“You worry too much,” Harper told him.
“We have to worry, chief. We can’t afford to let anything get ahead of us. We have taken the attitude we’re superior to this vegetable civilization, if you can call it a civilization, that has developed here. It’s the logical attitude to take because nettles and dandelions and trees aren’t anything to be afraid of back home. But what holds on Earth, doesn’t hold here. We have to ask ourselves what a vegetable civilization would be like. What would it want? What would be its aspirations and how would it go about realizing them?”
“We’re getting off the subject,” said Harper, curtly. “You came in here to tell me about some new symphony.”
Mackenzie flipped his hands. “O.K., if that’s the way you feel about it.”
“Maybe we better figure on grabbing up this symphony soon as we can,” said Harper. “We haven’t had a really good one since the Red Sun. And if we mess around, the Groomies will beat us to it.”
“Maybe they have already,” said Mackenzie.
Harper puffed complacently at his pipe. “They haven’t done it yet. Grant keeps me posted on every move they make. He doesn’t miss a thing that happens at the Groombridge post.”
“Just the same,” declared Mackenzie, “we can’t go rushing off and tip our hand. The Groomie spy isn’t asleep, either.”
“Got any ideas?” asked the factor.
“We could take the ground car,” suggested Mackenzie. “It’s slower than the flier, but if we took the flier the Groomie would know there was something up. We use the car a dozen times a day. He’d think nothing of it.”
Harper considered. “The idea has merit, lad. Who would you take?”
“Let me have Brad Smith,” said Mackenzie. “We’ll get along all right, just the two of us. He’s an old-timer out here. Knows his way around.”
Harper nodded. “Better take Nellie, too.”
“Not on your life!” yelped Mackenzie. “What do you want to do? Get rid of her so you can make a cleaning?”
Harper wagged his grizzled head sadly. “Good idea, but it can’t be did. One cent off and she’s on your trail. Used to be a little graft a fellow could pick up here and there, but not any more. Not since they got these robot bookkeepers indoctrinated with truth and honesty.”
“I won’t take her,” Mackenzie declared, flatly. “So help me, I won’t. She’ll spout company law all the way there and back. With the crush she has on this Encyclopedia, she’ll probably want to drag him along, too. We’ll have trouble enough with rifle trees and electro vines and all the other crazy vegetables without having an educated cabbage and a tin-can lawyer underfoot.”
“You’ve got to take her,” insisted Harper, mildly. “New ruling. Got to have one of the things along on every deal you make to prove you did right by the natives. Come right down to it, the ruling probably is your own fault. If you hadn’t been so foxy on that Red Sun deal, the company never would have thought of it.”
“All I did was to save the company some money,” protested Mackenzie.
“You knew,” Harper reminded him crisply, “that the standard price for a symphony is two bushels of fertilizer. Why did you have to chisel half a bushel on Kadmar?”
“Cripes,” said Mackenzie, “Kadmar didn’t know the difference. He practically kissed me for a bushel and a half.”
“That’s not the point,” declared Harper. “The company’s got the idea we got to shoot square with everything we trade with, even if it’s nothing but a tree.”
“I know,” said Mackenzie, drily. “I’ve read the manual.”
“Just the same,” said Harper, “Nellie goes along.”
He studied Mackenzie over the bowl of his pipe.
“Just to be sure you don’t forget again,” he said.
The man, who back on Earth had been known as J. Edgerton Wade, crouched on the low cliff that dropped away into Melody Bowl. The dull red sun was slipping toward the purple horizon and soon, Wade knew, the trees would play their regular evening concert. He hoped that once again it would be the wondrous new symphony Alder had composed. Thinking about it, he shuddered in ecstasy—shuddered again when he thought about the setting sun. The evening chill would be coming soon.
Wade had no life blanket. His food, cached back in the tiny cave in the cliff, was nearly gone. His ship, smashed in his inexpert landing on the planet almost a year before, was a rusty hulk. J. Edgerton Wade was near the end of his rope—and knew it. Strangely, he didn’t care. In that year since he’d come here to the cliffs, he’d lived in a world of beauty. Evening after evening he had listened to the concerts. That was enough, he told himself. After a year of music such as that any man could afford to die.
He swept his eyes up and down the little valley that made up the Bowl, saw the trees set in orderly rows, almost as if someone had planted them. Some intelligence that may at one time, long ago, have squatted on this very cliff edge, even as he squatted now, and listened to the music.
But there was no evidence, he knew, to support such a hypothesis. No ruins of cities had been found upon this world. No evidence that any civilization, in the sense that Earth had built a civilization, ever had existed here. Nothing at all that suggested a civilized race had ever laid eyes upon this valley, had ever had a thing to do with the planning of the Bowl.
Nothing, that was, except the cryptic messages on the face of the cliff above the cave where he cached his food and slept. Scrawlings that bore no resemblance to any other writing Wade had ever seen. Perhaps, he speculated, they might have been made by other aliens who, like himself, had come to listen to the music until death had come for them.
Still crouching, Wade rocked slowly on the balls of his feet. Perhaps he should scrawl his own name there with the other scrawlings. Like one would sign a hotel register. A lonely name scratched upon the face of a lonely rock. A grave name, a brief memorial—and yet it would be the only tombstone he would ever have.
The music would be starting soon and then he would forget about the cave, about the food that was almost gone, about the rusting ship that never could carry him back to Earth again—even had he wanted to go back. And he didn’t—he couldn’t have gone back. The Bowl had trapped him, the music had spun a web about him. Without it, he knew, he could not live. It had become a part of him. Take it from him and he would be a shell, for it was now a part of the life force that surged within his body, part of his brain and blood, a silvery thread of meaning that ran through his thoughts and purpose.
The trees stood in quiet, orderly ranks and beside each tree was a tiny mound, podia for the conductors, and beside each mound the dark mouths of burrows. The conductors, Wade knew, were in those burrows, resting for the concert. Being animals, the conductors had to get their rest.
But the trees never needed rest. They never slept. They never tired, these gray, drab music trees, the trees that sang to the empty sky, sang of forgotten days and days that had not come, of days when Sigma Draco had been a mighty sun and of the later days when it would be a cinder circling in space. And of other things an Earthman could never know, could only sense and strain toward and wish he knew. Things that stirred strange thoughts within one’s brain and choked one with alien emotion an Earthman was never meant to feel. Emotion and thought that one could not even recognize, yet emotion and thought that one yearned toward and knew never could be caught.