I had no word of any kind from the rocket for those two weeks, and that worried me more than anything else, because I had to believe it was laying plans. If I’d been the rocket, I’d have been laying plans, and I thought of two or three notions that might very plausibly work, and never doubted that Thumbelina Himself was thinking of two or three more than that.
The final interruption, though, was the assault. “Unexpected” was turning out to be a fine word for Tree, with “damned nuisance” a close runner-up and winner of Miss Congeniality. They’re all unexpected, sure, but Tree seemed to be leaning on the quality a little more than most new planets do.
I can’t call it a stampede, though it involved a good many Tree animals— large ones, all of them: the goo-spitting giraffe was among those present, as was the rhinobarrow—there were also, always at a distance, any number of furry birds. (Every time I saw the damned birds, and I saw them every damned day, I wondered about the substitution of what seemed fairly heavy fur for feathers, and the plain fact never did dawn on me, not from that direction.) The animals weren’t running in a crazed fashion from A to as near Z as manageable.
They were running purposefully.
I’d gone to sleep crowned with success-one final tuber recipe had in fact panned out nicely, with a strong taste of both yam and, believe it or not, Key Lime pie when strained and baked; I felt several steps ahead of myself and very victorious indeed. And I awoke at dawn to a symphony of horrible noises. I hardly had to look out the window to know what was going on.
The noises were an expansion for full orchestra of the panicked trumpeting, screaming and thrashing I’d caused by shooting off a slug gun back near the start of all this. That much told me: Animals on the Run.
The noises were getting louder by the second, and that told me: Running Toward Me.
Well, I didn’t think they could trample the log cabin, which was after all impervious, according to guarantee. Some animals would have their heads bashed in if they ran straight for the walls, and in seconds I wouldn’t be able to see out my Glassex windows because they’d be covered with animal, but that was about the extent of the threat.
The animals were racing straight toward me—I did look out the window in time to see that much; there wasn’t even a slight angle away from the cabin. And there were a lot of large animals, a lot of distant flying furry birds, a lot of everything. Fish were missing (there being no running stream up to the cabin), and Thumbelina was missing, but everyone else in the cast appeared to have accepted the invitation with pleasure.
And why did I think Thumbelina should have been there? Well, because the animals were headed straight toward me…
A rhinobarrow smacked the Glassex with its horn and face, lost interest in the whole affair and tried to sink gracefully to the ground. It didn’t get there, because a flying wedge of other animals—with a sort of bald tan spider the size of a gorilla in the lead—was also trying to get to, or through, the Glassex, and everybody was being held up, while unconscious, by everybody else. I stopped trying to see through my covered window, and went back to theory, while smacks and thumps were added in great quantities to the screaming and trumpeting and so on.
The animals were headed straight toward me.
Now, what would have pushed them into anything like that?
Some sort of reaction against a stranger… shared among various animals? A sort of jungle telepathy?
Well, telepathy was certainly possible for some races. But I’d been on Tree for several weeks. Telepathy that took that long a time to make up its mind, so to speak, didn’t seem worth even ten seconds of thought.
So something outside the animals had pushed the animals…
Thumbelina?
It seemed a good first hypothesis.
And then something else dawned on me, and very, very slowly—as the trumpeting, crashing, thudding, and general hooraw continued—all the pieces began to fall into place. I remembered what I’d really forgotten— not the identity of the noises, but the damned seventeen hours. I’d been unconscious for seventeen hours. I’d barely thought about that since— which was itself a massive, major due.
But that wasn’t the biggest clue. The biggest clue was one simple sentence I had never so much as said to myself:
Nothing happened more than once.
A: I fell down, unconscious, for seventeen hours.
B: I was shot at by a beamer.
C: I was shot at by a different beamer.
D: I was shot at by a disintegration thingummy.
E: I was shot at with a load of teeny buzz-saws.
F: …And so on. And, goddamn it, so on.
I felt like kicking myself, and no wonder. I was, again, outwardly calm and inwardly screaming and jumping up and down. The animal assault was beginning to fade, just a bit; there were fewer trumpetings, and a lot less in the way of thuds, because animals were now running into each other at some distance from the actual log cabin; I appeared to have a sort of outer coating five or six beasts thick in places.
Not that it mattered. Not that any of it mattered.
Nothing happened more than once—and things began by putting me out cold for seventeen hours.
Furry birds.
A robot Knave. (Who resembled me by my own measurements.)
And (as I had had every chance to realize while checking myself out from a fall into almost-water) the only way to find out how teeny doses of things affect the human body is to let them affect the human body.
Well, I knew what the leaves on those damned trees exuded, didn’t I? At least in an operational sort of way; whatever the composition, I knew what the stuff was meant to do, and what, in fact, it did do—and very, very well, too.
A totally unfamiliar animal is an immense threat. He may poison you; he may just taste terrible (or make everything else taste terrible, I suppose); he may decide to eat you.
Do you kill the animal? Probably not; you don’t know that you can kill it, and you aren’t quite sure how, in any case; it’s rather large, as killable animals go around you.
You chase it away. And chasing it away will look, to the animal, like a series of serious attacks.
And when one “Shoo!” doesn’t work, you try another. Why? Because that’s the way your mind works, if a mind is what’s controlling all this, and one of these days one of those “Shoo!”s is going to pay off. You have, after all, researched things carefully; you had seventeen hours to do that in.
Telepathy… well, telepathy had to be a part of the place, and the leaves that had primed me for it should have told me that, or the furry birds—long, long ago. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with trying to find real reasons for a robot Knave in a rocket…
And, come to think of it, if I hadn’t known how telepathy worked in human beings. I’d had some experience with it a few years before, when an indigenous telepathic race tried to take over a human colony on a new planet some damn fool Survivor had passed as safe.
In human beings, telepathy just takes over—the human mind and spirit seems to be erased, and no one has ever figured out how to bring it back, though there have been lots of tries and work is still, they tell me, ongoing.
But this was different—that chemical emitted by the leaves had to act as a sort of primer, allowing just enough telepathy to get inside a human mind without kicking the resident human out of it.
And the trees, or Tree itself—I have no idea which, and can’t see that it makes any practical difference just now; I prefer to blame the damn trees, but that’s nothing but preference—had done just that to me.