The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 91
The leaf dropped off and the tree went mad. Jepson fell into soft, springy undergrowth, the leaf still firmly fastened to his back. He landed with a wild yelp and a flood of curses. While we all lay flat, frantically trying to bury ourselves deeper, the tree thrashed around, its gum-laded spatulates hungry for vengeance.
One persistent branch kept beating within a yard of my head as I tried to shove said top-piece below ground. I hated the stink of pineapple and cinnamon that permeated the air. And it made me sweat to think how my lungs would strain, my eyes pop and my heart burst if I got a dollop of that junk slap in the face. I'd sooner've been neatly needled.
The tree ended its wild larruping, stood like a dreaming giant liable to wake into frenzy at any moment. Crawling to Jepson, we dragged him out of reach. He couldn't walk, his jackboots and the legs of his pants being firmly stuck together. His left arm was just as securely gummed to his side. He was in an awful pickle, cursed steadily and without pause for breath or thought. We'd never suspected him of such fluency. But we got him into the safety of the glade, and it was there I thought up a few words he'd overlooked.
Chapter Three
MOLDERS stolidly said nothing, contenting himself with listening to Jepson and me. Molders had helped me to the dragging and now neither of us could let go. We were fixed to the original victim, bonded like brothers but not talking like brothers. There was nothing to do but carry Jepson bodily with our hands remaining on the most inconvenient parts of his anatomy. He had to go horizontally and face downward, as if he was a drunk getting frog-marched to barracks. He was still adorned with the leaf. He was still reciting.
The task wasn't lightened by that young fool Wilson who thought there was something funny in other people's misfortunes. He followed us, snapping his accursed camera which I could have stuffed down his gullet with the greatest of pleasure. He was too happy about the fact that there wasn't any goo on him.
Jay Score, Brennand, Armstrong, Petersen and Drake met us as we lumbered awkwardly, across the sward. They looked curiously at Jepson, listened to him with much respect. We warned them not to touch. The pair of us weren't feeling too sprightly by the time we reached the Marathon. Jepson's weight was only two thirds normal, but after five hundred yards he seemed like the last remains of a glutinous mammoth.
We dumped him on the grass below the open lock, perforce sitting with him. The faint booming sound was still coming out of the forest. Jay went inside the ship, brought out Sam and Wally to see what they could do about the super-adhesive. The stuff was stiffening, growing gradually harder. My hands and fingers felt as if they'd been set into glassite gloves.
Sam and Wally tried cold water, lukewarm water and hot water, but none of it did any good. Chief Engineer Douglas obliged them with a bottle of rocket fuel. That didn't work either. They had a go with some special gasoline which Steve Gregory kept for the crew's cigarette lighters. They wasted their time. That gasoline could play hell with rubber, but it couldn't dissolve this stuff.
"Stick it, fellers!" advised Wilson, cackling loudly. Jepson made sulphuric mention of this idiot's parents. I enlarged upon his grandparents. Jepson turned to the subject of his nonexistent progeny. Molders looked stolid, said nothing. "You sure are in a fix," went on Wilson. "By gum!"
Then Sam came out with some iodine. It didn't work, but it did make a terrible stink. Molders permitted his face to look slightly pained. Some nitric acid caused bubbles on the surface of the semihard goo, but did no more than that. It was risky stuff to use, anyway. Frowning, Sam went back to look for something else, passed Jay Score coming out to see how we were doing. Jay stumbled as he got near, a strange thing for him to do considering his superhuman sense of balance. His solid three hundred pounds nudged young Wilson between the shoulder blades and that grinning ape promptly flopped against Jepson's legs. Wilson struggled and changed his tune, but stayed stuck, Jepson gave him the sardonic ha-ha, and the other didn't enjoy it a bit.
Picking up the dropped camera, Jay dangled it in one powerful hand, said contritely, "I never missed a step before. It is most unfortunate."
"Unfortunate, hell!" yelled Wilson. Sam came out with a big glass jar, dribbled its contents over my gooey hands. The ghastly green covering at once thinned into a weak slime and my hands came free.
"Ammonia," remarked Sam. He needn't have mentioned it—I could smell the pungent stuff. It was a good solvent, and he soon had us cleaned up.
Then I chased Wilson three times around the ship, he was too fast for me. We were just about to go aboard to tell our tale to the skipper when that tree started threshing again. You could see its deadly branches beating the air and hear the violent swoosh of them even at that distance. Pausing beneath the lock, we watched the spectacle wonderingly. Suddenly, Jay Score spoke, his voice metallic, harsh.
"Where's Kli Yang?"
None of us knew. Now I came to think about it, I couldn't recall him being with us while we dragged Jepson home. The last I remembered of him was when he stood beside me under that tree and his saucer eyes gave me the creeps by carefully scanning two opposite branches at once. Armstrong shot into the Ship, came out with the report that Kli Yang definitely wasn't there. His own eyes as saucerlike as the missing Martian's, Wilson said that he didn't remember Kli Yang coming out of the forest. Upon which we snatched up our needlers and made for that tree at the run. All the while, the tree continued to larrup around like a crazy thing tied down by its own roots.
REACHING the monstrous growth, we made a circle just beyond the sweep of its treacherous leaves, had a look to see where the Martian was wrapped in glue. He wasn't wrapped in glue. We found him forty feet up the trunk, five of his powerful tentacles clamped around its girth, the other five embracing the green native we'd pursued. His captive was struggling wildly and futilely, all the time yelling a high-pitched stream of gibberish.
Carefully, Kli Yang edged down the trunk. The way he looked and moved made him resemble an impossible cross between a college professor and an educated octopus. His eyes rolling with terror, the native battered at Kli's glassite helmet. Kli blandly ignored the hostility, reached the branch that had caught Jepson, didn't descend any farther. Still grasping the furiously objecting green one, he crept along the whipping limb until he reached its leafless end. At that point, he and the native were being waved up and down in twenty-five feet sweeps.
Timing himself, he cast off at the lowermost point of one beat, scuttled from reach before another eager branch could swat him. There was a singing howl from the nearer parts of the forest and something that looked like a blue-green coconut shot out of the shadows and broke at Drake's feet. The thing was as thin and brittle as an empty eggshell, had a white inner surface, and contained nothing. Kli Yang took no notice of the howls or the missile, bore his still struggling captive toward the Marathon.
Hanging back, Drake peered curiously at the coconut or whatever it was, struck the fragments of shell with his boot. He caught the full benefit of something invisible that was floating up from it, sucked in his cheeks, screwed up his eyes and backed away. Then he retched. He did it so violently that he fell over as he ran. We'd the sense to pick him up and rush him after Kli without getting too nosy about what had bitten him. He continued to regurgigate all the way across the grass, recovered just as we came under the ship's bulging side.
"Holy smoke!" he wheezed, "what a stench! It'd make a skunk smell like the rose of the animal world." He wiped his lips. "My stomach turned right over."
Looking up Kli, we found that his captive had been conducted to the galley for a peace-making feed. Kli dragged off his helmet, said. "That tree wasn't so difficult for me to mount. It walloped around as I went up, but it couldn't get at anything on its own trunk." He sniffed, rubbed his flat, Red Planet face with the flexible tip of a great tentacle. "Don't know how you bipeds can swallow this soup which you're pleased to regard as air."
"Where'd you find the greenie, Kli?" asked Brennand.
"He was stuck to the trunk more than forty feet up. His whole front fitted neatly into an indentation shaped like himself, and his back matched the trunk so perfectly that I couldn't see him until he moved uneasily as I got near him." He picked up the helmet. "It was a most wonderful sample of camouflage." He looked at the helmet with one eye, kept the other on the interested Brennand, made a gesture of disgust. "How about pulling down the pressure some place where higher forms of life can live in peace?"
"We'll pump out the port lock." Brennand promised. "And don't be so all-fired snooty, you caricature of a rubber spider."
"Bah!" said Kli, with great dignity. "Who invented chess? And who can't even play duck-on-the-rock without grabbing the grief?" With that insulting reference to Terrestrial inexpertness at chess, he slapped on his glassite dome. I pumped it down for him. "Thanks!" he said, through the diaphragm.
Now to get the low-down on the greenie.
CAPTAIN McNulty himself interviewed the native. The skipper sat grandly behind his metal desk, eyed the jittery captive with a mixture of pomposity and kindliness. The native stood before him, his black optics jerking around fearfully. At that close range you could see he was wearing a loincloth that matched his own skin. His back was several shades darker than his front, coarser, more fibrous, with little nodules here and there—perfect simulation of the surface of the trunk of the tree in which he'd sought refuge. Even his loincloth was darker at the back than at the front. His feet were broad and bare; the toes double-jointed and as long as the fingers of his hands. Except for the loincloth, he was completely naked and had no weapons. The queer chrysanthemum growing out of his chest attracted all eyes.
"Has he been given a meal?" asked the skipper, full of solicitude.
"He was offered one." Jay told him. "He refused it. As far as I can make out, he wants to go back to his tree."
"Hm-m-m," grunted McNulty. "In due time, in due time." He assumed the expression of a benevolent uncle, said to the native, "What's your name?"
The green one grasped the note of interrogation, waved his arms, broke into an untranslatable tirade. On and on he went, helping his gabble with many emphatic but incomprehensible gestures. His language was very liquid, his voice singsong.
"I see," murmured McNulty as the flood of talk petered out. He blinked at Jay Score. "Think this fellow is telepathic, like those lobster things were?"
"It is much to be doubted. I'd put him at the level of a Congo pygmy—maybe lower. He doesn't even possess a simple spear, let alone bow and arrow or a blowpipe."
"Yes, that's how he looks to me." Still maintaining his soothingly paternal air, McNulty went on. "All right, Jay. There's no common basis on which we can gain his understanding at the start, so I guess we'll have to create one. We'll dig up a natural linguist, set him to learning the rudiments of this fellow's language and teaching him some of ours."
"I've got the advantage of a mechanical memory—let me have a try," suggested Jay. He approached the green native, his huge, well-proportioned body moving quietly on the sponge rubber cushions of his dogs. The native didn't like his size or his bearing, neither did he approve of those brightly lit eyes. He backed away from Jay, backed right to the wall, his optics darting hither and thither.
Jay stopped as he saw the other's fear, slapped his own toppiece with a hand that could have knocked mine clean off my neck, he said, "Head." He did it half a dozen times, repeating, "Head, head."
The green one wasn't so stupid; he caught on, faltered, "Mah."
Touching his own head again, Jay said, inquiringly, "Mah?"
"Bya!" lilted the other, starting to recover his composure.
"See, it's dead easy," approved McNulty. "Mah—head; bya—yes,"
"Not necessarily," Jay contradicted. "It all depends upon how his mind translated my action. Mah might mean head, face, man, hair, god, mind, thought, or alien, or even the color black. If he's thinking of my hair and his own, then mah probably does mean black, while bya may mean not yes, but green."
"Oh, I hadn't thought of that." The skipper looked crushed.
"We'll have to carry on with this performance until we've picked up enough words to form lame sentences. Then we can deduce further meanings from the context. Give me a few days."
"Go ahead. Do your best, Jay. We can't expect to be able to talk turkey in the first five minutes. It isn't reasonable."
Taking our prisoner to the rest room, Jay summoned Minshull and Petersen. He thought three might just as well learn something as one. Minshull and Petersen were both hot on languages, speaking Esperanto, Ido, Venusian, low Martian and high Martian. They were the only ones aboard the ship who could give our chess maniacs a boiling in their own lingo.
I found Sam in the armory, waiting to hand in the stuff he'd taken out, and I said to him, "What did you see from the lifeboat, Sam?"
"Not so much. We weren't out long enough. Didn't get more than a hundred and twenty miles away. There was forest, nothing but forest with glades here and there. A couple of glades were the size of counties. The biggest of them lay at the end of a long lake. There were several rivers and streams."
"Any signs of life?"
"None." He gestured down the passage toward the rest room where Jay and the others were cross-examining the native. "It seems there's superior life in the forest, but you can detect no signs of it from above. Wilson's processing his reel—I doubt whether his camera caught anything that we missed."
"Ah, well." I said, "one twenty miles in one direction is nothing from which to estimate a world. I don't let myself be deluded, not since that drummer sold me a can of striped paint."
He chuckled. "Didn't it come out?"
"I laid it wrong side up," I told him.
It was right in the middle of that bantering that a powerful idea smote me. I followed him out of the armory, made a rush to the radio room. Steve Gregory was sitting by his instruments trying to look busy doing nothing. I was all set to wake him with my brain wave.
Chapter Four
AS STEVE looked up inquiringly, I said to him, "Hey, how about combing the bands?"
"Uh?"
"Remember those weird whistles and waterfalls you picked up on Mechanistria? Well, if anyone's radiating here, couldn't you detect 'em?"
"Sure." He kept his bushy eyebrows still for once, but spoiled it by waggling his ears. "If anyone was radiating."
"Go ahead and find out. It'll tell us something. What're you waiting for?"
"Have you kept those needlers cleaned and charged?" he asked.
I stared at him. "You bet I have! They're always ready for action. That's my job."
"And this one's mine," he said, dryly. He waved the ears again. "You're hours behind the times. I searched the ether immediately we landed, got nothing but a faint hiss on twelve point three meters. It was Rigel's characteristic discharge and came from that way. D'you think I'm that snake-armed snorer Sug Farn?"
"No, I don't. Sorry. Steve—it just struck me as a bright idea."
"Oh, it's O.K., sergeant," he said, amiably. "Every man to his job and every tail mechanic to his dirt." Idly he twiddled the shining dials of his slow-motion selectors.
The loud-speaker coughed as if it was clearing its throat, then announced in sharp tones, "Pip-pip-whop! pip-pip-whop!"
Nothing could have been better calculated to upset the determined serenity of his brows. I'll swear that after they'd entered his hair they continued over the top, down the back and lodged under his collar.
"Morse," he said, in the complaining tone of a hurt child.
"I always thought Morse was a code, not a mode," I remarked. "Anyway, if it is Morse, you'll be able to translate it." I paused as the loud-speaker shouted me down with, "Pip-pipper-pee-eep-whop!" then I concluded, "Every cat to his ash can."
" 'Tain't Morse," he contradicted himself. "But it's spark signals." He might have frowned if it hadn't taken too long to drag the brows back. Giving me one of those tragic looks you get sometimes, he snatched a pad, started recording the impulses.
The spacesuits, pom-pom chargers and other things had to be done, so I left him, returned to the armory, got on with my work. He was still fiddling around when darkness fell. So were Jay and his gang, but not for long.
The sun sunk, its long, greenish streamers faded from the sky and a velvet pall covered the forest and the glade. I ambled along the passage toward the gallery and was passing the rest room when its door jerked open and the green native burst out. His face was desperate, his legs going as if there was a thousand international smackers tied to the tape. Minshull yelped somewhere back of him as he jumped full tilt into my ready arms. The greenie squirmed like an eel, beat at my face, tried to kick my legs off my torso with his bare feet. His rough, harsh body exuded a weak odor of pineapple and cinnamon.
The others pounced out, got him tight, talked to him in halting words until he relaxed. His eyes shifty, anxious, he jabbered excitedly to Jay Score, making urgent gestures and waving his woody arms around in a way that reminded me of branches beating the air. Jay soothed him with fair if faltering speech. It looked like they'd picked up enough words to get along, though not enough to understand each other perfectly. Still, they were managing.
EVENTUALLY, Jay said to Petersen, "Tell the skipper I want to let Kala go."
Petersen cleared off, came back in a minute. "He says do whatever you think is best."
"Good." Conducting the native to the opening of the starboard lock, Jay yapped to him briefly, let him go. The greenie dived off the rim. Someone in the forest must have owed him for a loincloth because his feet made rapid brushing sounds as he fled across the turf. Jay stood on the rim, his flaming orbs staring into outer gloom.
"Why let him go, Jay?"
Turning, he said to me, "I've tried to persuade him to come back at sunup. He may, or he may not—it remains to be seen. We didn't have time to get much out of him, but his language is exceedingly simple and we picked up enough of it to learn that he calls himself Kala of the tribe of Ka. All members of his tribe are named Ka-something such as Kalee, Ka'noo, or Kaheer."
