XXVI

 

 

After that there seemed to be very little left to say. The car hummed onward into the night. Clouds were closing in ahead of them; it felt as though the familiar prospect of the stars were being shut away. Sheklov, conscious of having long ago passed the point of no return, was resigned to letting happen what would.

And Danty, having heard the story in full, sank back in his seat with a ferocious scowl of concentration and said nothing for so long that eventually Sheklov dozed.

He was awoken at last by Magda’s voice.

“I’m worn out!” she said loudly. “It’s nearly dawn.”

“Then I guess I’d better take the wheel again,” Sheklov said. “Danty can’t drive one-handed, and”—with a glance behind him, blinking to clear sleep from his eyes—”Lora’s still asleep, isn’t she?”

“Looks like it,” Danty said. “I’d take my turn if I could—but this arm’s stiffening up pretty bad. Mag’, can we like pull in for breakfast? I’d like to get to a washroom and change the dressing on this cut.” He checked, seeming to be struck by an idea. “Say! Make the left branch at the next interchange, will you? I’m getting it clearer in my head now. We have to shoot for the border in North Dakota some place. I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Service zone four miles,” Magda read from a sign. “That must be after the next interchange, then. Will do. … By the way, how are you feeling?”

“As though that crack on the head loosened my brains,” Danty said with a shrug. “But I’ll live.”

Properly roused from sleep now, Sheklov looked out at the morning as it spread across the vast net of the superway. A web spun by an inconceivable spider, a mesh of concrete offering the illusion of freedom to go, yet turning you back whenever you approached the limits you must not exceed …

Yes. A metaphor of the country. Perhaps of the human condition. Horrible!

All his doubts stormed back into his mind. For a brief instant he was able to imagine that he had dreamed his admissions of last night; then Danty said, “Vassily, how are you?” And he knew they had been real.

“As well as can be expected,” Sheklov said with ghoulish humour.

“That goes for all of us.” He rubbed his eyes. “Mag’, I’ve only been dozing, not completely asleep. I’ve been working it out. North Dakota, like I said. If we go over as a party, we’re likely to be recognised. I don’t know why or how, I only feel it. I’m still trying to sort that out. But something else keeps getting in the way. Vassily, you did say, didn’t you, that the aliens showed pictures of Earth?”

“Nine still pictures,” Sheklov said.

“Could you—well—maybe draw them for me?”

“I guess so,” Sheklov answered after a moment for thought. “I looked at the photographs often enough. Might not get the details right, but in principle they’d be correct.”

“Fine,” Danty said, and gave his crooked smile. “Over breakfast I’ll take you up on it. Mag’, isn’t that the service zone up ahead?”

 

The restaurant of the service zone was nearly empty. Only a couple of incurious long-distance truck-drivers glanced at them as they entered. Having collected coffee and food from the counter, they sat down around a table isolated in the centre of the room and Danty produced a stack of paper serviettes.

“Okay, Vassily, shoot,” he said, and sat back, sipping his coffee.

“What are you doing?” Lora said dispiritedly. She had hardly seemed to be awake when she stumbled from the car; now she sat with eyes red, hair tangled, displaying every sign of exhaustion, as though she had been the one who had to drive through the night. Magda, by contrast, seemed hardly affected. Pale, perhaps, but calm-faced and moving without obvious signs of fatigue.

“Drawing,” Sheklov said, unclipping a ballpen from his pocket. He added, reaching for the first of the pile of white serviettes, “And I’m not very good at it. But I’ll do what I can.”

He completed each drawing with quick, sure strokes; he had studied these enigmatic pictures—or at least the photos of them brought back from Pluto’s orbit, smeared a little with free-space cosmic radiation, but with pretty good detail surviving—and they were branded on his memory. Of course, pen-sketches like these were hard to make clear. He added a caption to each, summarising what the experts had deduced about them.

Finally, when the others had finished their food, he gestured for a space to be cleared and laid them out in sequence in front of Danty.

“This first one is obviously a view of our galaxy,” he said. “One can see the spiral arms. Then there’s a clear view of the alien ship, which is a plain ovoid, but quite unlike anything of ours, so it’s unmistakable. Then there’s a view of the sun from a long way out in space—from about where the alien ship is orbiting, in fact. You can be certain of that because the constellations in the background match. I don’t know astronomy well enough to do more than dot them in. Then there’s a view of Earth, here; the continents are perfectly recognisable, though they’re partly masked by cloud, as though the aliens are working from a particular picture.

“After that, there’s a human-built rocket, possibly a satellite-launcher, possibly one of our own ships that made the Pluto trip first. That’s interesting; apparently the engineers have spotted some detail-refinements in the design, and they seem promising. It’s rather as though you were to try to draw a Model T from memory and absentmindedly make it look like a much more recent make of car.

“Then there’s this. An explosion. Notice it’s centred on the United States. And in the original—I’m afraid I haven’t drawn this very well—in the actual picture you can see it’s nuclear. The likeliest explanation, the one that frightens us so much, and drove my superiors to send me here, is that it’s a strike by the aliens.”

Magda was staring, fascinated, although Lora was leaning back in her chair with her eyes half-closed and Danty was bestowing only casual glances on each successive picture. Suddenly irritated by his lack of interest, Sheklov let his tone grow sharper.

“Next is this one, a plain circle. That puzzled us terribly. But the logical conclusion is that it’s the Earth again, wiped out by clouds of dust and smoke. Because here …” He reached for the last two drawings.

“This is fire. No mistake about it. Something burning violently. And last of all there’s—this.”

He laid down the caveman picture, the figure draped in skins waving a stone axe. And sat back.

There was a dead silence.

 

Eventually Danty picked up the drawings, like Magda gathering her tarot cards, and reversed them. He laid them out again on the table in the opposite order, turning each around as he set it down so as to be the correct way up from Sheklov’s viewpoint the other side of the table.

“No,” he said. “This way.”

For a long moment Sheklov stared at them. Then he raised his eyes to Danty’s calm, amused face.

“Are you—sure?” he said huskily.

“As sure as I am that we’re going to find a way over the border, dodge the guards, dodge the mines, get to safety. And that’s close to 100 per cent. I only got one life, Vassily, and I’m fond of it in spite of everything.”

Sheklov sat frozen. In his mind he could hear words, as clear as though someone were uttering them aloud:

The last shall be first, and the first …

“Right,” Danty said with a chuckle. “Let’s move on.”