Hulann did not look back. He concentrated on the street ahead. He had succeeded in cutting off a warning. Even if the guard were soon found, they would have no way of knowing who had hurt him. Hurt? No, lulled. Hulann had killed the guard.
There was a spreading numbness in his body as the realization began to reach the depths of him. He, who had never killed, had never carried a weapon in anger against another intelligent being He had murdered.
He drove with a hypnotic concentration now, unable to stop the car, unable to think of anything to do but run. Run not only from the naoli who would be searching for him as soon as Fiala or Banalog was found, but running also from the dead guard. And from his past. Faster, Hulann, faster. Booming through the darkness in the fluttering insect machine.
In the occasional flushes of light as they passed other naoli buildings along other parts of the city, Leo could see the traces of tears on Hulann's thick, gray alien hide.
The traumatist Banalog sat bound in his office chair. He had turned it so he could look out the window at the snow.
If the universe is truly as balanced as all our studies have indicated, he mused, then how fundamental a part of the equilibrium is a race? An intelligent race? One of the eleven races, for instance. The naoli? The humans? Would the destruction, the total extinction of a major galactic race have an influence on the overall balance? Would it be a large or small influence? Small. Yes. We think too highly of ourselves. The loss of a race will have but a small effect. Yet will that small effect snowball? Will more and more things change because mankind no longer exists? And will this snowball grow so large that, a hundred thousand years from now-a hundred thousand centuries, perhaps-it will roll over the naoli as well? Have we, in the last analysis, damned ourselves? Have we only managed to borrow a little time against the end of everything?
He would have thought on it more, but for the growing delusions of the sweet-drug. Outside the window, the snow was now crimson and yellow.
It formed faces.
Hulann
A Human boy
It was pretty. He watched, letting the unreality engulf him
The Hunter sleeps. His is the death sleep of the naoli. He does not yet know that it will soon be time to stalk.
This time, his prey will be a lizard man, not a human. This will be unique for him. He will enjoy it. He has within him the seeds of destruction. He has longed to walk among his own kind with his sword of light and his permission to pass judgment. He will soon have that opportunity.
Now, he sleeps
Leo was quiet for a long while, watching the wipers thrust the thickening snow to the ends of the windscreen. At last, he turned to Hulann and said, "Where are we fleeing to?"
"I told you. Just away from the city."
"We will have to stay away ten years. We should have a destination."
"There is no destination."
Leo considered a moment. "The Haven."
Hulann looked sideways, almost lost control of the craft. He pulled it back onto the road, then talked without turning his attention away from driving. "It is not even certain that such a place exists. It may be a myth. Even if there is a sanctuary for the last humans which we have not reached, its whereabouts is a well-held secret."
"There is a Haven," Leo assured him. "I heard it talked about in the days of the last stand. I knew of certain leaders and irreplaceable specialists who were ferreted out of the city to be taken to the Haven."
"You know where it is?"
"Not exactly."
"What does that mean?"
Leo scrunched down in the corner between the seat and the door, turned sideways. He played with the hole in the seat which let the naoli tail through to the rear floor. "Well, I know that it's on the coast. The West Coast. Along the Pacific Ocean."
"That doesn't pinpoint it."
"But it's a start" he insisted.
"How would we ever search so much coast once we got there? And avoid the naoli forces all the way across the country."
Leo did not seem perturbed by what seemed insurmountable obstacles. "We'll find a way. You're a naoli. You can bluff your way through if you have to."
"Not likely."
"Otherwise," the boy said, "we hang around here until they catch us. And they will, you know."
Hulann hesitated. "I know."
"Well, then?"
"I couldn't enter the Haven with you. What would I do?" The worst thing now was to be utterly alone. He" could not have put it in words, but it was the thing he most dreaded. To be an outcast, a murderer, and without friends on an alien world of which he could never hope to be a part of.
"I'll talk to them. You're different, Hulann. I'll make them see."
"Well-" he said.
"Please, Hulann. I want to be with my people again."
Hulann could understand that desire. "All right," he said.
They followed the markers over the beltway, eventually heading west across the great expanse of the North American continent. They did not see even one other car in the hours left of the night. In the silence and gently thrumming music of the blades beneath them, Leo fell asleep, once more.
Chapter Four
As Hulann drove, he allowed his mind to wander, for a deluge of memories seemed the only present manner of assauging his depression. Therefore, he raised up a monolith of the past and walled off the recent events, then studied the brickwork of his partition.
He had met his first human while aboard the naoli ship Tagasa which had been of the private fleet of the central committee. He had been a guest of the government, a writer of creative history then. The Tagasa had been en-route from the home worlds to a series of outlying colony planets in the Nucio System. The rich background of the Nucio colonies had been obvious material for a series of tapebook adventures, and Hulann had been quick to take the chance to investigate the worlds first-hand.
The Tagasa had been in port on the world called Dala, a place of vegetation and no animals. He had returned to his cabin after a day of exploration of the surrounding jungle. He had seen the snake vines which moved almost as fast as a man could walk, slipping oily over each other and the trees on which they grew, pollinating the flowers that grew on the bark of some of the larger pines. He had seen the plants which ate other plants (and which impolitely spat out his finger when, at the urging of his guide, he had stuffed it into the pulpy orifice). He saw the breathing plants with their baggy, lunglike flowers, busy spewing out carbon dioxide to continue the cycle that had started here eons earlier.
"An incredibly old culture," his guide had said. "To have evolved plant life this far."
"No animals at all?" he asked.
"None. They've found a few insects, little mites, that live between the outer and second layer of bark on the red-top trees."
"Ah "
"But there's a question about those two. Seems the boys working on them in the labs have found traces of chlorophyll in them."
"You mean-"
"Plants too. Looking quite like insects. Mobile. Able to suck up nutriment from other plants and move about like animals."
The guide-an elderly naoli with a jewelry affectation: he wore a raw iris stone around his neck on a wood bead necklace-had shown him more. The Quick Ferns, for instance. Cute little, frilly, green things, lush and vibrant, swaying briskly under the slightest breath. They lined the forest floor, the shortest growth, a carpet beneath all else. As he watched, they grew, pushed up new plants, spread their feathery leaves-then grew brown, blackened, collapsed, gave off a puff of spores, and were gone. In a place where there was no animal feces, no animal decay, the vegetation had come to rely on its own death to give it life. For so much life-there was a wild, thick sprawl of growing things unlike anything he had ever seen before-a great deal of fertilizer was required. It was natural, then, that the Quick Ferns should have a total life span, from spore germination to death of the plant and ejection of the next spore cycle of fourteen minutes. At the end of each summer on Dala, there was a five foot layer of thick, black organic material lying on, the forest floor. By the following spring, it was decomposed, gone, and the Quick Ferns began their job again.