Alien Earth

CHAPTER 2 Sorcery of Science

Ignoring the shattered glass, the young Frenchman strode quickly toward Farris.

“What do you know of hunati?” he asked harshly,

Farris saw with astonishment that the man’s hands were shaking.

“I don’t know anything except what we saw in the forest. We came upon a man standing in the moonlight who looked dead, and wasn’t. He just seemed incredibly slowed down. Piang said he was hunati.”

A flash crossed Berreau’s eyes. He exclaimed, “I knew the Rite would be called! And the others are there—”

He checked himself. It was as though the unaccustomedness of strangers had made him for a moment forget Farris’ presence.

Lys’ blonde head drooped. She looked away from Farris.

“You were saying?” the American prompted.

But Berreau had tightened up. He chose his words now. “The Laos tribes have some queer beliefs, M’sieu Farris. They’re a little hard to understand.”

Farris shrugged. “I’ve seen some queer Asian witchcraft, in my time. But this is unbelievable!”

“It is science, not witchcraft,” Berreau corrected. “Primitive science, born long ago and transmitted by tradition. That man you saw in the forest was under the influence of a chemical not found in our pharmacopeia, but nonetheless potent.”

“You mean that these tribesmen have a drug that can slow the life-process to that incredibly slow tempo?” Farris asked skeptically. “One that modern science doesn’t know about?”

“Is that so strange? Remember, M’sieu Farris, that a century ago an old peasant woman in England was curing heart-disease with foxglove, before a physician studied her cure and discovered digitalis.”

“But why on earth would even a Laos tribesman want to live so much slower?” Farris demanded.

“Because,” Berreau answered, “they believe that in that state they can commune with something vastly greater than themselves.”

Lys interrupted. “M’sieu Farris must be very weary. And his bed is ready.”

Farris saw the nervous fear in her face, and realized that she wanted to end this conversation.

He wondered about Berreau, before he dropped off to sleep. There was something odd about the chap. He had been too excited about this hunati business.

Yet that was weird enough to upset anyone, that incredible and uncanny slowing-down of a human being’s life-tempo. “To commune with something vastly greater than themselves,” Berreau had said.

What gods were so strange that a man must live a hundred limes slower than normal, to commune with them?

Next morning, he breakfasted with Lys on the broad veranda. The girl told him that her brother had already gone out.

“He will take you later today to the tribal village down in the valley, to arrange for your workers,” she said.

Farris noted the faint unhappiness still in her face. She looked silently at the great, green ocean of forest that stretched away below this plateau on whose slope they were.

“You don’t like the forest?” he ventured.

“I hate it,” she said. “It smothers one, here.”

Why, he asked, didn’t she leave? The girl shrugged.

“I shall, soon. It is useless to stay. Andre will not go back with me.”

She explained. “He has been here five years too long. When he didn’t return to France, I came out to bring him. But he won’t go. He has ties here now.”

Again, she became abruptly silent. Farris discreetly refrained from asking her what ties she meant. There might be an Annamese woman in the background — though Berreau didn’t look that type.

The day settled down to the job of being stickily tropical, and the hot still hours of the morning wore on. Farris, sprawling in a chair and getting a welcome rest, waited for Berreau to return.

He didn’t return. And as the afternoon waned, Lys looked more and more worried.

An hour before sunset, she came out onto the veranda, dressed in slacks and jacket.

“I am going down to the village — I’ll be back soon,” she told Farris.

She was a poor liar. Farris got to his feet. “You’re going after your brother. Where is he?”

Distress and doubt struggled in her face. She remained silent.

“Believe me, I want to be a friend,” Farris said quietly. “Your brother is mixed up in something here, isn’t he?”

She nodded, white-faced. “It’s why he wouldn’t go back to France with me. He can’t bring himself to leave. It’s like a horrible fascinating vice.”

“What is?”

She shook her head. “I can’t tell you. Please wait here.”

He watched her leave, and then realized she was not going down the slope but up it — up toward the top of the forested plateau.

He caught up to her in quick strides. “You can’t go up into that forest alone, in a blind search for him.”

“It’s not a blind search. I think I know where he is,” Lys whispered. “But you should not go there. The tribesmen wouldn’t like it!”

Farris instantly understood. “That big grove up on top of the plateau, where we found the hunati natives?”

Her unhappy silence was answer enough. “Go back to the bungalow,” he told her. “I’ll find him.”

She would not do that. Farris shrugged, and started forward. “Then we’ll go together.”

She hesitated, then came on. They went up the slope of the plateau, through the forest.

The westering sun sent spears and arrows of burning gold through chinks in the vast canopy of foliage under which they walked. The solid green of the forest breathed a rank, hot exhalation. Even the birds and monkeys were stifledly quiet at this hour.

“Is Berreau mixed up in that queer hunati rite?” Farris asked.

Lys looked up as though to utter a quick denial, but then dropped her eyes.

“Yes, in a way. His passion for botany got him interested in it. Now he’s involved.”

Farris was puzzled. “Why should botanical interest draw a man to that crazy drug-rite or whatever it is?”

She wouldn’t answer that. She walked in silence until they reached the top of the forested plateau. Then she spoke in a whisper.

“We must be quiet now. It will be bad if we are seen here.”

The grove that covered the plateau was pierced by horizontal bars of red sunset light. The great silk-cottons and ficus trees were pillars supporting a vast cathedral-nave of darkening green.

A little way ahead loomed up those huge, monster banyans he had glimpsed before in the moonlight. They dwarfed all the rest, towering bulks that were infinitely ancient and infinitely majestic.

Farris suddenly saw a Laos tribesman, a small brown figure, in the brush ten yards ahead of him. There were two others, farther in the distance. And they were all standing quite still, facing away from him.

They were hunati, he knew. In that queer state of slowed-down life, that incredible retardation of the vital processes.

Farris felt a chill. He muttered over his shoulder, “You had better go back down and wait.”

“No,” she whispered. “There is Andre.”

He turned, startled. Then he too saw Berreau.

His blond head bare, his face set and white and masklike, standing frozenly beneath a big wild-fig a hundred feet to the right.

Hunati!

Farris had expected it, but that didn’t make it less shocking. It wasn’t that the tribesmen mattered less as human beings. It was just that he had talked with a normal Berreau only a few hours before. And now, to see him like this!

Berreau stood in a position ludicrously reminiscent of the old-time “living statues.” One foot was slightly raised, his body bent a little forward, his arms raised a little.

Like the frozen tribesmen ahead, Berreau was facing toward the inner recesses of the grove, where the giant banyans loomed.

Farris touched his arm. “Berreau, you have to snap out of this.”

“It’s no use to speak to him,” whispered the girl. “He can’t hear.”

No, he couldn’t hear. He was living at a tempo so low that no ordinary sound could make sense to his ears. His face was a rigid mask, lips slightly parted to breathe, eyes fixed ahead. Slowly, slowly, the lids crept down and veiled those staring eyes and then crept open again in the infinitely slow wink. Slowly, slowly, his slightly raised left foot moved down toward the ground.

Movement, pulse, breathing — all a hundred times slower than normal. Living, but not in a human way — not in a human way at all.

Lys was not so stunned as Farris was. He realized later that she must have seen her brother like this, before.

“We must take him back to the bungalow, somehow,” she murmured. “I can’t let him stay out here for many days and nights, again!”

Farris welcomed the small practical problem that took his thoughts for a moment away from this frozen, standing horror.

“We can rig a stretcher, from our jackets,” he said. “I’ll cut a couple of poles.”

The two bamboos, through the sleeves of the two jackets, made a makeshift stretcher which they laid upon the ground.

Farris lifted Berreau. The man’s body was rigid, muscles locked in an effort no less strong because it was infinitely slow.

He got the young Frenchman down on the stretcher, and then looked at the girl. “Can you help carry him? Or will you get a native?”

She shook her head. “The tribesmen mustn’t know of this. Andre isn’t heavy.”

He wasn’t. He was light as though wasted by fever, though the sickened Farris knew that it wasn’t any fever that had done it.

Why should a civilized young botanist go out into the forest and partake of a filthy primitive drug of some kind that slowed him down to a frozen stupor? It didn’t make sense.

Lys bore her share of their living burden through the gathering twilight, in stolid silence. Even when they put Berreau down at intervals to rest, she did not speak.

It was not until they reached the dark bungalow and had put him down on his bed, that the girl sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands.

Farris spoke with a rough encouragement he did not feel. “Don’t get upset. He’ll be all right now. I’ll soon bring him out of this.”

She shook her head. “No, you must not attempt that! He must come out of it by himself. And it will take many days.”

The devil it would, Farris thought. He had teak to find, and he needed Berreau to arrange for workers.

Then the dejection of the girl’s small figure got him. He patted her shoulder.

“All right, I’ll help you take care of him. And together, we’ll pound some sense into him and make him go back home. Now you see about dinner.”

She lit a gasoline lamp, and went out. He heard her calling the servants.

He looked down at Berreau. He felt a little sick, again. The Frenchman lay, eyes staring toward the ceiling. He was living, breathing — and yet his retarded life-tempo cut him off from Farris as effectually as death would.

No, not quite. Slowly, so slowly that he could hardly detect the movement, Berreau’s eyes turned toward Farris’ figure.

Lys came back into the room. She was quiet, but he was getting to know her better, and he knew by her face that she was startled.

“The servants are gone! Ahra, and the girls — and your guide. They must have seen us bring Andre in.”

Farris understood. “They left because we brought back a man who’s hunati?”

She nodded. “All the tribespeople fear the rite. It’s said there’s only a few who belong to it, but they’re dreaded.”

Farris spared a moment to curse softly the vanished Annamese. “Piang would bolt like a scared rabbit, from something like this. A sweet beginning for my job here.”

“Perhaps you had better leave,” Lys said uncertainly. Then she added contradictorily, “No, I can’t be heroic about it! Please stay!”

“That’s for sure,” he told her. “I can’t go back down river and report that I shirked my job because of—’’

He stopped, for she wasn’t listening to him. She was looking past him, toward the bed.

Farris swung around. While they two had been talking, Berreau had been moving. Infinitely slowly — but moving.

His feet were on the floor now. He was getting up. His body straightened with a painful, dragging slowness, for many minutes.

Then his right foot began to rise almost imperceptibly from the floor. He was starting to walk, only a hundred times slower than normal.

He was starting to walk toward the door.

Lys’ eyes had a yearning pity in them. “He is trying to go back up to the forest. He will try so long as he is hunati.”

Farris gently lifted Berreau back to the bed. He felt a cold dampness on his forehead.

What was there up there that drew worshippers in a strange trance of slowed-down life?