Cemetery World and Destiny Doll by Clifford D. Simak

Author:Clifford D. Simak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THREE

And I should have thought on it much longer, I told myself as I stood on that moon-washed desert; I never should have gone.

Smith still was crawling around on his hands and knees and whimpering. His blind-white eyes, catching the moonlight, glinted like the eyes of a hunting cat. Tuck was getting his legs unwound from the ridiculous robe he wore, stumbling toward the moaning Smith. What was it, I wondered, that made the two of them such pals? Not homosexuality, for that would have been apparent in the close confines of the space trip out from Earth; there must be within them some sort of spiritual need that reached out and touched the other. Certainly Smith would be glad of someone to look after him and Tuck might well regard the blind man and his voice in the head as a good sort of investment, but their friendship must be something more than that. Two fumbling incompetents, perhaps, who had found in each other’s weaknesses a common bond of compassion and of understanding.

The desert was almost as bright as day and, looking at the sky, I saw it was not the moon alone that accounted for the brightness. The entire vault of sky was ablaze with stars, more stars and bigger stars and brighter than I had ever seen before. The stars had not been apparent in the quick glance we had gotten of this place before the hobbies bucked us into it, but now they were—stars that seemed so close it seemed a man could reach up his hand and pick them, like the apples off a tree.

Sara was on her feet by now, still grasping her rifle, carrying it at port arms across her body.

“I managed to keep the muzzle up,” she told me.

“Well, hurrah for you,” I said.

“That’s the first rule, always,” she told me. “Keep the muzzle up so it doesn’t clog. If I hadn’t, the barrel would be full of sand.”

George still was wailing and now his wailing took the form of words. “What happened, Tuck?” he screamed. “Where are we? What happened to my friend? He has gone away. I don’t hear him anymore.”

“For the love of Christ,” I said to Tuck, disgusted, “get him on his feet and dust him off and wipe his nose and tell him what has happened.”

“I can’t explain,” growled Tuck, “until someone tells me what is going on.”

“I can tell you that,” I said. “We got took. We’ve been had, my friend.”

“They’ll come back,” howled George. “They’ll come back for us. They won’t leave us here.”

“No, of course they won’t,” said Tuck, hauling him to his feet. “They’ll come back when the sun is up.”

“The sun ain’t up now, Tuck?”

“No,” said Tuck. “The moon. And a lot of stars.”

And I was stuck with this, I thought. Heaved into a place where I had no idea where I was and loaded down with a couple of nincompoops and a white Diana who could only think about how she had kept the muzzle up.

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