One hiver was struck on an eye. Another suffered a rock in an intake hole, causing it to lose some of its flotation. The hivers retreated farther, to get out of the surprising range of the aliens.
And the aliens advanced! They continued to pick up rocks and hurl them. The hivers had to retreat, and finally to flee. They could not match the rock-throwing ability of the aliens.
In this manner the aliens had saved Burgess, who would surely have had his eyes knocked out and his intakes blocked if he had been alone. He had tried to save the aliens, and the aliens had saved him.
When the hivers fled, the aliens ceased throwing rocks and returned to Burgess. The Nona creature put an appendage on one of his contact points. Good? she sent.
Burgess returned a picture of a placid blue sky. It was good.
They continued to the wilderness. Here the big trees spread their branches high and their roots made a lattice on the ground. This prevented any hiver from traveling through, because it was unfeasible to maintain a sufficient cushion of air to support the body. The irregular roots prevented the canopy from making even contact with the ground, and the air leaked out inefficiently. Thus the wilderness was impossible to penetrate, and no hivers went there.
The aliens, however, had no difficulty. Their legs simply stepped on the roots, or between them. They could go wherever they wished in the wilderness.
Now that Burgess had shown them to safety, he contemplated his own problem. He could not join the aliens among the trees. But neither could he return to the anchor porthole. The hivers would now be guarding it. What was he to do?
Then the aliens did the strangest thing yet. One of them touched the largest one, and separated something from it. Were they dismantling the large one?
The second largest alien took the object, which looked like a detached branch of a tree, and poked it at the ground. It sank into the dirt. Then it came up, and the dirt came up and fell among the tangled roots of the nearest tree. The alien moved the branch again, and more dirt fell.
He continued to do this odd series of motions, until considerable dirt was piled across the roots. Then he moved away, and the smallest of the aliens climbed onto the mound of dirt. The legs moved up and down, and the feet landed on the dirt, making it spread and flatten.
This continued. The larger alien piled more dirt, while the smaller tread it flat. Was this some ritual of theirs? What was its point? The spread dirt was forming a channel which passed the tree and extended into the wilderness, where the ground was less interrupted.
Then the Nona creature touched a contact point again. Go she sent, and made a crude map showing the dirt.
Burgess tried to convey to her that he could not go into the wilderness. But she was persistent. Go. Path. Path? An awesome explanation loomed. Burgess pumped up his air and moved to the dirt. He moved onto it. The dirt had filled in the crevices between the roots, and made a section of level ground there. He could travel on this!
He followed the path, and soon was on the other side of the tree, where the ground was navigable. The aliens had made it possible for him to enter the wilderness!
But Burgess realized that where he had passed, the hivers could also pass. They would soon be returning in force, to overwhelm him and the aliens.
After he passed, the alien with the branch used it to scrape away some of the dirt. Now the path was impassable in that region. Burgess realized that the aliens had understood the threat, and acted to protect him. No hivers would follow them into the wilderness.
The day was declining. Now that safety had been assured, it was time for Burgess to eat. Rather than try to explain this process to the aliens, he showed them. He fired a rock up at a fruit hanging above. The fruit dropped. Then he sucked the fruit into his intrunk and ground it up with his internal teeth so that his body could absorb it directly from the reserve chamber. The irreducible husk and seeds he simply blew out the outtrunk.
Now the aliens demonstrated how they consumed food. One used its limbs to climb up into a tree—a process that amazed Burgess—and plucked and threw down several of the ripe fruit. Another caught the fruits before they reached the ground. Then the aliens brought out a sliver of stone or bone and used it to cut the fruit apart. Each piece was then put to an orifice in the upper end of the creature, where it slowly disappeared. The process seemed, on reflection, to be roughly similar to what Burgess did, but with different implements. Now he saw that there were indeed teeth in the upper orifices, which masticated the fruit. Since the chewed fruit did not emerge, it must find its way into the body. It seemed to be a workable system, crude as it was. The largest creature ate its fruit from the ground, but also had grain which came from a pocket along its side.
By now it was getting dark. Burgess simply settled on his curtain and drew in his eye stalks. The aliens were more elaborate. They gathered sticks and brush and fashioned a structure. Then they made themselves horizontal within this structure and were quiet. This, too, seemed workable.
There was a sound deeper in the forest. A kind of clicking.
Then Burgess’ new syndrome of thinking for himself brought him alert again. He had been lulled into a sensation of security, because he regarded the aliens as an alternate kind of hive, and the hive was safe at night. But they were not really a hive, and this was the wilderness. It was not safe at all, especially by night.
He honked. It was a floater’s signal of danger or alert. He had done it automatically, because that was the way of his kind. His new mode of thinking was merely an overlay on the conditioning of his lifetime.
The aliens reacted immediately. They scrambled out of their shelter, making exclamations. They looked around with their odd recessed eyes. One held an object which emitted a beam of light, as if the sun were inside it. The light splashed around in a circle, showing the trunks and foliage of the trees. The aliens had understood the warning well enough, but there was no threat near.
The Nona creature came to touch a contact point. ?, she inquired.
Burgess tried to clarify his concern. He sent a picture of a tree of the wilderness, with a darkness looming beyond it. He made a click with the rocks in his trunk. He fashioned a bolt of fear, hoping it would be intelligible to her.
The Nona made sounds. The others responded. They seemed to have better sonic differentiation than the floaters did, perhaps because their contact points were undeveloped.
Then, so abruptly it had to be by communal agreement, they were quite silent. They remained so for some time, motionless.
The click repeated. It was followed by a rustling and scraping, some distance away but approaching. Describe, the Nona creature sent. Burgess sent a picture of a huge crustacean that dragged itself along the ground by the use of several sets of legs, with enormous pincers in front. He had seen one of these only when it was dead; it had evidently fought some other creature in the night, and been defeated, and had dragged itself out onto the plain to escape. But its injuries had been too great, and it had died there. The flying flesh-eaters had swarmed there in the morning, and a floater had investigated. It had summoned others, who had spread the news, so that soon the entire hive had the mental picture of the creature. This was a monster of the wilderness! And this was what Burgess feared was coming near, with its pincers clicking hungrily.
The aliens consulted, in their fashion. Then they went to work, in their fashion. It seemed as senseless as their prior activities with the sand and shelter, but Burgess suspected that it would turn out to be as sensible at the conclusion. The aliens might not be a true hive as he knew it, but they managed a fair emulation of hive activities.