“Good,” the old man said. “Never mind the beasts, Gimp. You’ll be safe enough in our good ship here. The high forest does not reach out into your beloved waters. Hiero, we have a little time now and we should make land in only a few hours more. What do you say we examine those mind locks which we captured from the enemy? I have them right here.”
In a moment the two strange devices were laid upon the table before them. Luchare looked at them with loathing, but Hiero and Brother Aldo with interest, while Gimp’s battered face seemed to reflect both attitudes.
The locks themselves were of the curious, oily-looking bluish metal which Hiero had noticed the Unclean favored. The heavy neck chains were of some other metal, lighter in weight, though the color was not dissimilar. The mysterious mechanisms lay inside square cases, about three inches around and a half inch thick. There were certain marks like writing incised on them, but no one there, not even old Aldo, could read them. Other decoration there was none. And there were only very faint visible seams and no catch, or opening, on them at all.
“Don’t you suppose,” Luchare said, looking closely at a fine seam line, “that it would be dangerous to break one? Are they guarded in some way, do you think, so that a person opening it wrong would be hurt?”
“That’s possible,” Hiero said. He lifted a case and held it to his ear. Was it his imagination, or did he hear an almost imperceptible humming inside?
“No, I hear nothing,” Brother Aldo said, on being asked, nor did the others. “But I know very little of such things,” he continued. “To be quite honest, few of my order do. We have concentrated on developing empathy with all life through our natural mental powers, and again, quite frankly, we dislike mechanical devices of any sort. This may be a mistake. I think myself we may have gone too far in the anti-machine direction. There’s no reason that a limited number of machines cannot help the world, if they are controlled and properly designed. And we had better figure out the working of many Unclean devices or we’ll be in real trouble. But I’m not the man to do it, I’m afraid. Actually, Hiero, you’ve had a lot of experience lately with their devices. You should know as much as anyone not actually in their ranks, I would think.”
Hiero stared gloomily at the two shining objects on the table. Once more something gnawed faintly at his memory, some random thought, but again it seemed too elusive to come to the surface of his mind.
“The only gadgets I’ve seen, that is, Unclean devices,” he said slowly, “weren’t much like this. There was Luchare’s lance, which is a thought amplifier as well, and that compass-thing I also took off S’nerg, way back up North. I had to destroy that; remind me to tell you about it later. Then there was the mind prober they tried to use on me at the Dead Isle. And the machine I call the lightning gun, which blasted me down. I think it shoots charges of static electricity, though God alone knows how. These are mind blocks and they must be miracles of design: they’re so small.”
He sighed. “I can’t figure them out at all, and yet something keeps telling me to be awfully careful of them. Maybe Luchare’s right; some explosive or poison or something of the sort lies inside for the unwary.”
“Well, I better go on deck,” Gimp said, rising. “Landfall can’t be many hours away, no, nor dawn neither. And I don’t want to run on an uncharted rock, not off this coast!”
“I’m gong to bed, and so is Hiero,” Luchare said firmly. “We’ll need all our rest tomorrow, and only that lazy bear is getting a proper amount of sleep.”
“You’re right,” Aldo said, also rising. “But old men don’t need much sleep, princess, so I’ll walk the decks with our captain. Perhaps I’ll get a message or two.”
Hiero yawned and pulled off his boots, sitting on the edge of the bunk. Beside him, Luchare had already closed her eyes. She fell asleep like a child, he noted, in seconds. Damn it, what is there about those mind locks that worries me so? He glared at the things as they lay, still glinting on the table, then blew out the lantern. Whatever it was could wait.
The long, wailing cry. “Land—hooooo,” woke him up on the instant. Light, the gray light of dawn, was streaming in through an open cabin porthole. And then, as he sat up, he remembered! The memory was of the compass machine he had destroyed weeks ago, far up in the Palood! It had been a telltale, an Unclean homing device! And, for a dead rat’s skin, so too were these damned mind locks!
In an instant, ignoring Luchare’s startled cry, he was on deck, bellowing for the captain, yelling for Brother Aldo. Both appeared instantly and watched in horrified fascination as he smashed both locks on the deck, using a handy belaying pin. As he did so, he gasped out the reason, and the alarm flew in their eyes. Only when the deadly things were powdered metal did he look up and see where Foam Girl was heading.
The forest of the South! Not a mile away rose a rank of such trees as he had hardly dreamed possible, even though he had been warned what to expect. The actual shore was invisible, screened by rank growth, mostly bushes and shrubs, all of different shades of green. And behind them in turn reared up the giants of the forest, showing black boles, brown trunks, tan bark, and all the hues and permutations of brown to black, with reddish glints here and there. The Metz almost had to arch his back to see their incredible tops. Around some of the great trunks and hanging from the lofty branches, there twisted vines and lianas of every hue, some of whose girth looked greater than that of Foam Girl’s hull! Splotches of color, mostly blazing reds and yellows, here and there revealed the presence of giant, flowering plants which clung to the trees far up their enormous lengths. Through Gimp’s proffered telescope, Hiero could see a mass of intertwined, smaller plants festooning every vacant space between the boughs. The smells of the titanic forest reached out across the water to them, a medley of strange scents and musky perfumes. Beside Hiero’s head, Klootz suddenly bellowed from his pen, as if in greeting to a wood greater than any he had ever known. The answering call of some strange monster, a thunderous roar, echoed back faintly from the distant shore, and a flight of large, white birds rose from the foliage directly in front of them. A physical wave of warmth seemed to reach out to them.
“Can you get her in quicker?” The priest turned to Gimp in question. “I’m suddenly horribly afraid. We’ve given someone a constant clue to our position for over two days. And we’re not far from Neeyana, which they control.” He ignored Luchare, who now came on deck fully dressed and moved up to his side. But she seemed not to mind and bent to adjust her boots.
“Well, Master Hiero, you can see the sails are half-brailed,” the little seaman said. “I don’t dare go ramming in at full speed. We’ve got three good lookouts in the bows and forepeak. But there may be anything from sunken logs to nice, pointed rocks just under the surface. A few moments more should do, though.”
In the sun of early morning, the little ship sailed slowly in to the towering green wall of jungle ahead, a light breeze carrying her smoothly over the gentle swells. The hum of a tiny surf beating on the roots and tangled deadfalls of the shore now came to them.
Hiero finished a brief and private prayer session, but he was still nervous and inwardly cursing himself. Now he sent out his mind impulses, wishing he had thought to wake up hours before and start doing it to them. Beside him, Brother Aldo stood, eyes shut, seeming merely to breathe in the warm scents of the forest as they grew increasingly strong.