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XI

One by one, on the heels of Mrs. Fenner's statement, the people in the cargo deck stopped talking. It got so still that the sniffling of the children and the occasional creaking of a cot as somebody moved on it were almost painfully loud.

That was it. The decision made and finished. After a full day of emotional debauch, it was as sobering as a slap in the face.

It had a strange effect on Kirby. A single surge of intense anger died away almost before it was formed, and he remembered, as he stood there on the ladder looking out over the crowded deck, how he had stood there once before when the ship was in deep space and how his own courage had run out of him under the weight of that responsibility.

Now he saw Mrs. Fenner's two small children huddled together on their cot, not understanding what all the uproar was about but scared to death by it, and Fenner himself trying to comfort them, and he said to the defiant woman with the fear in her eyes, "I guess in your place I'd have done the same thing."

It was odd that he had never felt that protective anguish about Shari. He wondered whether it was some lack in his own emotional equipment, or whether it was because Shari always seemed so surely in control of her own mind and actions that it was impossible to think of her as helpless in any sense of the word.

Fenner glanced up at Kirby and then away again. "I couldn't stop her," he said. "She waited until I went out. I didn't know it till afterward."

"Somebody was bound to do it," Kirby said.

"But she didn't have any right to take it on herself!" someone cried shrilly from the back of the crowd. "It was for all of us to decide!"

There was a chorus of assent, quite loud.

Mrs. Fenner's tight little jaw sagged down in honest astonishment. "But that's what you wanted!"

"It wasn't up to you to do it," said the same voice, and then the owner of it began to cry. "I just can't face another five years out there cooped up in a damned old ship again!"

A second chorus, even louder.

Mrs. Fenner turned, oddly enough, to Kirby, saying, "But they did want it."

Kirby refrained from making the obvious comment on the difficulty of decision. He only said, "No, they didn't really. You see, they don't want either to go or to stay."

He started to climb the ladder. Wilson caught him.

"Wait, Kirby. Do you think there is a chance?"

Kirby shrugged.

"We still have a little time," Wilson said. "Let's find out. I don't want to go back unless I have to."

Krejewski came up, and Weiss. "That's right. And if we find out the message is a lie, we can just tell the R-ship to take off again."

"Like old times," said Kirby. "No, you guys have done enough. Stick with the wife and kids."

"Weiss said, "This is our world too, Kirby. "You can't have all the glory."

"Yeah," said Hanawalt, shoving his way to the ladder. "Suppose you got hurt or something; what would happen to Shari? You can't go alone. And anyway, like Weiss says—"

Suddenly every man in the place was demanding to go.

"I'll be damned," said Kirby. "Okay. But four will be enough. Wilson, Weiss, Krejewski, Hanawalt. You yelled the loudest. Don't blame me."

He went up the ladder, moving like a high-school boy, as though he had never been tired in his life. He took hold of Shari and hugged her.

"Humans," he said. "They're crazy. Absolutely crazy. Let's get some sleep."

They started before the first dawn, when the air was dim and cool and sweet, and it did not seem possible that there could be danger anywhere in the world. They carried every piece of equipment they could think of that might be helpful and would not weigh them down, and they were a curiously grim little expedition. The send-off they got was on the grim side, too, reflecting the confusion of desires that had turned the ship's company from a cohesive whole into merely a lot of people.

Pop Barstow wished them luck, and then got Kirby off to one side for a minute. "What happens if we don't hear from you before the R-ship lands?"

"You will."

"But if we don't?"

"You'll have to make up your own minds, go or stay."

"Every man for himself," Pop said. "Yeah. Only you know how that turns out. If one family goes they all go. Kirby—"

"Yeah."

"You're a stubborn man, young Kirby. An ornery one, too. I just want to ask you, do you believe in what you're doing, or are you risking five other necks besides your own, including your wife's, because you won't give up?"

Kirby looked at the old man, and then at the ground. "I wish you hadn't asked me that, Pop," he said. "Because honest to God, I can't answer it."

He rejoined the others and they went off, following the same route along the watercourse that they had taken on the ill-starred lumbering expedition. The spot in the forest from which Marapese had disappeared seemed to be the logical starting point, if there was any logical starting point.

"Well," said Weiss to Shari, "what do we look for? Intelligent crystals, globes of force, ten-foot lobster men, invisible monsters?" He was trying to be funny, but it did not come off. Shari shook her head.

"I know no more than you." She walked along for a time, very thoughtful, looking away at the forest. "It is strange that I can never get a conscious thought from this source—I mean, an ordinary thought. It must keep its mind well guarded. Unless—"

"Unless," said Weiss, "its mental processes are so alien that your mind can't recognize them at all; unless there's a specific projection like the one of the R-ship's brain that you can fit into your frame of reference."

"You sound like a psychologist," Kirby said.

"A cyberneticist," Weiss said stiffly, "is much the same thing. Only we do it with an electron here and a transistor there. A machine can think faster and remember more things than a man, and it can perform more functions simultaneously. It is unfailingly accurate, granting that its information is accurate, of course. But even a machine has to have a frame of reference, or the information fed to it is meaningless."

"Then you mean," said Kirby, "that It could be thinking away there somewhere and Shari wouldn't be able to get it at all?"

"Even psi powers have their limitations, Kirby. They're not supernatural."

Looking at the forest, Kirby grunted, "These are."

"No," said Weiss. "Not in that sense. They may be completely alien and unknown to us, but they still are bound by natural law and operating within their own logical framework."

"Sure," said Kirby. "Theoretically. But practically speaking, is that going to help us much?"

"Probably," Weiss admitted, "not much."

They tramped along, sometimes silent, sometimes speculating or questioning Shari over and over until she was weary of repeating. The day was perfect of its kind, a segment of full summer with two suns to blaze in the sky and a wind running hot and dry across a thousand miles of prairie to burn their faces a deeper brown. A fine day, a fine country. But emotionally they walked through it in a vacuum, holding everything in abeyance. It was not the time yet for hope, for fear, for anything. It was the time for walking, and they walked.

In the afternoon a storm blew up from the southwest. They sweated it out crouched under their tarps, and after it was over they wallowed on through the mud to make a camp where they had stopped before, clear of the forest. Damp and tired, they huddled around a hopeless little fire and chewed a cold supper. And now for the first time they had a definite feeling about the expedition.

"What's the use? How can you find something when you don't even know what you're looking for or where it is?"

Krejewski said it, and it was shocking to Kirby that it should be so, because Krejewski had always been solid, stolid, cheerful, and matter-of-fact about everything. And because he felt exactly the same way, Kirby said with unnecessary viciousness, "You can go back in the morning, if you want to. You know where the ship is."

A quarrel started then, and they all got into it, snapping wearily at each other until Shari broke it up. Then, as they rolled up in their blankets, Weiss said,

"If I could only figure out why it wanted to contact the R-ship. That's the key to the business right there. Why had it perceived and remembered, down to the last atom, the cybernetic control-center of the R-ship?"

Hanawalt answered, "It seems to be interested in mechanisms. Remember the chainsaws? I'll bet it has a picture of them, too. Incidentally, they worked all right again back at the ship."

"Then it—" Weiss hesitated, then blurted out, "It must have damped the atomic batteries."

"Mentally?"

"How else?"

"God," said Hanawalt. "Well, anyway, it didn't kill Marapese." He stressed the word "kill" heavily and hopefully.

"Perhaps," said Kirby, "It just wanted to look. It's never seen humans before."

Wilson said uneasily, "It didn't seem to like him very well, the way it shot him back. Maybe the next time—"

"It is possible," said Shari, drowning him out, "that we have one advantage. If Its mind is closed to me, perhaps It can't understand our thoughts, either."

"Frame of reference," Weiss pointed out triumphantly. "That's what I said."

Presently they slept, and Kirby dreamed again about the mountain-without-a-face. Only it was different this time, more crudely anthropoid, less symbolic. This time it had hands. It picked up the tiny human figures one by one and examined them and threw them away. It picked up Kirby and lifted him into the air, screaming with terror of the height and the wind that blew there, and it looked into him out of the great muffled darkness of its face until his flesh began to separate from itself most unpleasantly. Then it tossed him away and he fell and fell and fell until Shari shook him awake to stop his yelling, and it was dawn and time to eat and go on again, into the forest.

"Maybe we ought to hold off," Wilson said, "until we think up some kind of a plan. I mean, what are we going to do when we get there?"

"If I knew," Kirby said, "the chances are I wouldn't go in there at all. And if you can think of a plan, fine. But I don't think we can afford to wait for it."

He looked upward, where somewhere beyond the sky the RSS-2 rushed swift and unswerving toward them.

They loaded themselves and started on, in bright new sunshine that steamed the moisture out of the ground and the cold out of their bones. They would have felt good about it, except that every step brought them closer to the forest, and the trees looked higher and darker and less welcoming by the minute.

Kirby halted at the last possible rim, where the sunlight stopped and the shadows took over. He looked at Shari.

She shook her head. "Nothing."

With the feeling of a man who jumps off a very high cliff into unknown waters, Kirby said, "Let's go."

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Framed