Collected Fiction, page 532
Ferguson had heard sensitive men complain before now about the vast, unfeeling indifference of the forest to human suffering. He never had thought to walk through a forest whose menace was too close a focus of attention, a wilderness that watched without eyes and listened without ears to those who trod its ways.
The scent of wild honeysuckle was very strong.
It was Cairns who found Groot.
The big man lay crosswise of the trail they followed, half shrouded in a smother of vines and leaves so that they might have passed him by if the scientist’s keen eye had not caught a glimpse of the Dutchman’s blue shirt between the leaves.
They tried to pull the leaves away from him, though they knew from the way his body rolled when they tugged at it that he was dead. And the vines would not let him go.
“He’s tied up,” Sampson said. “She tied him in the vines and left him.”
“Those lianas?” Cairns said. “No. Look.” And he held back some of the leaves of the large vine.
They all looked, and Ferguson whistled a long soft note, and Parry, who did not believe in such things, had to turn away and go back a little down the trail.
For Groot had been crushed to death as by a boa constrictor, one of the great snake of the Amazon that can wind its monstrous coils leisurely about a man and squeeze him into pulp. But the coils that had crushed Groot were the green coils of a vine. That was unmistakable. From thick stems as big as a man’s wrist to tiny tendrils winding thinner than grass-blades about him, the vine had flung its deadly embrace about the man’s body and tightened, tightened until breath stopped and bones gave way and the liana had sunk deep into Groot’s flesh, killing him.
CAIRNS dropped the dead man’s wrist “Still warm,” he said. “This must have happened lately. Not more than an hour ago, even in this heat.”
“He was dead before it happened,” Sampson said slowly, staring at Groot’s suffused face. “He had to be! How could that thing grow around him if—if he’d been alive?” Cairns answered almost casually.
“I hope you never find out, Sampson.” Ferguson looked at him. “This doesn’t surprise you too much. Is it part of what you’ve—forgotten?”
“Maybe.” Cairns stood up, his gaze searching the forest. “Yes, maybe it is.”
“Are there many of them? Do the things—drop out of the trees? We’ve got to know what the danger is?!”
“It depends on how near we are to the valley. I don’t think we’re in danger yet. It’s only when she’s near that things like this happen.” His lips tightened as he looked down. “Poor sentimental fool! I warned him not to trust her.”
Parry had come back.
“Look,” he said abruptly. “The vine—” It was moving. Ferguson had his gun out almost before the first stir had breathed softly through the leaves, dreadfully as if Groot were coming to sluggish life among the coils of the thing that had killed him.
But there was nothing to shoot at. And it was the vine that stirred. A cluster of green buds was lifting itself on a slender stem, slowly, with a smooth motion a little like a snake’s. Other clusters rose one by one among the leaves. The men watched silently.
A bud began to unfold, showing a fringe of blue inside the green. Another, and another. The vine bloomed as they stood there, too unsure to move. The whole process could not have taken more than ten minutes from the first rustle of motion to the last unfolding cluster. The vine lay there looking up at them, then, with cluster upon cluster of blue flowers, white-ringed, like blue eyes. The blue of Groot’s eyes . . .
Ferguson felt sweat trickle down his ribs. He had an unpleasant, illogical feeling that if Groot’s eyes had been brown, these flowers would have unfolded brown centers to stare at them.
“Filthy thing!” Parry said. He kicked at the root of the thing. The leaves writhed away from his heavy boots and a few of the tendrils began to untwist and grope blindly in the air, like antennae.
Ferguson found where the brown static vanished underground. He pushed Parry roughly aside and with two blows of his machete severed the root. It writhed like a snake under the edge of the blade. And, cut, it began to wilt almost instantly. The leaves curled up, the blue flowers closed slowly. Ferguson felt obscurely as if he, and not the vine, had murdered Groot as he watched those impossibly familiar blue eyes fold shut.
They buried the Dutchman beside the trail.
“Do you want to go on?” Cairns asked them then.
They said that they did and again began to plod through the jungle. Men who are hungry for wealth can be very stubborn . . .
“There it is,” Cairns said on the third day, pausing at the head of a little valley and holding back a swinging branch to clear the view ahead. “There’s the gate. Your radium’s beyond, and my—my girl.”
There was hate in his voice when he said that, and dread.
They went down the narrow cleft and across a grassy slope slowly, not sure what to expect. Serpent vines writhing at them out of the trees? Jaguars screaming as they sprang? Unguessable dangers lurking just within the opening?
Yet, after all, there was nothing. A low line of hills closed the end of the valley, leaving an arched cave-mouth open to the valley within. They could see greenery and sunlight through the short tunnel.
“Jaeklyn’s valley?” Ferguson asked. Cairns nodded.
“Yes. I remember about this part of it Nothing wrong here. Jacklyn and his wife found the place, set up a station not far away. It was wild jungle then. It still is—with variations.” He grimaced nervously.
“No, I don’t remember after all. But I’ve got to go on in. If any of you want to change your minds, this is the time to do it.”
He did not wait for an answer. He shifted his pack on his shoulders and marched forward with an almost somnambulistic directness. Ferguson kept close behind, though his stomach was tight with anticipation and his skin felt abnormally sensitive, as if it were trying to develop eye-cells all over to watch from every side. A man might have a thousand eyes here, and still not be wholly safe.
ABROAD flagged path led down from the cave opening, through flowering green trees toward a distant house half concealed among the leaves. The valley, glimpsed from its entrance here, dipped down in a gentle bowl and rose on the other side to lap the far line of hills with a tide of jungle. Except for the path and the house, there was no sign of human presence. But the valley itself looked odd. Ferguson blinked. It looked wrong. He stared. There was no breeze, but the jungle was in motion, subtle, undulating motion that not even a breeze would have wholly explained.
Sounds rose from it, too, sounds that Ferguson had never heard before.
Thin, sweet, ringing noises, a soft chattering that seemed almost to carry a tune. And once a deep sound, resonant, echoing, rolled through the jungle until the very earth seemed to vibrate underfoot. It might have been a jaguar roaring, but it sounded as if the earth itself had spoken with a hollow voice whose tones resounded through all the empty spaces of the underground.
“What’s that?” Parry asked sharply. “Echo,” Ferguson said, when Cairns did not reply. “Maybe a big cat.”
“You’re crazy,” Parry said. “I know what a jaguar sounds like. And that wasn’t it.”
Ferguson shrugged. Cairns raised his arm, pointing.
“This is where Groot and I stood,” he said. “I remember now. That’s the path we followed when we found—her. Jacklyn built that house and the path. He and his Indios, years ago. She’s probably waiting for us.”
“How would she know we followed?” Ferguson asked, staring at the distant house. Cairns grunted.
“How do you know when you stub your toe? The valley—she’s a part of it. I remember!” His voice changed. “Outside, anywhere, she can summon the animals. Nearer to her own place—here—she can talk to the trees and vines. But in this valley—”
He gave Ferguson a blind, strange look and moved on down the path without finishing the sentence.
Ferguson followed, wondering a little about mutations. The scientist Jacklyn, working with forces too inconceivably vast to harness, setting free unknown radiations that must have flickered through the jungle like heatwaves, striking the encircling hills and echoing back again until everything in the valley was saturated with a power that could twist germ-plasm out of its time-accustomed paths, and produce—what? Anything. Anything at all. Animate vines—or—or vegetable animals!
What had become of Jacklyn, his wife, his Indios? Hard radiations could kill. Had the child, the girl, growing up in the midst of that furnace-hot cauldron of intangible waves, been the only human creature who survived? And if that were true, what unimaginable changes had the forces wrought upon her? Not only to the eye—her hair and her eyes and her pale ivory skin were strange enough—but inwardly, and mentally, and in other ways one could not even guess?
A small animal dropped from a tree and scurried up the path before them, curiously unafraid.
It looked like a squirrel, thought there was an odd tinge of green to its brown coat when the wind ruffled it.
Sampson, who was nearest the edge of the road, snatched out his revolver, a light calibered weapon, and threw a quick shot after the little beast.
“Fresh meat,” he said briefly.
The bullet took the smell greenish thing dead-center. It catapulted head over heels down the road with the momentum of its flight.
Then—Ferguson’s eyes widened—it picked itself up, shook its tail and scurried on, paying no attention to the men behind it. Dumfounded, they paused in a group and watched the creature pounce upon a vine that lay looping out into the path. Its sharp teeth flashed. It severed the vine and a thin milky juice gushed from the cut end. The squirrel sucked greedily.
The vine gave a convulsive lunge and a great coil of it came down out of the masking underbrush to seize the squirrel in a green, serpentine embrace. There was an interval of violent activity. When it ended, the vine lay in sluggish, victorious folds about the animal, and a spray of cup-shaped flowers was creeping forward to fasten sucker-mouths upon the furry body.
Cautiously the men came nearer. The vine moved a little, but that was all. Machete poised, Ferguson bent A shudder crawled down his spine, but he forced himself to touch the small animal’s pelt.
He jumped back, his breath catching. It was quite impossible, of course!
Parry stared at him. “What’s the matter?”
“Grass,” Ferguson said unevenly. “I’ll swear it’s grass—not fur.”
CAIRNS laughed without mirth.
“I remember,” he said. “See the thing’s tail? It isn’t fur either, it’s fern. Or it looks and feels like it, a big cluster of fern, adapted somehow. That isn’t a squirrel anyhow. It isn’t an animal. It’s an adaptation, something like a tumbleweed a million times evolved. A plant that feeds on the juices of other plants—when it’s lucky. No wonder the shot didn’t hurt it! It hasn’t any nervous system. Heaven knows how it does work inside.”
“Let’s go on to the house,” Ferguson said grimly.
The building at the end of the path was very quiet amid its encircling trees. It was a stone house, they saw as they came nearer. Pale stone pillars supported a tiny portico, and the walls were great slabs of stone. The most curious aspect of the house was its elaborate carving of leaves and tendrils and flowers, twining over the pillars and adorning the walls and framing the windows in delicate traceries of stone.
“Indio work?” Parry asked. “The carving, I mean?”
Cairns chuckled harshly and kicked at something in the path before him.
“Look,” he said. “Here’s more—carving!” His boot lashed out again.
There was a long garland of the stone flowers lying across their path. Cairns trampled on it and kicked the splintered fragments away.
“The stuff grows,” he muttered.
“Grows?” Ferguson said. “Not—but that’s stone.”
“I know. Stone evolving into plant, or maybe plant into stone. It grows, though. Groot and I—”
He paused suddenly, staring. Ferguson followed his gaze and felt a suffocating closeness in his chest. There was no real reason. It was not fear, exactly.
It was only that in the doorway of the house, under an arch of stone flowers, the girl stood, watching them with a bright black stare.
CHAPTER IV
Singing Plants
HER gaze was strangely blank. She saw them, but she saw the trees and the pathway too with the same indifferent acquiescence. And here, in her own place, there had come upon her a—a change, a subtle enhancement of the strangeness Ferguson had sensed about the girl from the first moment.
The spun silver hair was white fire in the sunlight. Her posture had altered, as though her muscles could flow like water. Ferguson thought of a jaguar pacing the confines of a cage, and the same feline in its native habitat. There was a difference, certainly, though this girl was not feline in the least degree.
It was ease—That was the quality, he saw now. Utter, placid self-confidence, untroubled by the tiny neuroses that attack civilized and uncivilized men alike. It was the air a goddess might have had, an invulnerable goddess armed with the power of Jove himself.
She was not a Circe—no. For this girl would not care about human beings. She would not trouble herself to change men to swine. As those cool, calm black eyes met his briefly, Ferguson had a troubling thought that the girl did not even regard him as a man or whether he was of the same species. She was not the same species as himself. No human could be one with the forest and the ground itself, a confident unity that hung unspoken but clear enough in the quiet air.
This was the home of the goddess.
Cairns was walking slowly forward, his face white as the girl’s. She regarded him as she might have looked at a squirrel-thing scurrying past on green, insensate feet. She came out of the door slowly, her hands sliding across the doorposts as if they caressed the stone-vined columns, and Ferguson thought madly that the house felt her touch and responded.
She moved away toward the jungle. Cairns’ warning cry stopped Parry as he started in pursuit.
“Careful! Remember Groot.”
“The devil with the girl,” Sampson growled. “It’s the radium we want.”
But Cairns was opening his pack.
“The hypodermic,” he said. “Help me, Ferguson. This time I won’t fail. I’ll find out . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Find out what?” Ferguson said.
“I don’t know. Odd.” He turned a puzzled gaze on Ferguson. “I thought I knew, but now that I’m back here, my mind isn’t clear. There’s something I’ve got to remember.” His jaw tightened. “But I’ve got to get the girl out of this valley! I’m clear on that, anyhow!”
His hands had been busy assembling and loading the hypodermic. The girl was a pale flash of shining hair among the trees before they were ready. But she was still in sight Cairns started recklessly after her, and the others followed more cautiously, Ferguson scowling and troubled.
She saw them coming. She paused briefly. Then she too began to run, easily, lightly, the trees drawing back out of her way.
“Wait!” Cairns called. “Wait!”
She laughed, a thin, sweet, inhuman sound like water falling over stones. But at the sound of it, the forest stirred.
The forest—woke!
Ferguson had only a flashing, nightmare impression of trees leaning ponderously forward in his path. Before him a great furrow of the earth’s surface rose like a watery wave, slowly, deliberately, into a crest too steep to climb. A wall that guarded the girl. The ground shuddered underfoot like the skin of a monstrous beast trying to shake them off.
Ferguson fell, his heart pounding, his throat dry with panic, in the midst of a welter of leaves and whipping branches that scored his face. He struck the ground and lay there, but he did not lie still. The earth rocked sickeningly.
It passed. The forest was still again. Ferguson reached out to pat the moist earth tentatively. He got up.
Cairns was on his feet a little distance away, and Parry and Sampson, with pale, blind, incredulous faces, were rising unsteadily. The forest whispered. It was still, but little sounds were audible; shrill, purring noises, a whine from high above, a growling among the leaves.
Ferguson sat down on a rock and took out a cigarette with trembling fingers. He said nothing till twin jets of smoke had spurted from his nostrils.
“Earthquake?” he asked Cairns, then.
The scientist was examining the hypodermic, miraculously unbroken.
“I’ve got to find her,” he said dully.
“Was that an earthquake?”
Cairns whirled on him, eyes blazing.
“How should I know?” he snarled. “Do you think this is easy for me, not being able to remember what horrible things may exist here—doing this blind? I gave you your chance to go back! Go back now, if you want to—all of you!”
SAMPSON mumbled something.
“You were here once before and got out again okay,” Parry said. “I’m keeping my mind on that.”
Ferguson looked at his cigarette. “He got out okay. Yeah. But without his memory. We don’t know what may have happened in here, that time.”
“So it was an earthquake,” Sampson said. “What about the radium?”
Parry moved uneasily.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe—”
“Maybe we couldn’t get out now if we tried,” Ferguson said.
Cairns was peering through the forest under his palm.
“I know where she’s gone. She—yes, she went there the first time. I remember. There’s a cavern over toward the hills. I think Jacklyn must have had his lab there, underground. I don’t know what’s inside, but there’s radium all around the cave entrance. She was—” He hesitated. “—she was there when Groot and I came.”
Ferguson stood up. Perhaps he, more than any of the others, sensed the unearthly implications of what had already happened. He knew that the dangers all around them were incalculable because they were based on an unknown quantity. And that realization seemed to have hardened him, stiffened his spine. That was one solidity he could be sure of—the cold, grim, selfless determination of the scientific investigator. At least, until that too failed him.
