She touched ground. Howell said crisply, “Call to them, Karen. By space-phone. We have to take the chance. Keep your voice going.”
Karen obediently picked up the transmitter. She said clearly, “We are friends. We are people from Earth. We heard your call and we will try to help you, though we need help ourselves.” Then, seeing Howell about to leave, “Wait!”she said anxiously to him, “you’re not going outside!”
“I am,” said Howell curtly. “If we delay, we may seem to be preparing to do them some dirt. And only one of us should go, for the same reason. But I’ll take a rifle.”
He slung a talkie over his shoulder. He took the sporting rifle Ketch handed him, He went to the exit-port. There he said peremptorily, “Talk, Karen!”
To Ketch and Breen he said in a low tone, “We’re in a very tight fix. I’ll try to keep you posted by talkie, but if there’s trouble, about all you can do is lift off and find somewhere else aground here where you can try to keep from being found. Don’t try to help me.”
He opened the port and jumped to the ground. All about him was jungle, though not unduly filled with underbrush. He headed through it for the sere brown area in which a globular metal object had been photographed from space.
The jungle was thick but by no means impassable. He forced his way through it. Almost immediately he began to speak into the talkie. His voice was not soprano, but it wasn’t likely that it would sound like a creature from a slug-ship. He spoke deliberately to be overheard. Those back in the Marintha heard every sound.
“This is a pretty thick jungle,” they heard him say. “A few vines, not many, and very few thorns. The smells aren’t unpleasant. Some are even attractive.”
He went on. He wished to be heard moving openly toward the defoliated area. A man or any other creature intending mischief would either move silently or else with the equivalent of roarings intended to intimidate those who heard him. Coming openly, and talking, he’d be less likely to seem menacing.
“… Things are singing in the trees. I can’t spare the time to try to see them. I need to keep moving and advertising myself as not sneaking up…”
Karen tried to obey his orders to keep her voice going out on a communicator-frequency not too far removed from the signal-beam. But she was afraid, for him. Her throat clicked shut. She could not speak. She listened as he continued to advance and to talk. Presently—
“Things are opening out ahead,” he reported. “No sign of anybody coming to meet me or take a pot shot. I’m nearly at the place where the foliage ends. Still plenty of tree trunks, though.”
His voice stopped.
CHAPTER THREE
There was excellent reason. He had come to a place where bare and interlacing tree trunks made filigree patterns against the sky. All foliage abruptly ceased to be. The trees seemed to thin out, but it was illusory because in the absence of leaves he could see for a long way between them. They hadn’t merely been stripped of leaves though. They were dead. They’d been killed. Their trunks looked dull and lifeless by comparison with the jungle-stuff still alive. There was no trace of anything with life in it ahead. Even the underbrush—there must be some underbrush where there are trees of varied species—even the underbrush appeared only as sticks. The ground was covered with rotted leaves. To right and left, the trees raised bare branches as if making frozen, futile gestures to the sky.
There was a clump of some local species, hundreds of slender saplings merging together thirty feet above the ground. They joined there, and other saplings rose from their junction-places and grew another thirty feet and joined again. It was like a three-story forest. It covered acres—and half of it was dead and half of it was living. The dead part was in the leafless area which from aloft formed an almost perfect circle. The living part was outside it. Howell saw dead ground-cover—creeping stuff with no upright stalks, but only runners and roots going down into the soil. In the brown circle it had been killed. Yet fresh runners already grew inward from the edge.
There was no sound before him. If wind stirred the jungle-tops, Howell did not hear it. There was the silence of death in this leafless portion of the jungle. Behind him things chattered and squeaked and made various mostly high-pitched noises. Ahead—nothing!
It didn’t feel right. It didn’t look right. Men destroying foliage to make a guide and destination for rescuers might have killed the trees. They wouldn’t have bothered with underbrush. They surely would not have troubled with the equivalent of grass. But something, somehow, had killed every trace of vegetation in a circle half a mile across. The trees were left to decay and ultimately to fall, but although the vegetation had been killed, the fertility of the soil was unaffected. The creeping stuff grew back into the area where creeping stuff had died.
It was definitely not right. It felt wrong. All of Howell’s suspicions, which he hadn’t been able to name even to himself, now returned with doubled intensity. He ceased to speak because his mind was filled with observing and suspecting and listening, and trying frantically to understand. He moved—not into the dead space, but along its edges. There was something in a tree, caught in a junction of branches. It had been an animal perhaps the size of a catamount. It was long dead. It had been armoured, like the armadillos of Earth and the small carnivores of Briesis. It had been aloft in the tree and it had been killed and it had fallen and been caught in the tree’s branches. A hunter would have taken it for a trophy most likely, if he’d shot it. But Howell told himself absorbedly that a dead thing found in a place where everything else was dead could have died in the same disaster and from the same cause. His suspicions deepened.
He continued to move along the edge of the dead space. There was a discoloured, dried-up, rotten soft-tissue plant, with a dead flower half a yard across. It had been killed. Death had been indiscriminate, striking everything with life in it. Flowers, trees, ground-cover, animals—all had been victims.
Then Howell saw the metal globe that had seemed the size of a pinhead on a much-magnified picture taken from space. It was a globe, it was metal, it was not a natural object. It had been designed. It had been made. It had been put here. It was perhaps thirty feet in diameter, with the peculiar look of metal which has been plastic-coated to utilize its strength while preserving it from rust and acid conditions. It looked like a spaceship. There seemed to be vents and photo units outside. From within it or from somewhere nearby the moving beam of the distress call must be projected.
But everything around it was dead.
Still utterly absorbed, Howell continued to be oblivious to the people in the Marintha and of his obligation to keep them informed of what he found.
He reached a place where he could see the metal globe almost completely. And now, even if it had occurred to him to speak, he would have been speechless.
A rotted tree had fallen and a pointed, broken limb had struck the still-distant metal globe. It had punctured it. It had ripped away one part of one sheet of absurdly thin plating.
The globe wasn’t a spaceship; it was only a paper-thin shell of metal. It was a dummy, with external details to make it seem designed for a voyage in space, but with no contents to make such a voyage possible. It was scenery, placed on a jungle-clad peninsula of an unnamed and uninhabited world.
And then Howell saw something else—which made the blood pound in his temples. Red rage surged though him. Now he understood, suddenly and completely.
He saw bones. They were partly covered by scraps of cloth. They were well within the area where everything was dead. They were human bones. But they were quite small ones. There were three complete human skeletons, halfway between the edge of the brown spot and the dummy metal globe.