When I was nine, my Daddy gave me a painted wooden doll that my
great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it,
nestled one in another, are eleven more dolls, each one smaller than
the last. I like to watch people when they open it for the first time.
My face must have been like that as I rode along the road.
The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave
way to great farms and fields. In the fields, working, were some of
the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before
hadn't seemed smart enough to count to one, let alone do any work.
But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or
something.
I passed two crossroads and started to meet more people, but nobody
questioned me. I met people on horseback, and twice I met trucks moving
silently past. And I overtook a wagon driven by the oldest man I've
seen in my life. He waved to me, and I waved back.
Near the end of the afternoon I came to the town, and there I received
a jolt that sickened me.
By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were
cold and sweaty and my head was spinning, and I wanted to kick Ninc to
a gallop.
I rode slowly in, looking all around, missing nothing. The town was all
stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were
no machines more complicated than the trucks I'd seen earlier. At the
edge of town, I passed a newspaper office with a headline pasted in the
window--INVASION! I remember that. I wondered about it.
But I looked most closely at the people. In all that town, I didn't
see one girl over ten years old and no grown-up women at all. There
were little kids, there were boys and there were men, but no girls. All
the boys and men wore pants, and so did I, which must have been why
Horst and his buddies assumed I was a boy. It wasn't flattering; but
I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the
clocks tick on this planet.
But that wasn't what bothered me. It was the kids. My God! They
swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house--a father and _four_
children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me
then--these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I
closed my eyes until it passed.
* * * * *
The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and
criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The
evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people
wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have _been_ eight billion people.
But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in
their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth
had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came.
I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough
foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some
others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I
wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me.
What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up
blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The
older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the
Council should know.
For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt _really_
frightened. There was too much going on that I didn't understand. I
felt a blind urge to get away, and when I reached the edge of town, I
whomped Ninc a good one and gave him his head.
I let him run for almost a mile before I pulled him down to a walk
again. I couldn't help wishing for Jimmy D. Whatever else he is, he's
smart and brains I needed.
How do you find out what's going on? Eavesdrop? That's a lousy method.
For one thing, people can't be depended on to talk about the things you
want to hear. For another, you're likely to get caught. Ask somebody?
Who? Make the mistake of bracing a fellow like Horst and you might wind
up with a sore head and an empty pocket. The best thing I could think
of was to find a library, but that might be a job.
I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the
late afternoon, when the sun was starting to sink and a cool wind was
starting to ripple the tree leaves, I saw the scoutship high in the
sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what
had gone wrong.
I reached down into my saddlebag and brought out my contact signal.
The scoutship swung up in the sky in a familiar movement calculated to
drop the stomach out of everybody aboard. George Fuhonin's style. I
triggered the signal, my heart turning flips all the while. I didn't
know why he was back, but I wasn't really sorry.
The ship swung around until it was coming back on a path almost over my
head, going in the same direction. Then it went into a slip and started
bucking so hard that I knew this wasn't hot piloting at all, just plain
idiot stutter-fingered stupidity at the controls. As it skidded by me
overhead, I got a good look at it and knew that it wasn't one of ours.
Not too different, but not ours.
One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and
we wouldn't tell these Mud-eaters how, a scoutship is something that
takes an advanced technology to build.
* * * * *
I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to
a campsite with two wagons pulled in for the night, and I couldn't
help but pull in myself. The campsite was large and had two permanent
buildings on it. One was a well enclosure and the other was little more
than a high-walled pen. It didn't even have a roof.
I set up camp and ate my dinner. In the wagon closest to me were a man,
his wife and their three children. The kids were running around and
playing, and one of them ran close to the high-walled pen. His father
came and pulled him away.
The kids weren't to blame for their parents, but when one of them said
hello to me, I didn't even answer. I know how lousy I would feel if I
had two or three brothers and sisters, but it didn't strike me until
that moment that it wouldn't even seem out of the ordinary to these
kids. Isn't that horrible?
About the time I finished eating, and before it grew dark, the old man
I had seen earlier in the day drove his wagon in. He fascinated me. He
had white hair, something I had read about in stories but had never
seen before.
When nightfall came, they started a large fire. Everybody gathered
around. There was singing for awhile, and then the father of the
children tried to pack them off to bed. But they weren't ready to go,
so the old man started telling them a story. In the old man's odd
accent, and sitting there in the campfire light surrounded by darkness,
it seemed just right.
It was about an old witch named Baba Yaga who lived in the forest in
a house that stood on chicken legs. She was the nasty stepmother of a
nice little girl, and to get rid of the kid, she sent her on a phony
errand into the deep dark woods at nightfall. I could appreciate the
poor girl's position. All the little girl had to help her were the
handkerchief, the comb and the pearl that she had inherited from her
dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to
defeat nasty old Baba Yaga and bring the girl safely home.