by Lee Brackett
was thin.
She knew she was near the finish-place because she could smell it. The gentle withered fragrance of flowers past their prime, and under that a dead, sour decay. She shouted McLaren's name, sick with dread that there might not be an answer, weak with relief when there was one. She raced over tumbled rocks toward the sound. A small creeper tangled her foot and brought her down. She wrenched it by the roots from its shallow crevice and went on. As she glanced back over her shoulder she saw a thin white veil, a tiny patch in the distant air, drifting toward her.
She came to the finish-place.
It was a box canyon, quite deep, with high sheer walls, so that it was almost like a wide well. In the bottom of it bodies were thrown in a dry, spongy heap. Colorless flower-bodies, withered and gray, an incredible compost pile.
Rory McLaren lay on top of it, apparently unhurt. The two packs were beside her, with the weapons. Strewn over the heap, sitting, lying, moving feebly about, were the ones who waited, as Button had put it, to stop. Here were the aged, the faded and worn out, the imperfect and injured, where their ugliness could not offend. They seemed already dead mentally. They paid no attention to the women, nor to each other. Sheer blind vitality kept them going a little longer, as a geranium will bloom long after its cut stalk is desiccated.
'Matty,' McLaren said. 'Oh, God, Matty, I'm glad to see you!'
'Are you all right?'
'Sure. My leg even feels pretty good. Can you get me out?'
'Throw those packs up here.'
McLaren obeyed. She began to catch Harker's feverish mood, warned by Harker's bleeding, ugly face that something nasty was afoot. Harker explained rapidly while she got out one of the ropes and half hauled McLaren out of the pit. The white veil was close now. Very close.
'Can you walk?' Harker asked.
McLaren glanced at the fleecy cloud. Harker had told her about it. 'I can walk.' she said. 'I can run like hell.'
Harker handed her the rope. 'Get around the other side of the canyon. Clear across, see?' She helped McLaren on with her pack. 'Stand by with the rope to pull me up. And keep to the bare rocks.'
McLaren went off. She limped badly, her face twisted with pain. Harker swore. The cloud was so close that now she could see the millions of tiny seeds floating on their silken fibers, thistledown guided by the minds of the flower-people in the valley. She shrugged into her pack straps and began winding bandages and tufts of dead grass around the bone tip of a recovered spear. The edge of the cloud was almost on her when she got a spark into the improvised torch and sprang down onto the heap of dead flower-things in the pit.
She sank and floundered on the treacherous surface, struggling across it while she applied the torch. The dry, withered substance caught. She raced the flames to the far wall and glanced back. The dying creatures had not stirred, even when the fire engulfed them. Overhead, the edges of the seed-cloud flared and crisped. It moved on blindly over the fire. There was a pale flash of light and the cloud vanished in a puff of smoke.
'Rory!' Harker yelled. 'Rory!'
For a long minute she stood there, coughing, strangling in thick smoke, feeling the rushing heat crisp her skin. Then, when it was almost too late, McLaren's sweating face appeared above her and the rope snaked down. Tongues of flame flicked her backside angrily as she ran monkey-fashion up the wall.
They got away from there, higher on the rocky ground, slashing occasionally with their knives at brush and creepers they could not avoid. McLaren shuddered.
'It's impossible,' she said. 'How do they do it?'
'They're blood cousins. Or should I say sap. Anyhow, I suppose it's like radio control—a matter of transmitting the right frequencies. Here, take it easy a minute.'
McLaren sank down gratefully. Blood was seeping through the tight bandages where Harker had incised her wound. Harker looked back into the valley.
The flower-people were spread out in a long crescent, their bright multicolored heads clear against the green plain. Harker guessed that they would be guarding the pass. She guessed that they had known what was going on in her mind as well as Button had. New form of communism, one mind for all and all for one mind. She could see that even without McLaren's disability they couldn't make it to the pass. Not a mouse could have made it.
She wondered how soon the next seed-cloud would come.
'What are we going to do, Matty? Is there any way . . .' McLaren wasn't thinking about herself. She was looking at the valley like Lucifer yearning at Paradise, and she was thinking of Viki. Not just Viki alone, but Viki as a symbol of thirty-eight hundred wanderers on the face of Venus.
'I don't know,' said Harker. 'The pass is out, and the caves are out . . . hey! Remember when we were fighting off those critters by the river and you nearly started a cave-in throwing rocks? There was a fault there, right over the edge of the lake. An earthquake split. If we could get at it from the top and shake it down . . . .'
It was a minute before McLaren caught on. Her eyes widened. 'A slide would dam up the lake . . . .'
'If the level rose enough, the Swimmers could get out.' Harker gazed with sultry eyes at the bobbing flower-heads below.
'But if the valley's flooded, Matty, and those critters take over, where does that leave our people?'
'There wouldn't be too much of a slide, I don't think. The rock's solid on both sides of the fault. And anyway, the weight of the water backed up there would push through anything, even a concrete dam, in a couple of weeks.' Harker studied the valley floor intently. 'See the way that slopes there? Even if the slide didn't wash out, a little digging would drain the flood off down the pass. We'd just be making a new river.'
'Maybe.' McLaren nodded. 'I guess so. But that still leaves the Swimmers. I don't think they'd be any nicer than these babies about giving up their land.' Her tone said she would rather fight Button's people any day.
Harker's mouth twisted in a slow grin. 'The Swimmers are water creatures, Rory. Amphibious. Also, they've lived underground, in total darkness, for God knows how long. You know what happens to angleworms when you get 'em out in the light. You know what happens to fungus that grows in the dark.' She ran her fingers over her skin, almost with reverence. 'Noticed anything about yourself, Rory? Or have you been too busy.'
McLaren stared. She rubbed her own skin, and winced, and rubbed again, watching her fingers leave streaks of livid white that faded instantly. 'Sunburn,' she said wonderingly. 'My God. Sunburn!'
Harker stood up. 'Let's go take a look.' Down below the flower-heads were agitated. 'They don't like that thought, Rory. Maybe it can be done, and they know it.'
McLaren rose, leaning on a short spear like a cane. 'Matty. They won't let us get away with it.'
Harker frowned. 'Button said there were other ways beside the seed . . . .' She turned away. 'No use standing here worrying about it.'
They started climbing again, very slowly on account of McLaren. Harker tried to gauge where they were in relation to the cavern beneath. The river made a good guide. The rocks were almost barren of growth here, which was a godsend. She watched, but she couldn't see anything threatening approaching from the valley. The flower-people were mere dots now, perfectly motionless.
The rock formation changed abruptly. Ancient quakes had left scars in the shape of twisted strata, great leaning slabs of granite poised like dancers, and cracks that vanished into darkness.
Harker stopped. 'This is it. Listen, Rory. I want you to go off up there, out of the danger area . . . .'
'Matty, I . . . .'
'Shut up. One of us has got to be alive to take word back to the ships as soon as she can get through the valley. There's no great rush and you'll be able to travel in three-four days. You . . . .'
'But why me? You're a better mountain woman . . . .'
'You're married,' said Harker curtly. 'It'll only take one of us to shove a couple of those big slabs down. They're practically ready to fall of their own weight. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe I'
ll get out all right. But it's a little silly if both of us take the risk, isn't it?'
'Yeah. But Matty . . . .'
'Listen, kid.' Harker's voice was oddly gentle. 'I know what I'm doing. Give my regards to Viki and the . . . .'
She broke off with a sharp cry of pain. Looking down incredulously, she saw her body covered with little tentative flames, feeble, flickering, gone, but leaving their red footprints behind them.
McLaren had the same thing.
They stared at each other. A helpless terror took Harker by the throat. Telekinesis again. The flower-people turning her own weapon against them. They had seen fire, and what it did, and they were copying the process in their own minds, concentrating, all of them together, the whole mental force of the colony centered on the two women. She could even understand why they focused on the skin. They had taken the sunburn-thought and applied it literally.
Fire. Spontaneous combustion. A simple, easy reaction, if you knew the trick. There was something about a burning bush . . . .
The attack came again, stronger this time. The flower-people were getting the feel of it now. It hurt. Oh God, it hurt. McLaren screamed. Her loincloth and bandages began to smolder.
What to do, thought Harker, quick, tell me what to do . . . .
The flower-people focus on us through our minds, our conscious minds. Maybe they can't get the subconscious so easily, because the thoughts are not directed, they're images, symbols, vague things.
