The gnome crossed the room to stand beside him.
Lathrop wrote on his pad: I was a whitherer. I used facts and logic to learn whither are we going. I was a seeker after truth.
“Those kind of streaks,” he said. “I have made many streaks of Clay’s life.”
“Magic,” said the gnome.
It was all down, thought Lathrop, all that he had learned of Clay. All but the missing years. All down in page after page of notes, waiting for the writing. Notes telling the strange story of a strange man who had wandered star to star, painting planet after planet, leaving his paintings strewn across the galaxy. A man who had wandered as if he might be seeking something other than new scenes to put upon his canvases. As if his canvases were no more than a passing whim, no more than a quaint and convenient device to earn the little money that he needed for food and polting plots, the money that enabled him to go on to system after system. Making no effort to retain any of his work, selling every bit of it or even, at times, simply walking off and leaving it behind.
Not that his paintings weren’t good. They were—startlingly good. They were given honored places in many galleries, or what passed as galleries, on many different planets.
Clay had stayed for long at no place. He had always hurried on. As if there were a purpose or a plot which drove him from star to star.
And the sum total of the wandering, of the driven purpose, had ended here in this very burrow, no more than a hiding place against the wind and weather.
“Why?” asked the gnome. “Why make the streaks of Clay?”
“Why?” said Lathrop. “Why? I do not know!”
But the answer, not only of Clay’s wandering, but of his following in Clay’s tracks, might be within his grasp. Finally, after all the years of searching, he might find the answer here.
“Why do you streak?”
And how to answer that?
How had Clay answered? For they must have asked him, too. Not how, because you do not ask the how of magic. But why … that was permissible. Not the secret of the magic, but the purpose of it.
“So we may know,” said Lathrop, groping for the words, “So all of us may know, you and I and all the others on other stars may know what kind of being (man?) Clay was.”
“He was … (kind?). He was one of us. We loved him. That is all we need to know.”
“All you may need,” said Lathrop. “But not enough for others.”
Although there probably would not be many who would read the monograph once he had written it. Only a pitiful few would take the time to read it, or even care to read it.
He thought: Now, finally, I know what I’ve known all along, but refused to admit I knew; that I’m not doing this for others, but for myself alone. And not for the sake of occupation, not for the sake of keeping busy in retirement, but for some deeper reason and for some greater need. For some factor or some sense, perhaps, that I missed before. For some need I do not even recognize. For some purpose that might astound me if I ever understood it.
The gnome went back to the stove and got on with the meal and Lathrop continued to sit with his back against the wall, realizing now the tiredness that was in him. He’d had a busy day. Polting was not difficult, actually seemed easy, but it took a lot out of a man. And, in addition to that, he’d walked twenty miles from his landing place to reach the village.
Polting might be easy, but it had not been easy to come by, for its development had been forced to wait upon the suspension of erroneous belief, had come only with the end of certain superstitions and the false screen of prejudice set up to shield Man against his lack of knowledge. For if a man did not understand a thing, he called it a silly superstition and let it go at that. The human race could disregard a silly superstition and be quite easy in its mind, but it could not disregard a stubborn fact without a sense of guilt.
Shuffling footsteps came down the tunnel and four gnomes emerged into the burrow. They carried crude gardening tools and these they set against the wall, then stood silently in a row to stare at the man sitting on the floor.
The old gnome said: “It is another one like Clay. He will stay with us.”
They moved forward, the four of them, and stood in a semi-circle facing Lathrop. One of them asked the old gnome at the stove: “Will he stay here and die?” And another one said, “He is not close to dying, this one.” There was anticipation in them.
“I will not die here,” said Lathrop, uneasily.
“We will …,” said one of them, repeating that word which told what they had done with Clay when he had died, and he said it almost as if it were a bribe to make the human want to stay and die.
“Perhaps he would not want us to,” said another one. “Clay wanted us to do it. He may not feel like Clay.”
There was horror in the burrow, a faint, flesh-creeping horror in the words they said and in the way they looked at him with anticipation.
The old gnome went to one corner of the burrow and came back with a bag. He set it down in front of Lathrop and tugged at the string which tied it, while all the others watched. And one could see that they watched with reverence and hope and that the opening of the bag was a great occasion—and that if there could be anything approaching solemnity in their squat bodies, they watched most solemnly.
The string finally came loose and the old gnome tilted the bag and grasped it by its bottom and emptied it upon the earthen floor. There were brushes and many tubes of paint, all but a few squeezed dry and a battered wallet and something else that the old gnome picked up from the floor and handed to the Earthman.
Lathrop stretched out his hand and took it and held it and looked at it and suddenly he knew what they had done to Clay, knew without question that great and final honor.
Laughter gurgled in his throat—not laughter at the humor of it, for there was no humor, but laughter at the twisted values, at the cross-purposes of concepts, at wondering how, and knowing how the gnomes might have arrived at the conclusion which they reached in rendering to Clay the great and final honor.
He could see it even now as it must have happened—how they worked for days carrying the earth to make the mound he’d seen beyond the village, knowing that the end was nearing for this alien friend of theirs; how they must have searched far for timber in this land of little bushes, and having found it, brought it in upon many bended backs, since they did not know the wheel; and how they fitted it together, fumblingly, perhaps, with wooden pegs and laboriously bored-out holes, for they had no metal and they knew no carpentry.
And they did it all for the love that they bore Clay, and all their labor and their time had been as nothing in the glory of this thing they did so lovingly.
He looked at the crucifix and now it seemed that he understood what had seemed so strange of Clay—the eternal searching, the mad, feverish wandering from one star system to another, even in part, the superb artistry that spoke so clearly of a hidden, half-guessed truth behind the many truths he’d spoken with his brush.
For Clay had been a survival-member of that strange, gentle sect out of Earth’s far antiquity; he had been one of those who, in this world of logic and of fact, had clung to the mysticism and the faith. Although for Clay, perhaps, the naked faith alone had not been enough, even as for him, Anson Lathrop, bare facts at times seemed not enough. And that he had never guessed this truth of Clay was easy to explain—one did not fling one’s faith into the gigantic snicker of a Logic universe.
For both of them, perhaps, neither fact nor faith could stand alone, but each must have some leavening of the other.