by Jerry Oltion
"Maybe the trees run away," Allen said.
Maybe they did. But if that was the case, then why didn't they run away from people with axes?
And why had the one last night run away from them when they simply shined a light at it?
They might get the chance to answer that question soon, or at least gather some more data. The sun was setting behind the mountains; in another hour or two, it would be dark. Not a moment too soon, either. The hike to the river and back had evidently taken more out of Judy than she had thought; she was definitely ready to call it a day.
While it was still light enough to see, she set to work boiling water, then pouring it into the three empty beer cans where it could cool off and remain sterile. That way they would have water ready to drink in the morning, and they wouldn't have to carry the stove with them if they decided to explore some more. The wind in the treetops picked up while she was doing that, and she made sure the stove was stable. She didn't want it tipping over and catching the ground cover on fire, especially not with the air thirty percent oxygen—and at higher air pressure than on Earth at that. Allen puttered around the Getaway Special, tightening straps and checking the parachutes to make sure everything was ready to go, then as the sky darkened and the shadows deepened beneath the trees, they climbed inside the tank and settled in for the night. Judy put the water bucket back where it had been before, and carefully nested the open circuitry beside it. The open beer cans fit tightly into the corrugations in the side of the tank, where they wouldn't get knocked over in the night. Judy's watch said 3:42. That seemed awfully early for sunset, but then she realized it was 3:42 a.m. The longer day here had lulled her into forgetting the time. And she had only eaten one real meal today. No wonder she was so tired.
She wondered how Tippet was holding up. "How long is the day on your home planet?" she asked him. For all their talk today, there were still a million things they didn't know about each other. He had settled in on top of the main hyperdrive engine, where he would be safe from human clumsiness in the dark. Allen had set his walkie-talkie on the water bucket so its speaker wouldn't blast Tippets ears every time he spoke. "Our day is nearly twice as long as here," Tippet said. "What about yours?"
"Shorter," Judy said. "It's already early morning by our clocks."
"Does that cause difficulties for you?" he asked.
"A little. We'll be okay after a little sleep."
Allen had already crawled into his sleeping bag. "That's exactly what I intend do if you two will quit yakking," he said. "Wake me up if anything interesting happens." Tippet waited a few seconds, then said, "Allen! A member of my overmind has just confirmed the reliability a new method to differentiate between skkttp and sttkkp during power-up."
"What?"
"You said to wake you if—"
"Interesting to me," Allen said.
"You didn't specify that. Ha, ha, ha."
"Very funny."
Judy giggled, only partially at Tippet's joke. There was an alien staying the night in her spaceship!
And they were lying low to see if an ambulatory tree would come for a visit again tonight. When she stopped to think about it, she either had to laugh or scream.
She switched out the light and settled into her own sleeping bag, leaving it unzipped so she could get out of it in a hurry if she had to. She listened for sounds from outside, but the forest was silent save for the soft whisper of air moving through the tops of the trees. She focused on it, letting it soothe her jangled nerves, until she drifted off to sleep.
The smoke was thick enough to mask the neon Open sign in the window, and the jukebox was blasting out a rap rampage at top volume, but Judy didn't care. She was just diving into her second helping of batter-fried butterfly with hearts of palm on the side when Tippet's voice cut through the dream.
"Wake up! Wake up! It's coming!"
She sat up, instantly awake, her heart already hammering. There was a deep bass rumble that came through the ground more than the air, accompanied by the same creaking noise and wet slurping sound that she had heard last night. It seemed much louder than before, as if the entire forest were on the move this time.
She yanked her flashlight free from its duct-tape loop and made sure the plastic bag wasn't in the way of the beam this time, but she didn't turn it on yet.
She couldn't see a thing in the dark. She couldn't hear Allen moving, either. "Allen?" she whispered.
"Allen, wake up."
"I'm up," he said. Soft blue light blossomed from his side of the tank: the computer waking up from
"suspend" mode.
Tippet was on the rim of Judy's hatch.
"What do you see?" she asked.
"Three trees are approaching us from uphill. The others are moving out of their way." Judy felt for the pistol with her left hand, got her finger on the trigger and her thumb on the hammer, then stuck her head up through the hatch. There was just enough starlight to see the forest opening up like a crowd of peasants when the king passes through, leaving a wide avenue for the dark silhouettes of three short but bulky-looking trees that shook the ground as they stomped down the slope toward the Getaway Special.
"I don't like the looks of this," she said. "Get ready on that hyperdrive." Allen snorted. "If we jump now, you'll get blown out into space in your pajamas."
"I didn't say 'jump'; I just said get ready. I'll close the hatches if we have to bail out."
"You'd better." Allen turned on his video monitor and swiveled his camera to face the oncoming trees. Judy looked down at it once and saw three ghostly images on the screen, then she looked back out into the night again. The surveillance cameras gave a clearer image, but if she had to shoot, she needed to keep her eyes dark-adapted.
Tippet was filming, too. The trees slowed down when they came within fifty feet or so, but they kept advancing one cautious step at a time.
"What do you think?" Judy asked him. "Are they just curious, or are they going to try to trample us?
Or both?"
"I don't know," he replied. "I hear a great deal of high-frequency vocal communication between them, and in the surrounding forest. Hold up a walkie-talkie and let's see what they do if I echo some of it back to them."
"They're talking?" After seeing the trees' reaction—or lack of it—to the French landing party, Judy had figured them for the vegetable equivalent of cows, but cows didn't talk. Tippet said, "It has the give and take of speech, but that's not necessarily what it is. It could also be mating calls, or territorial warnings, or simple echo-location."
Judy couldn't hear anything but their footsteps—or was that "rootsteps"? But Tippet evidently had a wider hearing range than she did. Whether the walkie-talkies had the fidelity to handle it was anybody's guess, but she tucked the pistol in her waistband long enough to grab the one on the water bucket and set it up on the flat spot between her hatch and Allen's, thumbing the volume all the way up as she did. Then she transferred her flashlight into her left hand and took the pistol in her right. That felt a little less awkward, but she couldn't say it was comfortable either way.
The walkie-talkie screeched like a public address system going into feedback. She plugged her ears with the ends of her thumbs and waited to see what would happen, but she didn't have long to wait. The three trees hooted like monkeys, their branches waving like semaphores, then they leaned forward and rushed the tank.
"What did you say to them?" she asked.
"I have no idea," Tippet replied, "but it apparently wasn't good." The ground shook and squelched beneath the trees' weight. Judy imagined the sound the Getaway Special would make if they stepped on it, but she didn't intend to let them get that close. When they were still thirty feet or so away, she aimed her flashlight at them and flicked it on. They definitely didn't like that, but unlike the tree she had pinned down with it last night, these didn't stop. All three of them whipped their branches backward, as if they were leaning into a hurricane, and kept coming.
"All rig
ht, then," she muttered. "Let's try plan B." She cocked the pistol with her thumb, aimed it high in the air, and pulled the trigger.
A tongue of flame shot about six feet out of the barrel, and the report echoed off the surrounding forest like a clap of thunder. That did what the flashlight hadn't: the three charging trees split apart like magnets with their same poles shoved together, and with a roar like a mile-wide strip of Velcro tearing loose, the rest of the woods yanked up their roots and leaped a few steps backward as well. Judy's hand tingled from the recoil. What a rush! For just an instant, while the gates of Hell had opened up at her command, she had felt like a god. An omnipotent and impatient god at that. No wonder some people liked guns so much; it gave them at least a fleeting sensation of mastery over an otherwise indifferent universe.
But "fleeting" was the word. Two of the three trees had fled, but the one in the middle kept coming straight for the Getaway Special.
39
Judy fired again, aiming toward the tree this time, but it didn't even hesitate. She couldn't tell if she'd hit it or not, but even if she miraculously struck a vital organ with a third shot, momentum would carry it as far as it needed to go now.
She didn't waste time trying. "Jump!" she shouted. She dropped the pistol and lunged for Tippet, sweeping him inside as gently as she could, then she slammed the hatches closed and shouted again:
"Jump!"
"We're not—" Allen began, but the tank lurched violently to the side. Judy whacked her head against the hyperdrive, lost her balance, and fell toward the beanbag chair, but she never connected. The tank lurched again, and they were in free fall.
The sudden flash of sunlight on the side of the tank nearly blinded her, but when she squinted she could see pitch-black shadows crisscrossing the yellow wall in every direction. The creak of plastic stretching to its limit made her think at first that they were stress lines about to give way, but then she realized what it was: the shadows of tree branches.
"Tippet?" she called softly. "Tippet, are you all right?" There was no answer. Debris was rising into the air all through the tank, but none of it looked like a butterfly in a spacesuit. She raised both feet and looked at the soles of her shoes, but she hadn't stepped on him. Where had he gone?
There was a scrabbling sound, then a heavy thump. The shadows moved across the plastic, their thick ends going for the dark side of the tank.
"Holy shit," Judy said. "It's still alive." Either she hadn't hit it, or a bullet in the trunk didn't matter. And apparently neither did vacuum.
"It can't be," Allen said. "The jump field wasn't set nearly wide enough. We must have cut it in half."
"Then what's that outside?"
"Just—I don't know. Muscle contractions." He looked at his video monitor, and Judy followed his glance, but the image was spinning wildly. The tree must have knocked the camera loose. Something soft smacked her in the face. She reached up to brush it away, stopping just in time when she realized it was Tippet. "There you are! Are you okay?" He flapped his wings a couple of times to keep himself in place, but still said nothing. Then Judy realized why: his walkie-talkie was on the other side of the hatch, no doubt tumbling away into space.
"Just a sec," she said, digging among her things for the other unit. She found it still beside the water bucket and flipped it on.
Tippet's voice immediately filled the tank. "Let's not do that again."
"What's the matter? Are you hurt?"
"I... don't believe so. Not now. But the jump cut me off from the overmind, and I was terrified until they located my signal again."
"Oh." She had no idea how that would feel, but it didn't sound fun. The tank screeched again as tree branches slid across its rough exterior, then something started banging rhythmically on the side right next to Judy's head. More muscle contractions? She looked at her video monitor, then at her spacesuit, still crumpled up on what had a minute ago been the floor. "First things first," she said. "Suit up."
"Uh . . . right," said Allen.
"Tippet, can that suit of yours stand up to vacuum?"
"In an emergency," he said.
"If whatever it's banging on the outside of this thing manages to punch through, I guarantee you it'll be an emergency."
Judy wasn't wearing her suit liner, but she didn't want to take the time to put it on, either. She just pulled on the bottom half of her outersuit, wriggled into the top, locked the waist ring, then put on the communications carrier and the helmet and gloves. She sealed it up tight this time, and made Allen do the same.
"Testing, testing. Allen? Tippet, can you hear me?" she asked.
"Loud and clear," Allen replied.
"Tippet?"
Nothing.
"Tippet?" She looked around for him, saw him gently flapping his wings to keep himself from drifting into the way of their flailing arms and legs.
"Tippet, can you hear me?"
"There you are," he said. "I had to find your intercom frequency."
"Oh. Sorry. I should have thought of that."
She turned on her monitor. Her camera was still taped down; she zoomed out to extreme wide angle and swiveled it around until she could see what they'd dragged into space with them. It was the whole tree. Either the jump field was wider than Allen had thought, or the tree had been reaching down to grab them when he hit the escape button, but Judy couldn't see any missing limbs. It clung to the Getaway with its gnarly, tubular roots, and its trunk was bent nearly double, shoving the green fronds at the end of its branches down into the tank's shadow. The whole works was rotating slowly, about twice the speed of a second hand on a clock, and the tree kept shifting around to keep its fronds in darkness. It kept one root free to whack against the side of the tank.
"Jesus," Judy whispered. "It's definitely alive. And it doesn't like direct sunlight." Allen slapped his gloved hand against the side of the tank.
"What are you doing?" Judy asked him.
"Answering." He whacked the tank twice more, then paused, then three times. She laughed, more from nerves than anything. "Oh, come on. You can't honestly expect a tree to do fill-in-the-blank math problems. Especially while it's hanging on for dear life in interplanetary space." Then the tank rang with four distinct blows. They were muffled inside the sealed spacesuits, but still clearly audible.
Allen whacked the wall five times.
Judy counted the response: one, two, three, four, five . . .
If there was a sixth, they never heard it. Above-normal atmospheric pressure from inside and the stress of a tree gripping it from outside was too much for even a lifetime-guaranteed septic tank to withstand. The end seam right next to Judy peeled open like a zipper, and in a single whoosh like a fighter jet passing low overhead, all their air rushed out into space.
Everything that wasn't tied down also raced toward the crack. Judy watched her sleeping bag slither out like an oil slick down a drain, followed by her spacesuit liner, the pistol, and half a dozen smaller items. The stuff sack full of food wedged itself up against it, but wouldn't fit through. Tippet, on the other hand, sailed out with room to spare.
"Tippet!" Judy yelled.
" Tptkpk!" The radio hissed and popped with words in his his native tongue, then he said, "I—I'm all right. I caught a branch."
"Thank God," she said.
Tippet said, "Ha. I had thought the notion of a deity rather quaint when I found it among the words in your language, but in this instance I will thank anyone I can."
"Can you make it back in?"
"I believe so. Just don't do anything to alarm the tree."
Judy couldn't imagine anything alarming it more than it already was, but she said, "We won't." With no air to carry sound, the tank was totally silent now. Judy's spacesuit hissed softly as it bled off air to put its internal pressure within its design limits, but that soon stopped. She put her hand against the wall, but she couldn't feel any vibration from the tree, either. The outrushing air had acted like a rocket, setting tank, tree, and al
l spinning a full revolution every five or six seconds; centrifugal force had probably stretched the tree out to full height again, and it didn't want to risk slipping just to whack on the tank with a root.
The tree was heavier than the Getaway; the center of gravity was somewhere outside, partway up its trunk. Judy and Allen and all their loose gear had drifted up against one wall, and the short radius of their spin kept threatening to give her vertigo when she turned her head too quickly. Steam boiled out of the water bucket and the open beer cans. Water in vacuum would boil until it froze. And the nitrogen in Judy's and Allen's blood would boil, too, under the reduced pressure in their suits.
"We're going to get the bends," she said. "We've got to land." Allen shook his head. "We can't do that with a tree hanging on to us. It's got to weigh at least a ton. Even if we deployed both 'chutes, we'd still hit like a bomb."
She looked at the monitor. Sure enough, the tree was standing out to its full height. It wasn't moving anymore, either. She could see Tippet out near the end of one of the branches, slowly working his way back. However inadvertently, the tree had saved his life. But it could still cost her and Allen theirs. "Then we'll have to cut it loose," she said.
"No," Tippet said.
"I know it sounds cruel, but the tree's going to die anyway," she said. "It's probably as good as dead already, and even if it's not, we can't put it back. And we can't keep full atmospheric pressure in these suits, which means we've got maybe half an hour at best before we start getting embolisms in our blood. When one of them plugs an artery in our hearts or our brains, we're dead."
"There is another option."
"What?"
"Go for my starship instead."
Neither Judy nor Allen said anything for a second, then they both spoke at once. "Can we breathe your air?" Judy asked, while Allen said, "It would take too long to match velocities." Tippet actually laughed; not the "Ha, ha, ha" he'd used before, but the real thing. It was an obvious mixture of Allen's and Judy's laughter, but it sounded genuine. "Yes, you can breathe our air. From what you've told me of Earth's atmosphere, ours is closer to normal for you than what you've been breathing here. And Allen, you forget what you are dealing with. Our starship has engines enough to boost us to a third of lightspeed. We can accelerate to match your vector, while you use the planet's gravity to bring yours closer to ours. Within a few minutes at most, we will be able to dock and bring you on board."
