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good place to stay, thought Rand. A place to sit and rest awhile. He tried to blank his mind, to wipe out the memory
and the photos, to pretend that nothing at all had happened, that there was nothing he must think about.
But there was, he found, something that he must think about. Not about the photos, but something that Sterling had
said just the day before. 'I got to wondering.' he had said, 'if a man should walk far enough, could he leave it all behind.'
How desperate must a man get, Rand wondered, before he would be driven to asking such a question. Perhaps not
desperate at all - just worried and alone and tired and not being able to see the end of it. Either that, or afraid of what
lay up ahead. Like knowing, perhaps, that in a few years time (and not too many years, for in that photo of the people
the clerk had seen a man he knew) a warhead would hit a little Iowa town and wipe it out. Not that there was any
reason for it being hit; it was no Los Angeles, no New York, no Washington, no busy port, no center of transportation
or communication, held no great industrial complex, was no seat of government. Simply hit because it had been there,
hit by blunder, by malfunction, or by miscalculation. Although it probably didn't matter greatly, for by the time it had
been hit, the nation and perhaps the world might have been gone. A few years, Rand told himself, and it would come
to that. After all the labor, all the hopes and dreams, the world would come to just that.
It was the sort of thing that a man might want to walk away from, hoping that in time be might forget it ever had been
there. But to walk away, he thought, rather idly, one would have to find a starting point. You could not walk away from
everything by just starting anywhere.
It was an idle thought, sparked by the memory of his talk with Sterling; and he sat there, idly, on the stream bank;
and because it had a sense of attractive wonder, he held it in his mind, not letting go at once as one did with idle
thoughts. And as he sat there, still holding it in mind, another thought, another time and place crept in to keep it
company; and suddenly he knew, with no doubt at all, without really thinking, without searching for an answer, that he
knew the place where he could start.
He stiffened and sat rigid, momentarily frightened, feeling like a fool trapped by his own unconscious fantasy. For
that, said common sense, was all that it could be. The bitter wondering of a beaten man as he tramped the endless road
looking for a job, the shock of what the photos showed, some strange, mesmeric quality of this shaded pool that
seemed a place apart from a rock-hard world - all of these put together had produced the fantasy.
Rand hauled himself erect and turned back toward the car, but as he did he could see within his mind this special
starting place. He had been a boy - how old? he wondered, maybe nine or ten - and he had found the little valley (not
quite a glen, yet not quite a valley, either) running below his uncle's farm down toward the river. He had never been
there before and he had never gone again; on his uncle's farm there had been too many chores, too many things to do
to allow the time to go anywhere at all. He tried to recall the circumstances of his being there and found that he could
not. All that he could remember was a single magic moment, as if he had been looking at a single frame of a movie film -
a single frame impressed upon his memory because of what? Because of some peculiar angle at which the light had
struck the landscape? Because for an instant he had seen with different eyes than he'd ever used before or since?
Because for the fractional part of a second he had sensed a simple truth behind the facade of the ordinary world? No
matter what, he knew, he had seen magic in that moment.
He went back to the car and sat behind the wheel, staring at the bridge and sliding water and the field beyond, but
seeing, instead of them, the map inside his head. When he went back to the highway, he'd turn left instead of right,
back toward the river and the town, and before he reached them he would turn north on another road and the valley of
the magic moment would be only a little more than a hundred miles away. He sat and saw the map and purpose [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]