Far away, over rolling rocky hills, they saw the steam which perpetually swirled up and rolled away to leeward from the place of warm springs. Beecham grew plainly excited as they drew near.
“I didn’t plant the trees in the actual mineral mud,” he said jerkily. “They need plant food, which soil bacteria makes, and where the mold’s highly mineralized or very hot, of course bacteria can’t grow and therefore trees can’t either. And for the same reason the roots of the trees can’t go down underground. It gets hot below the surface. So they lie on the surface and only capillary roots—they’re black, like fur, you’ll remember—reach down into the ground, and then only the very top and relatively cool layer holds nourishment for them. The roots lie on top of the ground, and the capillary roots reach down only through the top half-inch or inch of earth.”
Tom Belden said: “Not much of an anchor in a gale! You’d think they’d blow over.”
“They’re low,” explained Beecham nervously. “None of them grows over six feet high. They—they have a very broad foundation of roots. And besides—” He checked himself. “You helped set them out, Belden. You’ll recognize the place.”
“I’ll recognize the trees,” said Belden.
“I—I—” Then Beecham’s voice cut off as if with a click. But he toiled on, his eyes anxious.
Drake spoke suddenly.
“Surface roots. That ought to mean something to me!”
His tone was peculiar. Nora glanced at him and saw him frowning. His expression was strange. He spoke abruptly, in a tone a little higher than was necessary.
“Look here, Beecham! The willows—the native trees on Gow, here, don’t have surface roots! Their roots go underground!”
Beecham said, somehow unhappily: “Yes.”
“But I saw surface roots—surface roots growing maidenhair and bracken ferns! Surface roots! I saw them in a thicket of willows! I didn’t realize, and I went back and looked to see what I thought I should have noticed, and didn’t. And they weren’t there! Good God, Beecham!”
His grip on his gun tightened until the knuckles were white.
“Did you really see surface roots in the thicket?” asked Beecham. His voice was almost pitiful. “You didn’t say so. If you had—”
Drake swallowed audibly.
Tom Belden pointed. “There’s where we planted ’em. I remember that red pond!”
He hurried on ahead. The others followed him. In minutes they came upon Belden standing in an open space some thirty feet from the edge of the warm springs area. There were Kerguelen cabbages growing lush and thick. There were tall grasses. Warmth from the steaming place made a little belt of practically tropic temperature for a dozen or two dozen yards outside the highly colored, bubbling, ill-smelling mineral mud.
Drake’s face was white as he came up. Beecham wrung his hands suddenly. Nora looked uneasily from one to another.
“We planted ’em here!” protested Belden. “Remember, Mr. Beecham? Right here! We spread out the roots on the ground and threw some loose dirt over ’em,—not much,—just enough to anchor ’em! We straightened out the branches so they’d balance! It was right here! Look! Here’s where we spread the dirt! See? We dug it up right here! There was a tree right here. And there was one right there, and there was—”
Beecham’s teeth chattered. The muscles of Drake’s jaws stood out like cords.
“But there aren’t any trees here!” said Nora uneasily. “Not a sign of them! Do you suppose the beast devoured them?”
“I’m afraid,” said Drake in the grimmest voice a man could use, “I’m afraid that’s not the answer. Satisfied, Beecham? This was what you expected, were afraid of, wasn’t it?”
Beecham nodded, speechless. He seemed to have shriveled a little. He tried to say something, and instead he wrung his hands. There were no trees where they had been planted. There was only the fresh dirt that had been thrown over their roots. The trees were gone. All of them.
“We’ll go to the nests,” said Drake, in a tone no loss grim than before. “Spaulding was undoubtedly right when he said there was more than one beast after the birds. We’ll try to make a count. Come on.”
Now he took the lead, his features set and formidable. It was curious that he carried his shotgun at & ready position, though this was broad daylight. Yet the light was not the gray glow of an ordinary day on Gow. The cloud-bank was thicker than usual today. There seemed broad bands of darker tint stretching across the sky, as if the spiral cloud arms of a low-pressure system overlay the lower, more persistent cloud-cover of the island. The wind, too, was not the usual steady flow of air. There were gusts of twice the normal velocity.
The cloud of flying birds over the nest showed above irregularities in the ground. An infinite confusion of thousands of birds in flight was to be expected, but the pattern was new. The birds were aware of bad weather on the way. They seemed to dart more directly and more hurriedly out to sea, and to return with greater haste, as if struggling to get to ground with filled crops against the time when flight would be impossible.
Drake spoke only once on the way, though Nora was sure that he was acutely aware of her presence.
“When did you figure this out, Beecham?” he demanded. “And why didn’t you tell me?”
“After I’d dissected one of the small things,” said Beecham in a thin voice. “But I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t! Yet it’s so perfectly reasonable! When you think of it, it had to be this way! Biologically, nothing else was possible!”
Drake tensed his lips. He marched ahead. Once he checked abruptly and held out his hand to keep Nora from passing through a clump of tall grass. His face stern, he stamped through the rustling stuff. Nothing appeared, but he’d suspected a small horror’s presence there.
* * * *
They reached a place from which the nests themselves were visible, stretching more than half a mile along the windward shore of the island at the very top of the cliffs. From here the sea could be seen. It was dark gray. Giant swells marched across the face of the waters. Wind gusts ruffled their surfaces. They reached the base of the cliffs, and thunderous growlings and roarings came up from below. Now and again a tiny, ice-cold droplet of spray struck the faces of the four who walked on.
They saw birds by uncountable tens of thousands. They saw all the agitated flurry of a sea-bird nursery. They heard squawking and tumult even above the uproar of the surf. The sea-birds landed with enormous sweepings of their wings. They took off with powerful, splendid strokes. They circled, and soared, and rose and descended, and the look of things was that of a frantic ally busy metropolis, except that instead of buildings there were only nests.
But there were places where the nests were smashed and obliterated. New nests were already being begun, however, even in the centers of devastation. There had been a holocaust here. Corpses of dead birds—but not many—and piles of feathers told of an indescribable disaster. There were lame birds, trying desperately to fly. There was a torn-off wing not far from where Drake gazed with icy eyes upon the sea-bird colony.
There was a deeper shadow at the horizon. It moved toward the island. It seemed that the cloud-bank thickened as they looked, though that was certainly impossible.
Tom Belden panted incredulously: “Hey! Look at that! How’d—”
He stared in blank and uncomprehending unbelief at a sheltered spot in the lee of a rocky monolith. The rock had been covered with nests. It was so no longer.
A tree stood there. It was preposterous.
It did not belong here. It did not belong on the island. It was a thick, stunted trunk some six feet high, braced by surface roots which ran in twisted, tangled masses over the surface of the ground. Black, furry, roots reached down and entered the top, the upper surface of the thin soil. The tree had long, slender, snakelike and nearly leafless branches. They spread out and drooped to the ground in all directions.
Drake ground his teeth. Beecham was already scrambling agitatedly toward the cone-
like growth. It was a tree from the Hot Lakes region of the antarctic continent. It was one of those that had been set out near the warm springs, three miles away. It had not been planted here.
Beecham approached it, his breath coming in pantings. He stood before it, wringing his hands.
The slanting, drooping limbs of the trees stirred. Drake shouted. Nora screamed.
Jerkily, as if struggling against immense inertia, a snaky branch swept upward. Other branches moved. They gathered speed. They moved lustfully, horribly, toward Beecham.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was a near thing. Maybe Nora’s scream roused Beecham. Maybe it was Drake’s startled, desperate shout. Both of them cried out while he stood wringing his bands before the tree, which then looked perfectly harmless and even artificial. Its actual appearance in that place was as if some insane artist had traveled thousands of miles to create, on the edge of a nesting-ground on a remote and barren island, the singular representation of an oversized coolie hat. It was nearly without leaves, so that the tidiness of the job was emphasized, and the complete confusion of nest-covered stones and boulders and cliffside added to the improbability of the whole affair.
But, nightmarishly, it reached for Beecham. Later on, it appeared that the snaky branches of this tree, at this time, were sluggish. The thing that looked like a fugitive from a formal garden was beastly enough, and ferocious enough, to be sure. But it was nocturnal, and just then the light was nearer dusk than darkness. But perhaps it could not wholly slumber with thousands upon thousands of living things nearby. Even more probably, the nearby surf was loud and menacing, like the roaring of a storm. No creature can sleep soundly in the seeming of a storm.
It reached, fumbling blindly and horribly for the little man who stood wringing his hands before it. Branches by tens and dozens swung about, and they should have tangled upon Beecham, closing terribly.
But they were just a trifle sluggish, and Nora screamed and Drake shouted desperately—and Beecham woke to his danger.
He fled, and the horror he realized filled him with the panic of absolute surprise. He ran blindly.
And he fell. He was tripped, or a stone turned under his foot. But he fell. He struggled where he lay, not rising, and he was not far from the tree.
Drake plunged toward him. Tom Belden scrambled after, his eyes wide and shocked. Nora ran too, gasping—not because she understood what had happened and was happening, but because Drake was entering what she knew was deadly danger.
The tree reached out its branches toward Beecham as he lay upon the ground. It stretched its longest limbs, fumbling with them, and they came very close to Beecham. They writhed and quivered, struggling to stretch even closer. Even the tree trunk leaned, to gain inches.
Drake threw a fire bottle. It crashed at the base of the tree. Flames leaped up. Bark singed. Burning liquid ran about the surface roots; was absorbed by the fur-like roots; shriveled and destroyed them.
For minutes the stretching branches strained toward Beecham, while other limbs writhed and squirmed. A part of the coils reached into the flames, striving to seize them and destroy them. The thing became a Medusa-like monster, its serpentine branches trying to wrestle with the fire as if it were a living thing; trying terribly to crush, to seize, to grasp and enclose and strangle it.
And the tree was silent. There was the roaring of the surf and the squawling of the sea-birds. There was the thundering of wind in Drake’s ears as he reached Beecham and lifted him. Belden arrived, his eyes starting from his head. He helped with Beecham, though he could not look away from the unspeakably revolting sight of a thing like writhing, nested snakes insanely fighting flames that could not be fought.
Nora arrived, and panted in a voice of horror: “Little ones! There are little ones!”
She pointed with a shaking hand. And there were infinitesimal squirming monsters on the ground about the burning tree trunk. They dropped from the tree by ones and twos and dozens. They fell as tiny, featureless roots, and writhed, and bark, skin, and thorny green leaves popped into view, and they wriggled energetically. Some fell into the flames and shriveled there. Some laboriously dragged themselves away. One or two by chance moved toward the spot where Drake and Belden pulled Beecham farther from the horror which was the tree.
Belden’s teeth chattered. But he gasped: “Miss Hall! Get further away! You’re too close!”
She came to them, shaking. They dragged Beecham. He was sobbing. They shifted him thirty feet, forty. Fifty. Flames rose from the ghastly, maddened monster. Its roots stirred.
Suddenly, it ceased to battle with its own burning. Its branches thrashed insanely. It heaved and stirred and writhed—and died. Its trunk fell over and flamed up, and there were more heavings, and Nora cried out, choking: “The—the roots.”
They also burned. And they twisted in anguish in the circle of whitish ash that formed and blew away in the wind.
Presently there was only smoke, and Tom Belden gasped: “I—I guess I’m crazy. How’d it get here? We planted it back by the warm springs! How’d it get here? What was it? My God, what was it?”
Drake said coldly: “We’ll get Beecham to tell us that! Buck up, Beecham! Get some life into you! The thing’s dead! It’s dead! Hear me? Everything’s all right! Brace up!”
Beecham gasped: “My—my fault! I planted them! I turned them loose!” Drake turned away. White-faced and grim, he moved back toward the place from which smoke arose. He kicked something into the still-glowing embers. Something else. He went about the place where a tree had been, kicking things into the ashes. Sometimes they flared up and made tiny licking flames. Sometimes they smouldered and moved horribly until they died.
He returned.
“The little monsters,” he said harshly, “were limb-tips. The thing reproduced by growing small horrors at the tips of its branches. When they were ripe, they dropped off and opened their leaves. The fire made all the ripe and nearly ripe ones fall off at once. Beecham thought they were nibbled off. They weren’t. They were things themselves.”
Nora said in a still-shaking voice: “I think Beecham’s broken his ankle.”
Drake clenched his hands.
“It’s a long way back to the buildings. We’ll have to carry him. And it’s getting late.”
Beecham, horrified and sick and self-accusing, took his hands down from his face and fumbled with his left ankle. He said thickly and absurdly: “No. Not broken. Sprained, I think.”
“About the same for us,” said Drake.
He bent over. Beecham’s ankle was not broken. There was no grinding of bone-ends when Drake moved the foot. It was still in the state of relative numbness which immediately follows injury, but it was nevertheless acutely painful. It was simply impossible for Beecham to walk back to the depot.
Drake stood up and stared about him. Wind came in gusts over the cliff edge. Birds streamed toward the island from their far-away excursions for food. None flew away, now, though there was still light. Far away at the horizon there was darkness. It was not night, because it was to westward and the rest of the sky was brighter. It was the forefront of a storm of which a remote destroyer had been warned. The sea was darker than it had been. The surf was louder and more furiously enraged.
Drake said very coldly indeed: “Beecham, you’ll have to hobble between Tom and myself, using us as crutches. If we come to willows, we may manage actual crutches for you. It’s going to be painful, but we have to get back.”
Beecham said despairingly: “it’s all my fault. Casey and Thomas. You’d better leave me here.”
“No,” said Drake. “We’ll make it.”
He lifted Beecham by his arm-pits. Nora said: “I can carry his gun.”
She took it. Beecham put one arm around Tom Belden’s neck, and the other around Drake’s. They tried an experimental step. It was clumsy. It would be exhausting. It was horribly slow. Where the ground was rough, it would be impractical. But there was nothing else to be done.
&nbs
p; They started off. A great wind-gust came over the edge of the cliff. It staggered them. Drake took a last look at the horizon before he and Tom Belden began their hopeless effort. A man walking normally will cover three miles in an hour. As they must attempt this, one mile an hour would be remarkable. They would not nearly reach the relative safety of the quonsets until hours after dark. And there was the storm.
The sky darkened very swiftly. Before they had covered half a mile, the light on the island had faded to a dismal grayness. The wind increased. It swept in surges of appalling violence across the undulating, nearly barren ground.
* * * *
Tom Belden bore his full share of Beecham’s weight. He was very silent. But once, when Beecham panted with weariness, he said abruptly: “I still don’t see how that tree got there from the warm springs.”
“The same way you did,” said Drake abruptly.
Belden was silent. They went on. Down into hollows, and up over rocky hillocks where wind-gusts beat on them. Presently Beecham gasped: “I think I have to rest a moment. My arms—”
At each step he had to bear his whole weight by his arms around the necks of the other two. Drake grunted: “Good idea. We’ll change sides. That’ll rest us, too.”
They came to a little rocky hollow. Belden said helplessly: “I still don’t believe what I saw. That was a tree and it wasn’t a tree.”
Drake eased Beecham to a sitting position on a boulder. Wind boomed and roared overhead. The sound of the surf, increased as it was, was almost overwhelmed by the sound of wind alone. Beecham said painfully: “The trees—they’re trees, all right, Tom. Only, they’re evolved from something like sensitive plants or insect-eating plants to fit the conditions at the Hot Lakes.”
“I don’t get it,” protested Belden querulously. “Those little monsters. I thought they were beasts. Bugs maybe. Some kind of worm!”
“They’re the young of the trees,” said Beecham miserably. “They’re plants. I dissected a crushed one, and it was a plant that could move. That’s why I tried oil on them and later thought of amino triazole. That’s a weed-killer for lawns.” He swallowed. “The Hot Lakes region is hundreds of square miles of ground that’s warmed from below, like the warm springs. It got that way millions of years ago, and things had to adapt to the conditions, or die. In summer, there, the days are weeks long and the nights are only hours. In winter the nights are weeks long and the days only hours. Plants can live in long daylight, but they can’t thrive in darkness. They need sunlight so they can make use of the plant food their roots can find.”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 142
