by William Tenn
Ransom knelt and began to tear the wrappings off the weapons. He stared up at Hallock, smiling from the bed. "I'm ready. Map it out."
"Good," came the whispered reply. "I'm sorry I had to talk Miss Budd into danger, my boy, but I'm getting desperate. I spend more and more time in my dreams now, with greater risk of never returning. I counted on you to act immediately so that the nurse wouldn't spend too much time alone, but I swear I never intended for her to eat that much of the Fruit. I swear I intended for her to come back."
"It's done now. Doctor, give him a sedative. Don't look at me like that—give him a sedative!"
As the doctor unfastened the blanket and swabbed Hallock's arm, Morrow asked, "What do I have to do to get Nila back? And Dr. Risbummer?"
"I'll tell you; I'll be with you... there. We must kill the mother—the Brood Mother of Fancies and Horrors. You have the weapons?"
"Everything short of a portable hydrogen bomb. Rifle—high-powered Winchester—Tommy gun, two machetes, and a batch of hand grenades. Manage?"
The old explorer lay back and stared at the ceiling. "Wonderful! If only I'd had the sense years ago, myself... None of this would have happened. I'd never have reached this helpless, horror-ridden state." His whispers became almost inaudible as his mind wandered under the influence of the sedative.
"In Mesopotamia, far south of Dinra, where the desert turns to broken rock that looks like rubble left over from the making of the world... None of the native guides will go there, although there is a legend that the Garden of Eden and that treasure unheard of... Treasure! There is nothing but the tree—you pick through the sharpest rocks... and there is the tree—"
"The tree?" It was the doctor, breaking his staring silence.
"The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil," Hallock said softly, without lowering his gaze. "Not the way it is in the Bible... although some ancestor of man must have eaten of its fruit... it grows in a deep, rocky cleft where the sun cannot reach it and where no water flows... and yet it thrives... the summit is a magnificent crown of large feather-shaped leaves—purple, red and gold—and the Fruit... dozens of species of fruit, over a half of them unrecognizable, all on the same tree... not of this earth, that tree—yet who knows what creatures have eaten of it in the past, and what the Fruit eaten by a hairy Adam and his Eve. I could not know, God help me.
His voice stopped. Dr. Pertinnet tiptoed over to see if he was asleep. Suddenly, the whispers began again. The old explorer's eyes bulged, and he licked his dry lips.
"I could not know... and I didn't care... I picked the dates from the top because I recognized them, and I thought I would be safe... I thought I would be safe!... How was I to know which fruit had already been eaten by man... and then it began!... I lived in my own dreams, the dreams of my past... but only for a moment... it was pleasant... then... but when I gave some to the camel driver, and he disappeared into the dream... then when I saw the Brood Mother and what she sent forth in my mind... I could not know which fruit was already eaten by man... I could not know... what kind of men we would be... what kind if a different fruit had been eaten then... if the one I picked had been eaten... a race living in its dreams... strange powers... what some races have eaten... a dinosaur nibbling at the top... monstrosities of all geologic time eating of it... how was I to know which... which fruit..."
He was asleep.
Morrow said "Whew!" He glanced at the doctor, who was licking his lips and staring at the man on the bed.
"Coming with me?"
The doctor was startled. "Where? How?"
"Into Hallock's madness, or his mind. Comes to the same thing. Want to come along? I need a gun bearer."
"Now look here, Morrow! I've stood around and let this foolishness go on—"
"It's not foolishness," Morrow interrupted. "You should know that by now. You can't find Nila, and I can. You can't give an adequate reason for Hallock's disappearances, and I can. You don't dare taste any of that fruit which your lab says is chemically pure, while I—"
"Oh, all right. All right. I'll admit this situation has its unusual side..."
"The understatement of the millennium. Now wrap this grenade belt around your waist and pick up those cartridge boxes. See if you can slip a machete under your right arm—tha-a-at's right. I'll carry the guns and the other machete." Morrow pulled two dates out of the ivory chest on the night table.
He grinned at the doctor, who was bent almost double under the weight of the armament. "How do you know," the old man grumbled, "that, assuming we go anywhere, we will arrive with this—this confounded arsenal?"
"Don't know. I just assume it from Hallock's instructions and the fact that I carried all my clothes with me on my last visit. Here, have a date. Go on, take it!"
The psychiatrist took the fruit, turned it around doubtfully, and finally, following Ransom Morrow's example, popped it in his mouth.
"Mmmm, good," he said. "Tastes just like—"
—|—
They were falling. Down and down, around and around. All about them, the curiously shifting darkness. Morrow felt the pressing fear, the screaming desire to run away and panic.
"—just like a fruitcake the hospital dietician makes when she's in a good mood," the doctor was saying. His voice was quite calm, with the slightest edge of wonder to it. "Interesting that this should begin by a falling sensation. I think that the most reasonable explanation may be—"
They had landed. Again there was no memory of the actual moment of contact. The doctor rose and brushed nonexistent dust from his white hospital gown. He looked around nearsightedly and continued.
"The most reasonable explanation may be found in Freud. Not the Freud of declining mental powers, but the earlier, more acute scientist."
Ransom Morrow shook his head and began to divest the doctor of his weapons. "Doc," he said, "you are one nerveless wonder."
"Eh? Quite. Now on the subject of a falling sensation, Freud would have it that—Risbummer!"
He had turned and noticed the old man in tattered gown, who stood watching him fearfully. "Risbummer! So this is where you've been keeping yourself! Where are your notes, man?"
"My—notes?"
"Yes, your notes on the Hallock case. Come, come, we need them badly. Inexcusable to go away without leaving your notes available to the staff. I've been through the hospital files three times and your office twice. Where did you put them?"
The other passed his hand through his sparse hair. "My notes. Did—did you look in my cigar box? I seem somehow—I—I think I left them in the cigar box. I'm—I'm sorry for the trouble you've had."
"That's quite all right," Pertinnet told him magnanimously. "Just so we get them into the files eventually." The two men moved off to one side, conversing in low tones, for all the world like two physicians at a sickbed. Risbummer did have a nose-burn.
"Old home week in Hallock's subconscious," Ransom said to himself. He finished loading the rifle and stood up. "Nila," he called. "Hey, Nila!"
He was surprised at the speed with which his call was answered. A hysterical figure in white dashed out of the darkness and flung herself against his chest. He held her, soothed her, kissed her. "You aren't hurt?" he asked anxiously.
"No, I'm not hurt. But this place—this awful, awful place!" She stopped sobbing and straightened her hair. "I must look—oh! As bad as Risbummer. He ran away when he first saw me, but the cat was friendly and after a while so was he. He was in a broken state when I arrived: it's wonderful what a little human conversation will do."
"Well, you aren't merely human," Morrow assured her. He glanced over her head and stiffened. That pith helmet, those tropical shorts, that flowing black hair—it was Wells W. Hallock, but the Hallock of fifteen, of twenty years ago. The cat rubbed affectionately against his khaki wool socks.
"Some tableau!" Hallock said in the booming voice of youth. "Pertinnet and Risbummer are holding a consultation; Budd and Morrow are holding each other. All the stuff come through?" He walk
ed forward briskly.
While the two doctors came up to watch, he selected a machete and loaded the submachine gun; he hung two grenades from his belt.
"Don't mind if I take the Tommy?" he asked. "I know the vulnerable spots better than you. Let the docs carry the ammo."
He moved off into the lifting gloom, and Morrow hurried up beside him. "Where are we going? I don't want to take Nila where there's any danger."
"Well, the location keeps changing, but we'll get there soon. And don't worry about Nila: she's safest with you. You two, along with Pertinnet and Risbummer, are stuck here, by the way: you've all eaten too much of the Fruit. Your only hope is to wipe out the Brood Mother. From what I've seen, all this stuff will dissolve with her. I don't know whether we have enough equipment to sock it to her, but if we haven't—" He shrugged.
Nila walked directly behind them, looking about fearfully at the uglinesses slipping by in the darkness. The doctors brought up the rear, struggling under the heavy boxes of ammunition. The cat roamed on the outskirts of their little group, never moving off too far.
"How is it that you keep your youth?" Morrow asked.
"I don't know. It's one of the things I don't understand about this whole affair: I'm always as young as when I first tasted the Fruit. But that's just one puzzler. Another is why everyone who eats the Fruit winds up in my dream rather than in their own. Possibly because I was the first to eat it, and when it was fresh from the plucking at that. It's convenient to stay young, though, and I've often thought that if it weren't for these horrors barging about—Hello!"
A tiny, red head supported on a flexible stalk of a neck waved down out of the gray shadow. There were three eyes in the head and a kind of sucking proboscis for a mouth. The other end of the stalk protruded from a bulging red mass some ten yards away.
As the head descended lazily, Ransom pumped a shot into the center eye. He heard Hallock let go with a burst from the machine gun, and the head, severed from the neck, fell and dissolved into red liquid as it fell. Almost immediately, a new head began to take form on the thin, twisting neck.
"Get the body—there!" Hallock was yelling.
Ransom pulled a grenade from his belt, ripped the pin out with his teeth, and lobbed it at the main body of the creature. Then—"Drop!" he yelled.
They all fell flat as the terrific concussion sent bits of steel and red, writhing flesh over their heads. When they rose, the monstrosity was gone.
"You fool!" Hallock was raging. "You wild-eyed, trigger-happy fool! Wasting good grenades on a creature like that when we could have finished it with cartridges. We'll need all of our grenades for the Brood Mother." He took stock morosely. "Only five left. They'll have to do."
"Wasn't that the Brood Mother?" Morrow asked. He was still unsteady, but he put a reassuring arm around Nila.
"That? The Brood Mother? Why, that was just one of her minor offspring—part of a nightmare I had ten years ago in Tunis. When you see the Brood Mother—you'll recognize her!"
"How?"
"She just couldn't be anything else! Let's go."
Nila walked up and slipped her arm on Ransom's shoulder. "If we meet one of mama's bigger boys, I want to be as close to you as I can get, Ran," she whispered.
"Steady," Ransom warned. "I'm about ready to go off the deep end myself. But we've got to hold steady." He followed Hallock.
Behind him, he heard the doctors wheezing under the weight of the cartridges. "Did you notice the peculiar manifestation of the color red in that monster, Risbummer?" Dr. Pertinnet was saying. "Remember what Piscoodberry says about the occurrence of red in dreams of the mentally unstable?"
"Do you mean Piscoodberry On Simulated Hypnotism or the Piscoodberry monograph on The Primary Colors and the Subconscious?"
"The monograph, of course! Where are your thoughts, Risbummer? What else could I mean but the monograph? Now, according to Piscoodberry..."
Their voices became low and professionally confidential. Ransom and Nila grinned at each other. They felt better as they moved along behind Hallock.
The number of distorted creatures around them seemed to increase, but nothing moved out to disturb them. They were watched by hundreds of crazy eyes in all kinds of fantastic faces.
An odor, perceptible for the last few minutes, became suddenly stronger. It was something which could only be described as a stink. "Although," said Ransom, "it smells like the great grand-daddy of all stinks. Like everything filthy and foul concentrated in one place." The light had grown until there was almost perfect visibility.
The cat had been moving stiffly in front of their group. It stopped, stared ahead, and began to hump its back. A violent, hating hiss shot from its teeth. Then it slowly retreated until it backed into Hallock's legs. It crawled behind him.
Hallock stopped and peered ahead. "This is it," he said in a low, frightened voice. "The Brood Mother. Load up and get ready."
—|—
The two men saw to their weapons, made certain their grenades were easily detachable and would not catch on any part of their clothing. They stuck the machetes through their belts. Nila helped with the clips of cartridges.
"You stay here," Ransom whispered. He turned to the doctors, who were standing near him in wistful helplessness. He gave Pertinnet one of his grenades. "Take care of her." Then as Hallock squared his shoulders and sighed, he moved up beside him.
"Götterdämmerung," Hallock said. "The last big battle."
They walked forward gingerly, in step, a foot moving slowly ahead after the other one had found firm purchase. The cat padded at their side, its belly hugging the ground.
The stench tore at their nostrils. Solid waves of odor came at them in stronger and stronger layers. Ransom scratched at the stock of his Winchester, trying desperately to see what lay ahead.
Then they saw it.
An immense carpet of living flesh, cradled in its own slime, lay before them. Miles long—and miles wide. A great expanse of flat, undulating tissue, green and yellow and sickly orange. Every now and then, some monstrosity would float up to the side of the organic carpet and move away from it. It was breeding before their unbelieving eyes.
Back and forth it soughed in the thick goo, and the odor arising from it was indescribable. And then, Ransom saw it was not entirely flat: at regular intervals, there were gaping mouths set flush with the surface, opening and closing spasmodically.
Hallock rushed forward, and Ransom, licking lips that tasted like dehydrated cardboard, moved with him. He knew they should go slowly, stalk it and not fire until they knew just where to strike. But he was hypnotized by the horror of the thing, by Hallock, and he ran at it like a madman.
Hallock stopped at the edge of the slime and tore the grenades off his belt. He pulled the pins and threw them in long looping arcs far into the monster. There were explosions and bits of awful flesh splattered about them.
Then Hallock was on his knees, screaming curses and laughter and spraying bullets into the expanse of living matter.
There was an answering scream from ten thousand throats. A vast ripple ran across the blanket of flesh, from mouth to mouth. Then—the far side lifted. Higher and higher—the monster was rearing from the slime!
Ransom got off a grenade as he saw it come up. One mouth winked out into a dripping hole. Then he was beside Hallock, firing into it as it rose.
Those mouths—they weren't only mouths, they were part of individual faces with discernible eyes and noses—they were gaping red mouths and horrible faces, but they reminded Ransom of something he couldn't quite remember.
"Get that center bulge," Hallock was gasping. "Looks like a vital spot!"
Ransom squeezed off a shot right into the palpitating scarlet blob at the exact middle of the creature. It ricocheted! Armor!
He pulled the pin out of his last grenade. Slime dripped down on them. He threw the grenade. It exploded far above the red spot.
They cursed in unison and began to stumble backward, firing a
s they went. The monster undulated forward, the gaping mouths at the top swinging down closer.
Ransom remembered the grenade he had given Pertinnet. He turned and ran back to where he had left Nila and the two doctors. He dropped his Winchester as he ran, not bothering to retrieve it.
Nila stared over his head at the awful thing coming down and forward. "Ran, oh, Ran," she moaned.
Pertinnet was examining the grenade, turning it over and over in his hands. "Strange device," he observed. "No discernible trigger mechanism. Simplicity should be one of the chief factors—"
Ransom plucked the grenade from his hands and whirled. Hallock was firing straight up now, burst after burst of bullets that had as little effect as wads of paper. He ran out of ammunition or the gun jammed, and he dropped it. He swept the machete from his belt.
"Back, Hallock," Ransom called. "Get back!" The older explorer didn't seem to hear him, but moved ankle-deep into the slime.
Ransom pulled the pin, took dead aim at the red spot and threw. The entire red bulge seemed to open outward as the grenade hit it. The monster screamed again, a perfect chord of screams. It folded back, and in upon itself.
As it rolled back, Hallock stepped onto the surface, swinging his machete like a lunatic. He sliced great hunks out of it before the edge behind him curled inward, carrying him with it—shrieking in horrible pain—wrapped in huge agonizing mouths.
The world cracked. Millions of unmatched cymbals clashed against each other in a discordant rattle of sound. Great splinters of grayness came smashing down all around them.
Ransom grabbed at Nila as he felt himself fall. They turned and twisted down through a dissolving murk. On both sides, he could see fragments of bloated green bodies floating off into spiralling vapor, red and violet areas writhing off into nothingness. Pertinnet and Risbummer, also clutching each other, were floating down slowly some distance away.
Nila huddled her warm and frightened body closer to his. "Those faces," she whimpered. "Those faces! Do you know whose they were? Hallock! Awful! How unbelievably awful!"
