man finish up the milking.
"By mid-morning we hadn't heard anything from Sam and decided to go over and talk to him about what we'd seen him do for you. I guess it was eleven by the time we got there."
Jim Ellerbee nodded agreement.
"When we got there," Fenwick went on, "we saw that the front door of the house was open as if the storm had blown it in. We called Sam, but he didn't answer, so we went on in. Things were a mess. We thought it was because of the storm, but then we saw that drawers and shelves seemed to have been opened hastily and cleaned out. Some things had been dropped on the floor, but most of the stuff was just gone.
"It was that way all through the house. Sam's bed hadn't been disturbed. He had either not slept in it, or had gone to the trouble of making it up even though he left the rest of the house in a mess."
"Sounds like the place might have been broken into," said Baker. "Didn't you notify the sheriff?"
"Not after we'd seen what was outside, in back."
"What was that?"
"We wanted to see the silo after the lightning had struck it. Jim said he'd always been curious about that silo. It was one of the best in the county, but Sam never used it. He used a pit.
"When we went out, all the cows were bellowing. They hadn't been milked. Sam did all his own work. Jim called his own man to come and take care of Sam's cows. Then we had a close look at the silo. It had split like a banana peel opening up. It hardly seemed as if a bolt of lightning could have caused it. We climbed over the broken pieces to look inside. It was still warm in there. At least six hours after lightning—or whatever had struck it, the concrete was still warm. The bottom and several feet of the sides of the silo were covered with a glassy glaze."