The Hard Scientist came towards base at a run, laboring through the high, fleshy stalks of the graminiformes. "Something -- in the forest -- " His eyes bulged, he panted, his mustache and fingers trembled. "Something big. Moving behind me. I was putting in a benchmark, bending down. It came at me. As if it was swinging down out of the trees.
Behind me." He stared at the others with the opaque eyes of terror or exhaustion.
"Sit down, Porlock. Take it easy. Now wait, go through this again. You sou' something -- "
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow A-105
"Not clearly. Just the movement Purposive. A -- an -- I don't know what it could have been. Something self-moving In the trees, the arboriformes, whatever you call 'em. At the edge of the woods."
Harfex looked grim. "There is nothing here that could attack you, Porlock There are not even microzoa. There could not be a large animal."
"Could you possible have seen an epiphyte drop suddenly, a vine come loose behind you?"
"No," Porlock said. "It was coming down at me, through the branches. When I turned it took off again, away and upward. It made a noise, a sort of crashing If it wasn't an animal, God knows what it could have been! It was big -- as big as a man, at least Maybe a reddish color. I couldn't see, I'm not sure."
"It was Osden," said Jenny Chong "doing a Tarzan act" She giggled nervously, and Tomiko repressed a wild feckless laugh. But Harfex was not smiling
"One gets uneasy under the arboriformes," he said in his polite, repressed voice. "IVe noticed that Indeed that may be why I've put off working in the forests. There's a hypnotic quality in the colors and spacing of the stems and branches, especially the helically-arranged ones; and the spore-throwers grow so regularly spaced that it seems unnatural. I find it quite disagreeable, subjectively speaking I wonder if a stronger effect of that sort mightn't have produced a hallucination...?"
Porlock shook his head. He wet his lips. "It was there," he said. "Something Moving with purpose. Trying to attack me from behind."
When Osden called in, punctual as always, at 24 o'clock that night, Harfex told him Porlock's report "Have you come on anything at all, Mr. Osden, that could substantiate Mr. Porlock's impression of a motile, sentient life-form, in the forest?"
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Ssss, the radio said sardonically. "No. Bullshit," said Osden's unpleasant voice.
"You've been actually inside the forest longer than any of us," Harfex said with unmitigable politeness. "Do you agree with my impression that the forest ambiance has a rather troubling and possibly hallucinogenic effect on the perceptions?"
Ssss. "I'll agree that Porlock's perceptions are easily troubled. Keep him in his lab, he'll do less harm. Anything else?"
"Not at present," Harfex said, and Osden cut off.
Nobody could credit Porlock's story, and nobody could discredit it He was positive that something something big had tried to attack him by surprise. It was hard to deny this, for they were on an alien world, and everyone who had entered the forest had felt a certain chill and foreboding under the "trees." ("Call them trees, certainly," Harfex had said. "They really are the same thing only, of course, altogether different") They agreed that they had felt uneasy, or had had the sense that something was watching them from behind.
"We've got to clear this up," Porlock said, and he asked to be sent as a temporary Biologist's Aide, like Osden, into the forest to explore and observe. Olleroo and Jenny Chong volunteered if they could go as a pair. Harfex sent them all off into the forest near which they were encamped, a vast tract covering four-fifths of Continent D. He forbade side-arms. They were not to go outside a fifty-mile half-circle, which included Osden's current site. They all reported in twice daily, for three days. Porlock reported a glimpse of what seemed to be a large semi-erect shape moving through the trees across the river; Olleroo was sure she had heard something moving near the tent, the second night
"There are no animals on this planet," Harfex said,
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow a-107
Then Osden missed his morning call.
Tomiko waited less than an hour, then flew with Harfex to the area where Osden had reported himself the night before. But as the helijet hovered over the sea of purplish leaves, illimitable, impenetrable, she felt a panic despair. "How can we find him in this?"
"He reported landing on the riverbank. Find the aircar; he'll be camped near it, and he can't have gone far from his camp. Species-counting is slow work. There's the river."
"There's his car," Tomiko said, catching the bright foreign glint among the vegetable colors and shadows. "Here goes, then."
She put the ship in hover and pitched out the ladder. She and Harfex descended. The sea of life closed over their heads.
As her feet touched the forest floor, she unsnapped the flap of her holster; then glancing at Harfex, who was unarmed, she left the gun untouched. But her hand kept coming back to it. There was no sound at all, as soon as they were a few meters away from the slow, brown river, and the light was dim. Great boles stood well apart, almost regularly, almost alike; they were soft-skinned, some appearing smooth and others spongy, grey or greenish-brown or brown, twined with cable-like creepers and festooned with epiphytes, extending rigid, entangled armfuls of big saucer-shaped, dark leaves that formed a roof-layer twenty to thirty meters thick. The ground underfoot was springy as a mattress, every inch of it knotted with roots and peppered with small, fleshy-leafed growths.
"Here's his tent," Tomiko said, cowed at the sound of her voice in that huge community of the voiceless. In the tent was Osden's sleeping bag, a couple of books, a box of rations. We should be calling shouting for him, she thought, but did not even suggest it; nor did Harfex They circled out from the tent, careful to keep each other in
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sight through the thick-standing presences, the crowding gloom. She stumbled over Osden's body, not thirty meters from the tent, led to it by the whitish gleam of a dropped notebook. He lay face down between two huge-rooted trees. His head and hands were covered with blood, some dried, some still oozing red.
Harfex appeared beside her, his pale Hainish complexion quite green in the dusk. "Dead?"
"No. He's been struck. Beaten. From behind." Tomiko's fingers felt over the bloody skull and temples and nape. "A weapon or a tool... I don't find a fracture."
As she turned Osden's body over so they could lift him, his eyes opened. She was holding him, bending close to his face. His pale lips writhed. A deathly fear came into her. She screamed aloud two or three times and tried to run away, shambling and stumbling into the terrible dusk. Harfex caught her, and at his touch and the sound of his voice, her panic decreased. "What is it? What is it?" he was saying
"I don't know," she sobbed. Her heartbeat still shook her, and she could not see clearly. "The fear -- the... I panicked. When I saw his eyes."
"We're both nervous. I don't understand this -- "
"I'm all right now, come on, we've got to get him under care."
Both working with senseless haste, they lugged Osden to the riverside and hauled him up on a rope under his armpits; he dangled like a sack, twisting a little, over the glutinous dark sea of leaves. They pulled him into the helijet and took off. Within a minute they were over open prairie. Tomiko locked onto the homing beam. She drew a deep breath, and her eyes met Harfex's. "I was so terrified I almost fainted. I have never done that"