The next thing I knew I somehow had a stick in my hand and I was whacking the animal as hard as I could, oblivious to the damage. I was doing to my leg. Finally, the thing squealed ― the sound of chalk against a blackboard ― let go, and burrowed back into the grass.
I lay there for a moment. Presently, I got to my feet. The leg was numb and loath to obey my commands, but I could walk. I paused to look around for the key, which I had dropped, but it was nowhere around.
Movement behind me, the sound of thrashing. I regretted having yelled, but when it comes to creepy-crawlies I immediately lose my gonads, become all hoopskirts and fluster. Definitely phobic reaction.
No time to search for the key.
Sam sounded nearer, at least, but now I had no way of communicating. I groped through the eternal green miasma, flailing at my leafy tormentors, suddenly getting a wild, desperate notion to go back to the main building, ask Mr. Perez for his machete, and pay the rooted bastards back in kind. They did not relent. I hacked at them with what I had, stiffened forearms, my good leg, hate. Tiny insects hummed about me in a swirling cloud, lit on my face and swam on the surface of my cornea, and had pity enough not to bite.
I heard the crackling of a gun. Someone was burning a path off to my left.
Crashing came from directly ahead. Sam. I lurched forward and fell, squelched a curse, and struggled onward again. Sam was near, but I still couldn't see him. My ankle turned in a depression, and for an agonizing few seconds I sucked air and screamed inwardly as bolts of white heat shot through me. But soon I was plunging ahead, throwing my body against the foliage, ramming myself through toward what I took to be the rig's engine sounds. Progress came in bits of eternity.
Finally, I gave up. The throbbing had returned in my leg, neatly phasing with pulses of fire from my ankle. I collapsed backward from the heat, the exertion, the pain. I dug out my squib and waited, letting wriggly wet things lave my face. I didn't care, just lay there, defocusing my eyes on an overarching canopy of dark green. Sam was getting nearer, nearer. I tried to sit up, found that I could, then looked around.
Something whooshed out of the jungle directly behind me. I turned around and found myself sitting beside Sam's left front roller. It had stopped on the exact spot where my head had been. The engine whined again, the roller moved, and I pounded frantically against the ground-effect vane with all my strength.
"Jake?" Sam's voice on the external speaker.
"Yo!"
The hatch popped open, and I painfully hauled myself up and in.
I fell to the deck behind the shotgun seat.
"Oh, my God," I heard Darla say.
I rolled over and saw her face, one of the most deftly executed of God's pastel drawings. "Hello."
"Where the hell you been, boy?" Sam chastised.
"Out weeding the garden. Let me get… ahhhh!"
"Careful," Darla said. "Oh, your leg…."
With a little help, I got up and slumped into the seat. Sam was turning to the left, steamrollering through the green-capped swells.
"There's a stream around here. Yeah, the ground's dipping. Should be―"
We didn't see the man, one of our pursuers, until we were on top of him. He had time to turn his head and register the beginnings of alarm before we ran straight over him. He didn't have time to scream. Darla gave a tiny squeak and put her hand over her mouth.
After an interlude, Sam said, "Here we go."
We clunked over an embankment, slid, and splashed into a shallow running brook strewn with polished stones. Sam eased the back end down. I heard the forward accordian-joint between cab and trailer go scrunch as it bent to its limits. Sam turned hard left and trundled down the stream bed bumpingly, jarring our teeth and bones to jelly.
"We'll make time this way," Sam said.
"Where are we going?"
"This stream parallels a dirt road farther down. The road should take us down to the clearing project, where we'll pick up another trail that'll get us to the Skyway. We hope."
"How do you know all this?"
"Just following Cheetah's directions. Ask her yourself."
I looked around. In a pile of soft dark hair huddled in a comer of the rear seat, two big wet eyes awaited my approval.
4
The stream meandered through cathedrals of jungle, its banks overhung with weeping vinery. We strapped in and let the rig jostle us as Sam sent it banging over rocks and slamming down over half-meter-high cataracts. It was rough going, but not as difficult as barging through rain forest. The gradual downgrade soon leveled off and the stream got deeper. Then it got very deep.
As the water level gurgled up to my viewport, I said, "I knew those optional snorkels on the vents would come in handy someday."
"I think this is about as deep as it gets," Sam said.
He was right. Ahead was white water. Sam stopped for a moment to decide on his approach, then gunned it for a place where the drop was lowest. We rolled over smooth rocks and splashed into the hydraulics below, like some great, lumbering water beast beached in the shallows.
Anyway, the rig was getting a long-needed washing. The stream widened out farther down, and Sam stopped long enough for Darla to clean the triple-puncture wound on my leg and bandage it up. I suddenly felt very weird.
"You're in luck," she said. "Cheetah says the weegah, which is what bit you, isn't poisonous to humans. Unfortunately, the chemical of the venom resembles chlorpromazine, a tranquilizer, if I remember correctly. You should be winking out soon. You probably got a good dose."
"I feel very calm, but kind of strange. How did you know all that?"
"Oh, passing interest in xenobiology, especially exotic zoology."
"If I die, I want you to do something for me. Go to my flat and kill every houseplant in it."
"Sounds so petty."
But my ire grew abstract as a nirvanalike mood descended. The pain in my leg and ankle subsided to alternating twinges, and I sat back to enjoy the ride as Sam resumed driving.
About half an hour later we picked up the dirt road, but we almost hung ourselves up getting out of the water. We scraped bottom with the sickening sound of abused metal, then gained the rutted road, which bore us away from the stream and slightly uphill.
I grew terribly sleepy. I told Darla to fetch a stimtab from the medicine kit, but she advised against it, contending that the interaction of the drug and the venom was unpredictable, owing to the weegah's alien chemistry. I acquiesced. Now she was a doctor.
Another hour went by, and we came to the clearing. It was a shock. Over at least a dozen square kilometers the jungle had been ripped away like so many weeds. In its place lay chewed earth, shards of pulp, and row after endless row of neatly wrapped bales, bundles of vegetation sorted into homogeneous groups ― bark, logs, leaves, chips, pods, fruit, and vegetable mash (these in big metal canisters), all products useful as-is or ready for further processing. The thing that had done the deed was off in the distance, a Landscraper. The machine was a metal platform almost a kilometer long, moving on gargantuan tracks, biting off great chunks of forest at its leading edge, sorting, processing, digesting masses of material in its guts, and dropping the fecal result off behind. Eventually, farms, houses, and factories would follow in its wake. Cleared land was a premium on Demeter (the proper name for the planet and one everybody ignored; most people called it Hothouse).
Cheetah eyed the scene dolefully, and I couldn't help feeling sorry. She looked upon the ruins of her only home.