“We’d better go on now,” said Drake grimly. “Ready, Beecham?”
Beecham stood up on his one good foot. Drake bent to receive his arm about his neck. Nora picked up the extra gun. It was wholly useless, but none of the four could imagine abandoning a weapon. The three men resumed their painful progress.
“But animals,” panted Beecham, as they went up the nearest incline, “animals can live in the dark if they can find food. That was the situation living things faced, near the Hot Lakes. In the summer plants could grow, but in the winter they couldn’t. And they couldn’t go into winter dormancy—they couldn’t die down to live through the winter—because the ground was warm!”
They reached an exposed place. Wind hit them. There were droplets of water in it, which stung the bare skin of their faces. There was a roaring and howling overhead, and an increased and terrible booming of the surf.
“So the plants had to invent a way to survive,” said Beecham’s voice thinly through the tumult. “And they did. Orchids had, before them. Lichens invented themselves—two kinds of creatures growing together, neither able to survive alone. And there’ve been other inventions. Insectivorous plants designed traps to catch insects, and muscles to close the traps of those plants and destroy the creatures they caught. There’s been a tradition for centuries, of a carnivorous tree in Madagascar. It’s said to be a thick trunk with writhing arms like an octopus. It seized animals that came near. The legends say that the natives used to feed it with human sacrifices.”
Struggling through the semi-darkness with Beecham clinging to his neck, Drake felt a peculiar, despairing irony. He’d heard of the carnivorous tree of Madagascar. It was a myth, centuries old, though there were alleged eye-witness accounts of it. It was absurd. Nobody believed it. Yet it was ironic to hear Beecham babbling of it in an antarctic storm which alone should have made their journey impossible, while they had themselves destroyed a not dissimilar thing no more than an hour ago.
“Then a tree invented itself so it could live near the Hot Lakes,” panted Beecham. “In the summer it was a plant, feeding on the food it could extract from the soil. In the daylight it had to keep still to grow. When the long nights came, it had to feed differently. And it had to move to find food.”
With a bellow, a wind-gust solid as a wall rushed upon them. When it eased, Drake said harshly: “This is no good. I’m going to carry Beecham on my back. You take my gun, Tom. When I need rest, you’ll carry him. Nora, you’ll need to use a flashlight pretty soon.”
Beecham said miserably: “I can be left, Drake. The trees won’t hurt in this storm, and you know enough to handle matters from now on. I was responsible for Casey’s death, and Thomas’. I didn’t know, but I shouldn’t cost your lives!”
For answer, Drake took him on his shoulders and lunged ahead. Tom Belden said: “I’m resting now, Mr. Drake. I’ll take over when you’re tired.”
Rain came. It poured down in sheets. In streams. As if from buckets upended overhead. The light grew fainter yet. But they could still see dimly the splashings of water upon wetted lichens, and rounded dark-green Kerguelen cabbages, and upon grasses bent flat to the ground by the wind.
They went on. It was very bad. Presently Drake said: “Talk, Beecham. Keep our minds occupied.”
He did not want to think ahead to the time when there would be pitch darkness all over the island and they would have only flickering flashlights to light their way. It would be very easy to become lost.
There was a lightning flash from horizon to horizon, and for the fraction of a second they saw the beating of wind and rain upon the rocky surface of Gow Island. There was no shelter. The ground glistened with wetness.
“That lightning could help, if it keeps up,” said Drake. He plodded on. Nora followed closely, a flashlight ready in her hand.
Beecham’s voice came drearily through the night and storm. “You can guess all the rest of it. Because the ground was too hot under the surface, the plants that lived had to have surface roots only, with capillary roots to take food only from the very top of the soil. That tended toward the invention the plants made. It meant that they weren’t anchored when the dark nights came. Maybe the root of one starving plant first came upon another in the dark. And the other plant was food, if only it were killed. So one plant killed the other and fed on it. The murderer lived on. And it learned to move not only its branches but its roots, to get more food. It survived and had descendants. They moved and hunted. And then a terrible invention appeared. All plants must reproduce themselves. These plants survived by budding, by breaking off parts of themselves which were capable of surviving. Most trees can be reproduced by budding. These plants budded themselves. And they were hunting plants. So when winter came they hunted each other.”
There was another lightning flash, a small one. Drake plodded on with Beecham on his back. Nora carried two guns, and Belden carried Drake’s as well as his own.
“So it went on,” said Beecham’s small voice in the storm uproar. “And through hundreds of thousands of generations the trees evolved. In the summer and the light they are only trees, feeding on the soil. The trees that were sent here from Gissel Bay were collected in daylight, and until they were packed away in the plane they were not ever in the dark. But in the dark they were monsters, hunting for food. In the summer they scattered their young, the budded-off tips of their branches. They squirm away and root themselves, just underground and with only their leaves showing, mostly. But they have to find places for themselves during daylight. The young trees move by day and they hunt by day also, though they grow mostly by what the furry capillary-roots on their bodies gathered from the ground when they are partly buried. That is why they hunted us.”
Drake trudged on, bearing Beecham upon his shoulders. Rain fell, and wind blew, and the darkness grew deeper, and the storm moved to overwhelm the island.
A long time later Drake found himself staggering under the double burden of Beecham and the storm. There was a place where jagged rocks uprose. There was a hollow down-wind from them. Drake half-stumbled into it. Nora’s flashlight found a stone on which Beecham could sit. He put Beecham down there.
“Just a moment,” he panted. “We’ll go on in a minute.”
“I should be left behind,” said Beecham, miserably.
Drake did not answer. He flung himself down on the saturated ground. Tom Belden said: “I’ll carry him next.” To Beecham he protested, “But the plants couldn’t just live on each other! Wouldn’t they just eat each other up until only one was left?”
A blast of wind overhead drowned out all possible other sounds. Lightning flashed. Then Beecham said tiredly: “I told you. In the summer they scatter their young and put down their black, furry, capillary-roots. They live as plants. When winter comes, and darkness, they hunt each other, and their young, who have grown during the summer. When spring comes again there are not many left, but they multiply again so there will be food for those who survive the next winter. It isn’t—it isn’t pretty to think what the winter nights must be like around the Hot Lakes. Things like the tree we just burned crawling about in the blackness, hunting each other and their own young.”
* * * *
And now it was night. The four people, drenched with rain, panted and rested in the lee of jagged rocks which rose from this small hollow on the island’s top. There was continuous uproar all about. Lightning flickered and flared, and wetness glistened on the stones and the soil itself—and this was not yet the storm’s peak.
Drake pulled himself erect. Then Nora screamed shrilly.
Movement appeared over the edge of the depression in which they had taken refuge. Lightning flamed, and darkness fell, and lightning flamed again.
And things came down into the sheltered place. They were trees from Antarctica.
One came first, its prehensile branches bent and writhing in the process of steadying itself against the storm-wind. Its roots twitched and slithered over the ground. Its thick trunk
wobbled horribly. It seemed to move with an inordinate, clumsy caution, as if fearful of overturning.
A second followed. Its branches wavered and flowed here and there, grasping stones for bracing against the wind pressure. It rocked heavily back and forth. It descended into shelter from the storm.
A third came. And one of its branches was tightly curled about something, as if it carried some small item of prey. The lightning showed the three unbelievable horrors moving with ponderous, deliberate care, getting themselves into shelter from the gale which blew ever more fiercely over the island.
The four people moved out into the storm’s fury, gagging and sickened by the monstrousness they avoided. Drake walked freely, now. He was filled with an intolerable hatred of the things that had killed two men and would destroy the rest of—
He shouted in Beecham’s ear: “Beecham! If those damned things got loose, if even one midget monster got loose in the world back home, and people didn’t believe or realize until it grew and scattered its young—”
Beecham, clinging to Belden’s back, cried bitterly: “And they wouldn’t believe! Before they’d credit what had happened, the things would have such a start they’d never be wiped out! They’d fight to own the earth, and they could win!”
There was lightning so brilliant as to make all the world seem incandescent. There was no thunder. Thunder is rarely heard far out at sea, and Gow Island was remote in a monster waste of ocean. The rain beat down, and wind screamed, and before long it seemed to create a deep, booming note like the sound of a thousand plane motors droning among the clouds.
They struggled on. When lightning flashed they guided themselves by its light. When, as sometimes happened, tens of seconds went by without blue-white brilliance showing all the world in stopped motion, then Nora sent a puny flashlight beam ahead.
Tom Belden staggered, and Drake took Beecham again, and let Tom carry two guns. Presently Drake stopped, and Belden took over his burden. Beecham was bitterly humiliated by his helplessness. The others would have been back at the buildings long ago but for him.
They needed rest desperately. There was a hollow which the lightning showed. It led toward the depot and the airstrip. And in such hollows there were more stones to be avoided, but there would be a lessening of the beating by the wind. Drake led the way down into it. They were barely a mile from the buildings, then, and for a quarter-mile they moved briskly, though at another time their progress would be considered a crawl. Then lightning came, and ceased, and they went on, and it did not come, and they went on, and Nora kept the flashlight bent upon the ground to guide their footsteps. The wind, down here, was at their backs. It helped them. But Drake began to stagger again with the load of Beecham on his back. For a long time Nora did not lift the flashlight beam from the way immediately before them.
Then lightning flashed, and all the world was brilliance, and they saw trees before them. Antarctic trees. There seemed dozens of them, though that was illusion. The way, though, was blocked by stunted, thickened tree-trunks no more than six feet high, with snaky surface roots clinging to every possible anchorage. But the serpent-like branches swayed and curled and groped in ghastly eagerness.
Drake stopped short. He almost fell from the suddenness of the stop. Nora cried out. Tom Belden dropped one of the guns and raised the other fiercely.
When lightning flashed again he fired. Repeatedly. There was no discoverable effect. Nora threw a gasoline bottle. The wick was probably wet from the rain. Nothing happened. They had walked into something like an ambuscade. There was a grisly monster above them on the right. There were two above them on the left. They reached out with their branches. There were preliminary loosenings of the graspings of their roots. The branches swung back and forth like the sweeping of nets or sieves to capture anything alive which came within reach.
Drake slid Beecham down to one-footed standing on the ground. He took a gasoline bottle from his belt. Down-wind from himself, he broke it. It did not light. He fired a gun into the gasoline. It caught. He knocked off the neck of another bottle, and ignited it, and threw its contents toward the trees. A burning rain and fire flew down-wind. It splashed upon squirming branches.
It burned, while he rubbed his hand in mud to extinguish flames upon it. He took another gasoline bottle and repeated the action. He took a third from Nora.
There was light, even in the rain and smother of the storm. Things fought flames which wind tried to tear away from them. They struck each other and fought terrible, mindless battles while burning spread from one to another.
Drake watched, making growling sounds in his throat. Perhaps one of these monsters—so near the installation—was the boojer-beast which had killed and fled with Casey. Perhaps another had killed Thomas and bent his rifle scornfully besides. Very probably it was one of these that he’d heard slithering in Warehouse Four, which had made off with the corpse of Brown, the pilot.
He took Beecham on his back again, and led the way up the bank of the hollow behind the trees which lustfully prepared to descend clumsily to devour him.
At the top of the embankment, now, he saw a faint glow of light. It was no more than a quarter of a mile away. It was the landing lights of the belly-landed plane, which had been lashed down and two of whose motors were running to furnish power for half-million-candlepower lamps.
* * * *
In that quarter-mile they had to change Beecham from Drake to Belden, and again from Belden back to Drake, before they stumbled into the golden glare. But they made it, and searched for lights among the buildings, and found Warehouse Three giving out dim, vague glows from its windows. Nora banged on the door with a gun-butt. There were shrieks of terror from inside, in female voices.
But they went in. The interior was dim and utterly depressing. But there was a band of fuel-oil around the edges of the floor, and there was now a platform whose supports rested in buckets of fuel-oil, so that no crawling thing could possibly climb to it. Drake let Beecham slide to the floor, and let other people take him in charge.
“Belden’ll tell you what’s what,” said Drake. He’d been exhausted this morning, before starting for the warm springs. Now, arrived at safety, he went completely numb. “Nora, get up on that platform. Somebody help Beecham. He’ll tell you—”
The rest was dreamlike. Hollister, it was, helped Drake to the platform and put him on a cot.
He then slept for something more than twenty hours.
When he awoke, the storm was much diminished, and Beecham had given specific information. The boojer-beast was the antarctic trees. There were as many beasts as there were trees. The little monsters that had appeared at the installation were the branch tips which had ripened and dropped off the trees still baled in Warehouse Four. There was now a wide band of amino triazole around those trees, and another variety of weed-killer had proved effective and would be used presently. But on that first bit of white stuff there were already small dead things which looked like roots with tufts of three green thorny leaves at one end. There were more baits waiting to be put out when the weather should permit.
Much more important, there was now confidence on Gow Island. What had to be fought was deadly enough, but now they knew what it was.
When Drake woke and the cook provided a specially cooked meal for him, Nora carried it to him.
“Everything’s all right now,” she said. Then she lowered her voice. “D-darling, now that everybody knows what they were afraid of, do we have to be so terribly discreet?”
“I’ll go outside with you,” promised Drake, “and hold your hand in just a second.”
But he didn’t. He was administrative officer of the island, and all responsibility was his. He had to give judicious praise—even to Spaulding—for the preparation of the warehouse as a refuge. And he had to discuss gravely with Spaulding, Spaulding’s splendid plans to hunt down the pack of carnivorous trees which had lain in wait a mere half-mile from the quonsets. He had to discuss the fumigation of the buildi
ngs that had been abandoned, so that any small monsters in them would die. He had to praise Hollister …
This was because he had full responsibility for the conduct of affairs, and the morale, and the efficiency, of the people of the island. His private affairs could not be allowed to interfere.
* * * *
Next morning the storm was practically done with, and four hours after daybreak there were shoutings, and a plane appeared. The power officer spread out panels on the ground which signified that landing was practical. The plane swung out to sea and descended, and roared magnificently toward the landing strip, and its wheels touched and it taxied to the depot.
Then there was trouble. There were passengers in this plane. They’d had little hope of a landing, but they had elaborate and detailed orders in case they managed it. Almost immediately they put out an emergency radio transmitter and reported back to Gissel Bay. Then they turned to the island’s inhabitants. They were very cordial and completely skeptical. When Beecham essayed to explain the biology behind the remarkable messages the island had sent before it went out of communication, the visitors were soothing. They were prepared, they said, to believe him implicitly. But they’d like to see the creatures he described.
There was a bale of tightly bound antarctic trees in Warehouse Four. It was surrounded by a circle of white powder. But Spaulding had gathered up the corpses of the miniature horrors from that circle, and had incinerated them. It was his idea of keeping things tidy. Other corpses by the baits had also been carefully disposed of, because the power officer had touched a dead one, once, and his hand was still swollen and useless. The trees that had been burned were merely ashes. The specimens Beecham had collected, he’d used to test weed-killers on, and Spaulding had burned them too. There was no evidence beyond the unanimous testimony of the island’s population.
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 143
