“The universe is infinite,” said Brock moodily. “Recurving in on itself, topologically—”
“Maybe. But I worried over it. I worried over First Cause. I worried all through my adolescence. Then I stopped worrying.”
He smiled acidly. “You became a vegetable. You rooted yourself in the mud of your own ignorance, and decided not to pull loose because it was too painful. Am I right, Hammond?”
“No. I joined the Exploratory Corps.”
I dreamed, that night, as I swung in my hammock. It was a vivid and unpleasant dream, which stayed with me well into the following morning as a sort of misshapen reality that had attached itself to me in the night.
I had been a long time falling asleep. Brock had brooded most of the day, and a long hike over the bleak tundra had done little to improve his mood. Towards nightfall he dialed a few drinks, inserted a disc of Sibelius in his ear, and sat staring glumly at the darkening sky outside the ship. Alphecca II was moonless. The night was the black of space, but the atmosphere blurred the neighboring stars.
I remember drifting off into a semisleep: a half-somnolence in which I was aware of Brock’s harsh breathing to my left, but yet in which I had no volition, no control over my limbs. And after that state came sleep, and with it dreams.
The dream must have grown from Brock’s bitter remark of earlier: You became a vegetable. You rooted yourself in the mud of your own ignorance.
I accepted the statement literally. Suddenly I was a vegetable, possessed of all my former faculties, but rooted in the soil.
Rooted.
Straining for freedom, straining to break away, caught eternally by my legs, thinking, thinking…
Never to move, except for a certain thrashing of the upper limbs.
Rooted.
I writhed, longed to get as far as the rocky hill beyond, only as far as the next yard, the next inch. But I had lost all motility. It was as if my legs were grasped in a mighty trap, and, without pain, without torment, I was bound to the earth.
I woke, finally, damp with perspiration. In his hammock, Brock slept, seemingly peacefully. I considered waking him and telling him of the nightmare, but decided against it. I tried to return to sleep.
At length, I slept.
Dreamlessly.
The preset alarm throbbed at 0700; dawn had preceded us by nearly an hour.
Brock was up first; I sensed him moving about even as I stirred towards wakefulness. Still caught up in the strange unreal reality of my nightmare, I wondered on a conscious level if today would be like yesterday—if Brock, obsessed by his sudden thirst for an answer, would continue to brood and sulk.
I hoped not. It would mean the end of our team if Brock cracked up; after eleven years, I was not anxious for a new partner.
“Hammond? You up yet?”
His voice had lost the edgy quality of yesterday, but there was something new and subliminally frightening in it.
Yawning, I said, “Just about. Dial breakfast for me, will you?”
“I did already. But get out of the sack and come look at this.”
I lurched from the hammock, shook my head to clear it, and started forward.
“Where are you?”
“Second level,” he said. “At the window. Come take a look.”
I climbed the spiral catwalk to the viewing-station; Brock stood with his back towards me, looking out. As I drew near I said, “I had the strangest dream last night—”
“The hell with that. Look.”
At first I didn’t notice anything strange. The bright-colored landscape looked unchanged, the pebbly orange soil, the dark blue trees, the tangle of green vines, the murk of the morning atmosphere. But then I saw I had been looking too far from home.
Writhing up the side of the window, just barely visible to the right, was a gnarled knobby green rope. Rope? No. It was one of the vines.
“They’re all over the ship,” Brock said. “I’ve checked all the ports. During the night the damned things must have come crawling up the side of the ship like so many snakes and wrapped themselves around us. I guess they figure we’re here to stay, and they can use us as bracing-posts the way they do those trees.”
I stared with mixed repugnance and fascination at the hard bark of the vine, at the tiny suckers that held it fast to the smooth skin of our ship.
“That’s funny,” I said. “It’s sort of an attack by extra-terrestrial monsters, isn’t it?”
We suited up and went outside to have a look at the “attackers”. At a distance of a hundred yards, the ship looked weirdly bemired. Its graceful lines were broken by the winding fingers of the vine, spiraling up its sleek sides from a thick parent stem on the ground. Other shoots of the vine sprawled near us, clutching futilely at us as we moved among them.
I was reminded of my dream. Somewhat hesitantly I told Brock about it.
Why?
He laughed. “Rooted, eh? You were dreaming that while those vines were busy wrapping themselves around the ship. Significant?”
“Perhaps.” I eyed the tough vines speculatively. “Maybe we’d better move the ship. If much more of that stuff gets around it, we may not be able to blast off at all.”
Brock knelt and flexed a shoot of vine. “The ship could be completely cocooned in this stuff and we’d still be able to take oft,” he said. “A spacedrive wields a devil of a lot of thrust. We’ll manage.”
And whick!
A tapering finger of the vine arched suddenly and whipped around Brock’s middle. Whick! Whick!
Like animated rope, like a bark-covered serpent, it curled about him. I drew back, staring. He seemed half amused, half perplexed.
“The thing’s got pull, all right,” he said. He was smiling lopsidedly, annoyed at having let so simple a thing as a vine interfere with his freedom of motion. But then he winced in obvious pain.
“—Tightening,” he gasped.
The vine contracted muscularly; it skittered two or three feet towards the tree from which its parent stock sprang, and Brock was jerked suddenly off balance. As the corded arm of the vine yanked him backward he began to topple, poising for what seemed like seconds on his left foot, right jutting awkwardly in the air, arms clawing for balance.
Then he fell.
I was at his side in a moment, carefully avoiding the innocent looking vine-tips to right and left. I planted my foot on the trailing vine that held Brock. I levered downward and grabbed the tip where it bound his waist. I pulled; Brock pushed.
The vine yielded.
“It’s giving,” he grunted. “A little more.”
“Maybe I’d better go back for the blaster,” I said.
“No. No telling what this thing may do while you’re gone. Cut me in two, maybe. Pull!”
I pulled. The vine struggled against our combined strength, writhed, twisted. But gradually we prevailed. It curled upward, loosened, went limp. Finally it drooped away, leaving Brock in liberty.
He got up slowly, rubbing his waist.
“Hurt?”
“Just the surprise,” he said. “Tropistic reaction on the plant’s part; I must have triggered some hormone chain to make it do that.” He eyed the now quiescent vine with respect.
“It’s not the first time we’ve been attacked,” I said. “Alpheraz III-—”
“Yes.”
I hadn’t even needed to mention it. Alpheraz III had been a hellish jungle planet; the image in his mind, as it was in mine, was undoubtedly that of a tawny beast the size of a goat held in the inexorable grip of some stocky-trunked plant, rising in the air, vanishing into a waiting mouth of the carnivorous tree—