by Jerry Oltion
Allen let out a long breath. "It's been a busy day, that's for sure. Running from the cops this morning, and talking to alien butterflies by nightfall."
Judy could still hear the squeal of tires as the cars pulled up in front of the house. "I wonder how Trent and Donna are doing?" she asked.
"I'll bet they're okay. In a town that size, they probably went to school with half the cops. They're probably having more trouble with the pipe we cut than anything else."
"I hope it wasn't a gas line." Judy imagined the fireball that could have engulfed the house, and suddenly her euphoria fell away into guilt. What if they'd been hurt? She'd been so caught up in her own problems and her own adventures that she hadn't really considered the mess they'd left behind, but now that she had time to think about it, she realized she and Allen had been agents of chaos on a personal level as well as a global level. Somehow, thinking that they might have hurt Trent and Donna seemed the worse of the two.
And Dale. If the Feds had hacked through his security, he could be behind bars by now. They might not link him to the bank robberies, but they would know he was laundering money, and they would probably accuse him of drug running if they couldn't pin anything else on him. Shit. Why did things always have to work out like that? Trent and Donna hadn't done anything wrong, and neither had Dale, at least not to Judy or Allen. But because of their generosity, now they were all in trouble.
She wondered what was going on elsewhere. Was the government messing with her family, or Allen's? She hadn't even called her dad the whole time she'd been in Wyoming, for fear the call would be traced. She'd meant to call him before they left, but there'd been no time. Damn the government and their paranoia anyway. Things could have gone so smoothly if they hadn't overreacted. But no, they had to panic, and now everyone was running around in circles. She imagined the various other governments of the world were doing the same. Instead of building spaceships, they were probably all frantically building hyperdrive bombers. What if someone actually nuked New York, or London, or Paris? That would be bad enough, but she could just imagine the flurry of retaliation from it.
"You still awake?" Allen asked softly.
"Yeah." Judy sighed. "I'm sitting here beating myself up over all the trouble we've caused."
"Hmm?" He cleared his throat. "Weren't you feeling good just a minute ago?"
"I was, but then it hit me how much confusion we left behind."
"Oh. Every silver lining has its black cloud, eh?" He said it in a joking tone of voice, but it still stung.
"I'm just thinking about things, that's all."
"Okay." She didn't need light to see the gesture that went with that one word: hands held out in front of him, palms toward her.
She hated it when people did that, but she didn't want to get into it with Allen. Not now. She just settled back against the wall of the tank and rested her head in the groove between two of the wide corrugations.
She might have fallen asleep, or she might have just been drifting, but a noise from outside brought her upright in an instant. It was a sucking sound, like someone pulling their foot out of the mud, and it sounded so real and so close that she half expected to hear whoever was out there say "Damn it!" as they lost their shoe.
It happened again.
"Did you hear that?" she whispered.
From Allen's side of the tank came only soft breathing.
She stuck her feet under the auxiliary hyperdrive and jostled his beanbag. "Allen! Wake up!"
"Mmm?"
The sucking noise came closer.
"Something's out there! Something big."
"What? Where?"
"Outside!" She felt for the gun, but couldn't find it on the top of the bucket where she had left it. She patted around among the food and spacesuits at the base of it, but she couldn't find it there, either.
"Where's the gun? Have you got it?"
"No, I—"
Something scraped against the side of the tank, and they both yelped in terror. "Yaah!" Allen banged against something. "Ow! Should we jump? Should we jump?"
"Not yet." If they did that with both hatches open, they would lose all their air in one big whoosh. Judy reached up and felt for Allen's hatch and slammed it closed, but instead of closing her own, she snatched one of the flashlights mounted between them, ripped it loose from its duct-tape loop, and stood up, flipping on the light and aiming it out into the night.
It still had the plastic bag on the end. The sudden glare was like a strobe going off right in front of her face; she yanked it free and shined the light outward again, hoping whatever was out there had been blinded just as badly.
When her eyes recovered, there was nothing to see. She swept the beam around in a full circle, but all she saw were trees and bushes. No eyes glowing in the light, no shadowy figures slipping furtively into cover; just the same fernlike trees they had seen during the day. One of the rubbery branches on the closest tree had drooped down toward the tank, and that was apparently what had scraped against it. She couldn't see what might have made the sucking sound, but nothing was moving now. She couldn't hear anything, either, but the pounding of her heart could have masked a jet engine.
"What's out there?" Allen asked. "Do you see anything?"
"No. Just the forest." She waved the light around, trying to spot anything that might be trying to sneak up on them, but the only motion she saw was the shadows she created. Her sleeping bag had slid down around her ankles. She kicked it off, instinctively freeing her feet in case she had to run, even though she knew that flight in this case meant a completely different thing. The light was bright enough to make her squint, even after her eyes had adapted. She waved it overhead and it cast a widening searchlight cone into the sky, but there was nothing up there, either, so she shined it back on the tree.
"It's gone."
"You sure?"
"No." Whatever had made that noise hadn't made a peep since. If it could move away silently, it would have approached silently.
She shined her light at the branch that had brushed the tank, a rubbery, maybe-hydraulic branch like the one that stayed put for a few seconds after she had flexed it. This one angled down from the trunk toward her, the tuft of greenery at its tip just a foot or so from the plastic. She didn't remember any trees being that close before. In fact, she was nearly certain the closest one had been twenty or thirty feet away.
How had Sherlock Holmes put it? "When you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Something like that.
If that was the case, then the trees were sneaking up on them.
31
"I think it's the trees," Judy said.
"The trees?"
She risked a glance down into the tank. There was enough light reflecting off the fronds overhead to illuminate Allen's face in pale green. He was half out of his sleeping bag, hands hovering over the computer, its screen providing a bluish counterpoint to the green light from above.
"There's nothing else out here. And I'd swear one of 'em's closer than it was before." She looked back out, but nothing had moved since she'd switched on the light. At least she didn't think so. It was hard to wrap her mind around the concept that something like a tree could move. Millennia of evolution had hard-wired her brain to accept plants as part of the landscape, not as something that could walk around.
But that sucking sound . . . She shined the light down at the roots, and sure enough, she could see where they had pulled free of the ground. They lay on top of the soil now, but they were slowly working their way back into it, like earthworms in a freshly spaded garden. And behind the tree, thirty or forty feet back where Judy remembered one standing before, was an open spot with gouges in the mat of tiny fern where the roots had ripped free.
"Jesus," she said. "Have a look at this."
Allen popped open his hatch and pulled the second flashlight from its tape, then stood up and shined it out into the night.
"There," Judy said
, aiming her beam at the roots and the torn-up ground behind them. They watched the tree nestle into place. Judy kept an eye on the branches, ready to duck if one of them took a swipe at her, but they stayed put.
Allen swept his light around in a circle. "Is it just that one?"
"I don't know. It's the only one I actually saw moving, but they all look closer to me."
"That could just be the light."
She supposed it could. All those shadows behind them made them look like they were leaning forward. And she didn't remember exactly where they were to begin with. It was like when she rearranged the furniture in her apartment; it was hard to remember how it looked before. But the tree standing next to the Getaway was unmistakable. If it had been there when they landed, their parachute would have snagged in its branches. And they had seen its roots in motion. It wasn't doing anything now. The branch that had brushed the side of the tank was still there, still stretched out toward them like the arm of a kid poking at an anthill with a stick. The tiny fronds at the end of it fluttered softly in the breeze—except the air was dead still.
"Hello?" Judy said. Her voice sounded small and flat.
She reached out to the end of the branch and gingerly touched a frond. It was soft, velvety, like a moth's wings. A little shudder passed through the entire tree, and the branch slowly rose back into the air to join the others.
This was totally outside Judy's realm of experience. "What now?" she asked.
"I don't know." Allen shined his light to either side, then turned and swept it behind him again, but none of the other trees had budged since he and Judy had switched on their lights. The tree's roots had stopped moving. They weren't buried all the way in the ground, but it didn't look like it was going anyplace soon. Of course until a few minutes ago, Judy would have sworn it never had moved.
"I don't think we're being attacked," Allen said. "Do you?"
"No. It looks more like . . ."
"What?"
She had to struggle to say the words. This was a tree they were talking about! But she had heard it move, and had seen it anchor itself down again. And that outstretched branch. "I... I think it's just curious."
Allen took a deep breath, then nodded slowly. "I would be, if something dropped out of the sky right at my feet. But it's had all afternoon to check us out. How come it didn't do anything until now?"
"I have no idea."
They watched the tree for more signs of animation, but nothing moved. After maybe five minutes of standing there in the hatch holding a flashlight, her shoulders growing cold in the night air, Judy said, "I don't think it's going to do anything more."
"You want to go back to sleep?" Allen asked incredulously.
"No, but I don't want to stand here all night waiting for a tree to move, either. Let's try something else."
"Like what?"
"Well, it waited until we'd gone to bed before it moved before; let's try switching out the lights and hunkering down again. Maybe it'll think we've gone to sleep again and come a little closer." Allen thought that over for a few seconds. "Do we want it to come closer?"
"I want it to do something."
He looked at the tree, then back at her again. "This is nuts, you know that?"
"You got a better idea?"
In lieu of an answer, he simply switched off his flashlight and ducked down so his head was even with the rim of the hatch. Judy did the same, dropping all the way down and hunting around in the dark until she found the pistol. It had fallen off the auxiliary hyperdrive into her spacesuit helmet. She pulled her sleeping bag up over her shoulders, leaving her feet free to move, and stood back up. They waited. Five minutes seemed like forever. Ten became an eternity. She was just about convinced that they might as well settle back in to sleep when the tree made a soft creak like the noise of a door swinging open. Judy rose up just enough to look over the edge, but even with her eyes adapted to the dark again, there wasn't enough light to see more than faint shadows in the deeper darkness. The creak sounded again, and this time she could tell it was coming from the ground. It grew louder until it became a rumble that could be felt as well as heard, then there was a slurp and a pop. A moment later the whole sequence repeated, then a third time, and a fourth.
Judy rested her thumb on the hammer of the pistol, ready to cock it and fire if the tree reached in through the hatch. She had no idea what part of its anatomy to shoot for, but from inside the tank she didn't exactly have a wide field of view to choose from. Fortunately she didn't have to try; the squelching noises picked up their pace and a dark shadow moved away overhead, leaving stars in its wake. The ground shook with heavy thumps, like the footsteps of a giant. Judy stood up a little higher, and as long as she didn't look straight at it, she could see motion in the darkness. Receding. The tree was running away.
There was a loud crash and a splintering of branches. Judy flipped on her flashlight just in time to see the tree smash headlong into one of the others that hadn't moved. It teetered, nearly falling over, then stretched out a root and caught itself. It lurched to the side, roots rippling like snakes and branches waving wildly for balance, and it staggered another couple of steps before coming to a stop.
"Turn that off!" Allen hissed.
"Why?" Judy asked, but she killed the light.
"Because I don't want it to come back and trample us, that's why."
"I don't think there's much chance of that," Judy said. "It's terrified of us."
"Yeah, right. That's why it stops every time we turn a light on it." He had a point, but it wasn't necessarily the right one. "Maybe the light blinds it, and it doesn't want to move if it can't see."
"And maybe the light attracts it. Plants are phototropic, after all."
"Earth plants are." But she left her light off, straining to see by starlight alone. The tree remained motionless for another minute or two, then, just as Judy thought to turn on the video cameras and see if they could pick up an image in this dim a light, it creaked to life again. She held her breath, gripping the pistol tight in her hand, but she relaxed when the tree thumped off deeper into the forest.
To heck with the video cameras. When they could no longer hear or feel the vibration from the tree's headlong flight, Judy flipped on her light again and shined it at the ground around the tank. The fern carpet was ripped up like a bus seat after a street gang had tagged it. She checked the base of the other trees, but they hadn't moved an inch.
"Well, that's a relief," she said softly. "At least all of 'em aren't mobile." Allen sat back down inside the tank. "One is crazy enough. You happy now?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You wanted strangeness. I'd say you got it."
She knelt down and put the gun on the bucket again, then tucked her feet into her sleeping bag and settled back against the wall. "I certainly can't complain."
There was a tiny flash of blue-green light from Allen's half of the tank: his wristwatch's backlight.
"What time is it?" she asked. She had taken her watch off when she'd settled in to sleep, and didn't want to hunt for it in the dark.
"About three."
"a.m.?"
"Yep."
It wasn't nearly that late local time, but it had already been afternoon when they'd left Rock Springs. They should have picked a landing spot closer to the night half of the planet if they'd wanted to keep their biorhythms in synch with the day/night cycle. Of course they had no idea how long this place's days were, so that might not have lasted through the night anyway.
It didn't matter. In her years as an astronaut, Judy had learned how to adjust to practically any schedule. As long as she got a couple hours of sleep for every ten or so she spent awake, she could function indefinitely.
She was falling behind tonight, but there were still hours of darkness to go. Provided no more inquisitive trees came to see who had landed in their midst, she should be okay. 32
The sun had just cleared the horizon when Judy woke. She stretched lazily a
s the first rays lit up the Getaway, then found her watch in the corner where she'd put it last night and checked the time. 10:38
a.m. Here was another dream come true: she'd found a planet where there were more than twenty-four hours in the day.
Allen was already awake and bustling around outside. Judy heard him muttering to himself, or so she thought at first, but then she heard the squawk of a radio and another voice answering him. Tippet! He'd come back already!
She had never undressed last night; now she slid her sleeping bag down over her feet, put on her boots, and climbed out of the tank.
The air was chilly, but not so bad that she needed a coat. She looked at the trees, half expecting to see them all gathered in a circle around the Getaway, but they weren't. They were spaced evenly, their canopies giving each other plenty of room to collect sunlight, just like they had been yesterday. Judy couldn't find the one that the curious one had smashed into last night. None of them had broken branches or gaps in their foliage.
The ground cover had repaired itself, too. A couple of tons of tree running amok had ripped up the fern and left big gouges everywhere, but that was all smoothed over now and covered with fresh greenery. That stuff would be worth its weight in gold for no-maintenance lawns if it could be imported safely, but Judy doubted it could. Non-native plants that spread by seed or vine were bad enough; plants that actually picked up and walked from place to place would be an ecologist's nightmare. Allen was sitting on the ground with his back against the big rock, holding the computer in his lap, and Tippet was standing on his right hand, riding the top knuckle of his index finger while he typed and manipulated the mouse pointer with his thumb on the glide pad.
"Good morning," Judy said, walking toward them.
Allen looked up at her with a big grin. She had seen that look on his face before, and she was just about to ask him what new kind of mischief he'd dreamed up when the radio—a walkie-talkie that he'd propped up on the rock beside him—crackled with momentary static, then a clear voice said, "Good morning, Judy. Allen and I have been discussing the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the ramifications of Bell's inequality. Would you care to join us?" She stopped with one foot still upraised to take a step, then slowly lowered it to the fern. "You what?"
