Father Valentine and half a dozen strange crewmen sprawled in a thicket, exhausted and satiated.
In the hospital, fevered patients moaned untended, or ran wildly into the clearing and into the forest, in search of they knew not what. A man with a broken leg ran a mile through the trees before his leg gave way beneath him and he lay laughing in the moonlight while a tigerlike beast licked his face and fawned on him.
Judith Lovat lay quietly in her quarters, swinging the great blue jewel on the chain around her throat; she had kept it, all this time, concealed beneath her clothing. Now she drew it out, as if the strange starlike patterns within it exerted some hypnotic influence on her. Memories swirled in her mind, of the strange smiling madness that had been on her before. After a time, following some invisible call, she rose, dressed warmly, calmly appropriating her room-mate's warmest clothing (her room-mate, a girl named Eloise, who had been a communications officer on shipboard, was sitting under a longleafed tree, listening to the strange sounds of the wind in its leaves and singing wordlessly). Judy went calmly through the clearing, and struck into the forest. She was not sure where she was going, but she knew she would be guided when the time came, so she followed the upward trail, never deviating, listening to the music in the wind.
Phrases heard on another planet echoed dimly in her mind, by woman wailing for her demon lover…
No, not a demon, she thought, but too bright, too strange and beautiful to be human… she heard herself sob as she walked, remembering the music, the shimmering winds and flowers, and the strange, glowing eyes of the half-remembered being, the clutch of fear that had quickly turned to enchantment and then to a happiness, a sense of closeness more intense than anything she had ever known.
Had it been something like this, then, those old Earth-legends of a wanderer lured away by the fairy-folk, the poet who had cried out in his enchantment:
I met a Lady in the wood,
A fairy's child
Her hair was long, her foot was light
And her eyes were wild…
Was it like that? Or was it--And the Son of God looked on the daughters of men, and beheld they were fair…
Judy was enough of a disciplined scientist to be aware that in the curious actions of this time there was something of madness. She was certain that some of her memories were colored and changed by the strange state of consciousness she had been in then. Yet experience and reality testing counted for something, too. If there was a touch of madness in it, behind the madness lay something real, and it was as real as the tangible touch on her mind now, that said, "Come. You will be led, and you will not be harmed."
She heard the curious rustle in the leaves over her head, and stopped, looking up, her breath catching in anticipation. So deep was her hope and longing to see the strange unforgotten face that she could have wept when it was only one of the little ones, the small red-eyed aliens, who peered at her shy and wild through the leaves, then slid down the trunk and stood before her, trembling and yet confident, holding out his hands.
She could not entirely reach his mind. She knew the little ones were far less developed than she, and the language barrier was great. Yet, somehow, they communicated. The small tree-man knew that she was the one he sought, and why; Judy knew that he had been sent for her, and that he bore a message she desperately hungered to hear. In the trees she saw other strange and shy faces, and in another moment, once they were aware of her good will, they slipped down and were all around her. One of them slid a small cool hand into her fingers; another garlanded her with bright leaves and flowers. Their manner was almost reverent as they bore her along, and she went with them without protest, knowing that this was only a prologue to the real meeting she longed for.
High in the wrecked ship an explosion thundered. The ground shook, and the echoes rolled through the forest, frightening the birds from the trees. They flew up in a cloud that darkened the sun for a moment, but no one in the clearing of the Earthmen heard ....
Moray lay outstretched on the soft ploughed soil of the garden unit, listening with a deep inner knowledge to the soft ways of growth of the plants embedded in the soil. It seemed to him, in those expanding moments, that he could hear the grass and leaves growing, that some of the alien Earth-plants were complaining, weeping, dying, while others, in this strange ground, throve and changed, their inner cells altering and changing as they must to adapt and survive. He could not have put any of this into words, and, a practical and materialistic man, he would never rationally believe in ESP. Yet, with the unused centers of his brain stimulated by the strange madness of this time, he did not try to rationalize or believe. He simply knew, and accepted the knowledge, and knew it would never leave him.
Father Valentine was awakened by the rising sun over the clearing. At first, dazed, and still flooded with the strange awarenesses, he sat staring in wonder at the sun and the four moons which, by some trick of the light or his curiously heightened senses, he could see quite clearly in the deep-violet sunrise; green, violet, alabaster-pearl, peacock-blue. Then memory came flooding in, and horror, as he saw the crewmen scattered around him, still deep in sleep, exhausted. The full hideous horror of what he had done, in those last hours of darkness and animal hungers, bore in on a mind too confused and hyperstimulated even to be aware of its own madness.
One of the crewmen had a knife in his belt. The little priest, his face streaming with tears, snatched it out and began very seriously expunging all the witnesses to his sin, muttering to himself the phrases of the last rites as he watched the streaming blood…
It was the wind, MacAran thought. Heather had been right; it was something in the wind. Some substance, airborne, dust or pollen, which caused this madness to run riot. He had known it before, and this time he had had some idea what was happening; enough to work all through the early stages, swept only by recurrent attacks of sudden panic or euphoria, at locking up weapons, ammunition, poisons from the hospital or the chemistry lab. He knew that Heather and Ewen were doing the same thing, to some limited extent, in the hospital. But evenso he was numbed with horror at the events of the last day and night, and when night fell, knowing rationally that one semi-sane man could do little against two hundred completely crazed men and women, he had simply hidden in the woods, desperately clinging to sanity against the recurrent waves of madness that clutched at him. This damned planet! This damned world, with the winds of madness that crept like ghosts from the towering hills, ravening madness that touched men and beasts alike. An encompassing, devouring, ghost wind of madness and terror!
The Captain is right. We've got to get off this world. No one can survive here, nothing human, we're too vulnerable…
He was gripped with desperate anxiety for Camilla. In this mad night of rape, murder, panic terror out of control, savage battle and destruction, where had she gone? His earlier search for her had been fruitless, even though, aware of his heightened senses, he had tried to "listen" in that strange way which, on the mountain, had allowed him to find her unerringly through the blizzard. But his own fear acted like static blurring a sensitive receptor; he could feel her, but where? Had she hidden, like himself after he knew the hopelessness of his search, simply trying to escape the madness of the others? Had she been gripped by the lust and wild sensual euphoria of some of the others, and was she simply caught up in one of the groups madly pleasuring and indifferent to all else? The thought was agony to MacAran, but it was the safest alternative. It was the only bearable alternative--otherwise the thought that she might have met some murder-crazed crewman before the weapons were safely locked away, the fear that she might have run into the woods in a recurrence of panic and there been clawed or savaged by some animal, would have driven him quite witless with fear.