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ourselves and that gateway to the valley.
I had forgotten the blueness of the high plateau with its mossy hummocks, its thickets of sweet-
smelling shrubs, the icy rills and, towering in every direction, the trees that reached miles into the
sky. If one looked for a reason why this planet should be closed, or intended to be closed, I felt that
one must look toward those towering trees. For they were clearly the handiwork of another
intelligence. Trees, seeding naturally, do not grow in a grid arrangement, each one exactly so far
from its nearest neighbor. One tended to become accustomed to them after a time, but this was
only, I was well aware, because the mind, tired of fruitless speculation, turned them off, rejecting
them as a way of preserving itself against the devastating question mark of wonder written by the
trees.
That night, beside the campfire, we tried to put into perspective the situation which confronted us.
There seemed no hope we could get into the spaceship which stood on the field in the center of the
city. At least two dozen other ships also stood upon the field. In all the years they'd stood there
others must have tried to crack them, but there was no evidence they had.
And what had happened to those other people, those other creatures, that had ridden in the ships?
We knew, of course, what had happened to the humanoids whose skeletons we'd found in the gully.
We could speculate that the centaurs might be retrogressed out-planet creatures which, centuries
ago had landed on the field. The planet was large, with more land surface than the Earth, and there
was plenty of space in which other stranded travelers might have found a living niche and settled
down. Some of them might be living in the city, although that seemed doubtful because of the
killing vibrations which swept the city whenever a ship should land. And there was, as well, the
consideration that many expeditions might have consisted only of male members of a species,
which would mean there'd be no continuation. Marooned, they'd simply die and that would be the
end of it.
"There's one more possibility," said Sara. "Some of them may be back there in the valley. We know
that Knight made it. Some of the others, perhaps many of the others, might have made it, too."
I nodded, agreeing with her. It was the final trap. If a visitor did not perish in reaching it, then there
was the valley. Once in it, no one would get out. It was the perfect trap in that no one would ever
want to leave it. Although there could be no seeking what Lawrence Arlen Knight had sought-and
what we had sought. They might have come for reasons quite unknown to us.
"You are sure," asked Sara, "that you really saw what you say you saw?"
"I don't know what I can do," I told her, "to make you believe me. Do you think I threw it all away?
To spite you, maybe? Don't you think I might have been a little happy, too? Maybe, being a
suspicious sort of clown, not as happy as you were, but after all those miles. . ."
"Yes, of course," she said. "You had no reason to. But why you alone? Why not me? I did not see
these things."
"Hoot explained all that," I told her. "He could alert only one of us. And he alerted me. . ."
"A part of me is Mike," said Hoot. "We owe one another life. A bond there is between us. His mind
is always with me. We be almost one."
"One," said Roscoe solemnly, "done, fun, gun..."
"Cease your clack," said Paint. "No sense at all you make."
"Fake," said Roscoe.
"The almost human one," said Hoot, "tries, to talk with us.
"His brain is addled," I said. "That's what is wrong with him. The centaurs. . ."
"No," said Hoot. "He attempts communication."
I hunched around and stared up at Roscoe. He stood straight and rigid, the flare of firelight on his
metal hide. And I remembered how, back there in the badlands, when we had asked a question, he
had signaled that we should travel north. Did he, in fact, still understand? Was there something he
could tell us if he could put it into words?
I said to Hoot, "Can you dig it out of him?"
"It beyond my power," said Hoot.
"Don't you understand," Sara said to me, "that there is no use trying. We're not going to get back to
Earth; or anywhere. We are staying on this planet."
"There is one thing we could try," I said.
"I know," she said. "I thought of it, too... The other worlds. The worlds like the sand dune world.
There must be hundreds of them."
"Out of all those hundreds, there might be. . ."
She shook her head. "You underestimate the people who built the city and set out the trees. They
knew what they were doing. Every one of those worlds would be as isolated as this world. Those
worlds were chosen for a purpose. . ."
"Have you ever thought," I argued, "that one of them might be the home planet of the folks who
built the city?"
"No, I never have," she said. "But what difference would it make? They'd squash you like a bug."
"Then what do we do?" I asked.
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