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to me and I ate a few bites of the steak we fried, then sat back to wait. Nothing happened and all of
us ate. We had found a food supply and could hoard the little stock we carried.
There was about this high land an ecstatic mysticism and at times I found myself feeling that I was
walking through a dream. It was not this high plateau itself, but the total impact of the planet that
seemed to come crashing down upon me- the wonder of who had been here before and why they'd
left and what might be the purpose of the orchard they had planted and then abandoned, along with
the great white city. Huddling close to the campfire, grateful for its warmth against the chill of
night, I watched Hoot and wondered at the brotherhood that lay between us, binding us together.
He had cleaned my blood of poison and had later asked me for a loan of life and when Tuck had
snatched him from me had accepted the loan from Tuck, although I suspected it had been taken as a
proxy of my life, for between him and Tuck there was no such thing as brotherhood.
Now, more than ever, Tuck walked by himself, no longer even pretending that he was one of us. He
almost never spoke except on those occasions when he mumbled to the doll and once the evening
meal was done sat by himself away from the fire, apparently unmindful of the cold. His face
became thinner and his body seemed to shrink within the muffling folds of his robe, shrinking not
into a skeleton, but into tough rawhide. He took on a gray quality, a shadow sense, so that one
became unaware of him. There were times when I'd look around and see him and be surprised to
find him there and even wonder, momentarily, who he was, and that strange wiping-out-of-memory
was, as well, a part of this high blue land through which we walked. Past and present and the
thought and hope of future would seem to blend into a terribly logic feel of time that was in itself
eternity, a never-beginning never-ending state of being that hung suspended, in duration and yet
had about it a continuing and a sparkling sense of wonder.
So we moved across that great plateau, Paint rocking along in silence except for the occasional
click of a rocker against a stone protruding from the trail; Hoot ranging out ahead, a dot against the
distance, still working at his scarcely-needed role of scout; Tuck stumbling along like a dim gray
ghost muffled to the throat in brown, and Roscoe stumping sturdily, muttering to himself his
endless string of rhyming words, never making sense, a vocal moron who trundled happily through
an alien never-never land. And I, stalking along with the shield upon my back and the sword
banging at my leg, must have appeared as strange as any of the rest. Sara probably was touched the
least of all, but she changed as well, regaining the old flare of adventure which had been sheared
from her by the toil and monotony and the tension of crossing the desert with its badlands stretches.
I saw in her again the woman who had met me in the hallway of that aristocratic house in the midst
of its sweeping lawn and who had walked with me, arm in arm, into that room where it all had
started.
The mountains loomed higher and lost some of their blueness and we could see now that they were
wild and fearsome and breathtaking mountains, with soaring cliffs and mighty canyons, clothed
with heavy woods that extended almost to the rocky peaks.
"I have a feeling," Sara said one night as we sat beside the campfire, "that we are nearly there, that
we are getting close."
I nodded, for I had the same feeling-that we were getting close, although I could not imagine close
to what. Somewhere in those mountains just ahead we would find what we were looking for. I did
not think that we would find Lawrence Arlen Knight, for he must long since be dead, but in some
strange manner for which I could not account, the conviction had crept into me that we'd find
something, that somewhere this trail must end and that at the end of it lay the thing we sought.
Although I could not, for the life of me, put into words the sort of thing we sought. I simply did not
know. But not knowing did not suppress the excitement and anticipation of what lay just ahead. It
was all illogical, of course, an attitude born of the mystic blue through which we journeyed. More
than likely the frail would never end, that once it reached the mountains it would continue to go
snaking up and around and through that upended country. But logic had no place here. I still
continued to believe that the trail would end somewhere just ahead and that at the end of it we'd
find something wonderful.
Above us lay the glow of the galaxy-the fierce blue-whiteness of the central core, with the filmy
mistiness of the arms spiraling out from it.
"I wonder," Sara said, "if we ever will get back. And if we do get back, what can we tell them,
Mike? How is one going to put into words the kind of place this is?"
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