Страница 9 из 54
He lay quietly, his mind agape at what had happened, and wondering, too, what had made it happen. Although the wonder was a formalized and an academic wonder, for he knew what it was.
The Pinkness had faded out of him, and he went hunting it and found it, snug inside its den.
Thanks, he said to it.
Although it seemed a little fu
The car went fleeing up the canyon, and the air was fresh and cool, as if it had been new-washed in some clear mountain stream, and the smell of pine came down between the walls like the smell of a faint and delicate perfume.
Perhaps, he told himself, it had been with no thought of helping him that the thing inside his brain had acted as it did. Rather it might have been an almost automatic reflex action for the preservation of itself. But no matter what it was, it had saved him as surely as itself. For the two of them were one. No longer could either of them act independently of the other. They were bound together by the legerdemain of that sprawling Pinkness on that other planet, by the double of the thing that had come to live with him — for the thing within his mind was a shadow of its other self five thousand light years distant.
“Have trouble,” Harriet asked.
“I met up with Freddy.”
“Freddy Bates, you mean.”
“He’s the one and only Freddy.”
“The little nincompoop.”
“Your little nincompoop,” said Blaine, “was packing a gun and he had blood within his eyes.”
“You don’t mean—”
“Harriet,” said Blaine, “this is liable to get rough. Why don’t you let me out—”
“Not on your life,” said Harriet. “I’ve never had so much fun in all my life.”
“You aren’t going anywhere. You haven’t much road left.”
Shep, you may not think it to look at me, but I’m the intellectual type. I do a lot of reading and I like history best of all. Bloody battle history. Especially if there are a lot of campaign maps to follow.”
“So?”
“So I’ve found out one thing. It is always a good idea to have a line of retreat laid out.”
“But not up this road.”
“Up this road,” she said.
He turned his head and watched her profile and she didn’t look the part — not the hard-boiled newspaper gal that she really was. No chatter column writer nor a sob sister nor a society hen, but one of the dozen or so top-notch reporters spelling out the big picture of Fishhook for one of the biggest newspapers in North America.
And yet as chic, he thought, as a fashion model. Chic, without being sleek, and with an air of quiet assurance that would have been arrogance in any other woman.
There was nothing, he was sure, that could be known of Fishhook which she didn’t know. She wrote with a strangely objective viewpoint, one might almost say detached, but even in that rare atmosphere of journalistic prose she injected a soft sense of human warmth.
And in the face of all of this, what was she doing here?
She was a friend, of course. He had known her for years, ever since that day shortly after she had arrived at Fishhook and they had gone to di
Strange, he thought, but it all was strange. Fishhook, itself, was a modern nightmare which the outer world, in a century’s time, had not quite accepted.
He wondered what it had been like, that century ago, when the men of science had finally given up, when they had admitted that Man was not for space. And all the years were dead and all the dreams were futile and Man had finally ended up in a little planetary dead-end. For then the gods had toppled, and Man, in his secret mind, had known that after all the years of yearnings, he had achieved nothing more than gadgets.
Hope had fallen on hard times, and the dreams had dwindled, and the trap closed tight — but the urge to space had refused to die. For there was a group of very stubborn men who took another road — a road that Man had missed, or deserted, whichever you might choose, many years ago and ever since that time had sneered at and damned with the name of magic.
For magic was a childish thing; it was an old wives’ tale; it was something out of nursery books — and in the hard and brittle world of the road that Man had taken it was intolerable. You were out of your mind if you believed in magic.
But the stubborn men had believed in it, or at least in the principle of this thing which the world called magic, for it was not actually magic if one used the co
Out of this stubbor
Ahead of the car the road swung to the right, then swiveled to the left, in a tightening curve. This was the turnaround; here the road came to an end.
“Hang on,” said Harriet.
She swung the car off the road and nosed it up a rocky stream bed that ran along one of the canyon walls. The airjets roared and blustered, the engines throbbed and howled. Branches scraped along the bubble top, and the car tilted sharply, then brought itself aright.
“This is not too bad,” said Harriet. “There is a place or two, later on, where it gets a little rough.”
“This is the line of retreat you were talking about?”
“That’s exactly right.”
And why, he wondered, should Harriet Quimby need a line of retreat? He almost asked her but decided not to.
She drove cautiously, traveling in the dry creek bed, clinging close against the wall of rock that came down out of darkness. Birds fled squawling from the bushes, and branches dragged against the car, screeching in their agony of tortured wood.
The headlights showed a sharp bend, with a barn-size boulder hemming in the wall of rock. The car slowed to a crawl, thrust its nose into the space between the boulder and the wall, swiveled its rear around and went inching through the space into the clear again.
Harriet cut down the jets, and the car sank to the ground, grating on the gravel in the creek bed. The jets cut out and the engine stopped and silence closed upon them.
“We walk from here?” asked Blaine.
“No. We only wait awhile. They’ll come hunting for us. If they heard the jets, they’d know where we had gone.”
“You go clear to the top?”
“Clear to the top,” she said.
“You have driven it?” he asked.
“Many times,” she told him. “Because I knew that if the time ever came to use it, I’d have to use it fast. There’d be no time for guessing or for doubling back. I’d have to know the trail.”
“But why, in the name of God—”
“Look, Shep. You are in a jam. I get you out of it. Shall we let it go at that?”
“If that’s the way you want it, sure. But you’re sticking out your neck. There’s no need to stick it out.”
“I’ve stuck out my neck before. A good newsman sticks out the neck whenever there is need to.”
That might be true, he told himself, but not to this extent. There were a lot of newspapermen in Fishhook and he’d drank with most of them. There were a few he could even call his friends. And yet no one of them — no one but Harriet — would do what she was doing.
So newspapering by itself could not be the answer. Nor could friendship be the entire answer, either. It was something more than either, perhaps a good deal more than either.