Alien Earth

CHAPTER 3 Unholy Lure

He turned to the girl and asked, “How long will he stay in this condition?”

“A long time,” she answered heavily. “It may take weeks for the hunati to wear off.”

Farris didn’t like the prospect, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“All right, we’ll take care of him. You and I.”

Lys said, “One of us will have to watch him, all the time. He will keep trying to go back to the forest.”

“You’ve had enough for a while,” Farris told her. “I’ll watch him tonight.”

Farris watched. Not only that night but for many nights. The days went into weeks, and the natives still shunned the house, and he saw nobody except the pale girl and the man who was living in a different way than other humans lived.

Berreau didn’t change. He didn’t scan to sleep, nor did he seem to need food or drink. His eyes never closed, except in that infinitely slow blinking.

He didn’t sleep, and he did not quit moving. He was always moving, only it was in that weird, utterly slow-motion tempo that one could hardly see.

Lys had been right. Berreau wanted to go back to the forest. He might be living a hundred times slower than normal, but he was obviously still conscious in some weird way, and still trying to go back to the hushed, forbidden forest up there where they had found him.

Farris wearied of lifting the statue-like figure back into bed, and with the girl’s permission tied Berreau’s ankles. It did not make things much better. It was even more upsetting, in a way, to sit in the lamplit bedroom and watch Berreau’s slow struggles for freedom.

The dragging slowness of each tiny movement made Farris’ nerves twitch to see. He wished he could give Berreau some sedative to keep him asleep, but he did not dare to do that.

He had found, on Berreau’s forearm, a tiny incision stained with sticky green. There were scars of other, old incisions near it. Whatever crazy drug had been injected into the man to make him hunati was unknown. Farris did not dare try to counteract its effect.

Finally, Farris glanced up one night from his bored perusal of an old L’Illustration and then jumped to his feet.

Berreau still lay on the bed, but he had just winked. Had winked with normal quickness, and not that slow, dragging blink.

“Berreau!” Farris said quickly. “Are you all right now? Can you hear me?”

Berreau looked up at him with a level, unfriendly gaze. “I can hear you. May I ask why you meddled?”

It took Farris aback. He had been playing nurse so long that he had unconsciously come to think of the other as a sick man who would be grateful to him. He realized now that Berreau was coldly angry, not grateful.

The Frenchman was untying his ankles. His movements were shaky, his hands trembling, but he stood up normally.

“Well?” he asked.

Farris shrugged. “Your sister was going up there after you. I helped her bring you back. That’s all.”

Berreau looked a little startled. “Lys did that? But it’s a breaking of the Rite! It can mean trouble for her!”

Resentment and raw nerves made Farris suddenly brutal. “Why should you worry about Lys now, when you’ve made her wretched for months by your dabbing in native wizardries?”

Berreau didn’t retort angrily, as he had expected. The young Frenchman answered heavily.

“It’s true. I’ve done that to Lys.”

Farris exclaimed, “Berreau, why do you do it? Why this unholy business of going hunati, of living a hundred times slower? What can you gain by it?”

The other man looked at him with haggard eyes. “By doing it, I’ve entered an alien world. A world that exists around us all our lives, but that we never live in or understand at all.”

“What world?”

“The world of green leaf and root and branch,” Berreau answered. “The world of plant life, which we can never comprehend because of the difference between its life-tempo and our life-tempo.”

Farris began dimly to understand. “You mean, this hunati change makes you live at the same tempo as plants?”

Berreau nodded. “Yes. And that simple difference in life-tempo is the doorway into an unknown, incredible world.”

“But how?”

The Frenchman pointed to the half-healed incision on his bare arm. “The drug does it. A native drug, that slows down metabolism, heart-action, respiration, nerve-messages, everything.

“Chlorophyll is its basis. The green blood of plant-life, the complex chemical that enables plants to take their energy direct from sunlight. The natives prepare it directly from grasses, by some method of their own.”

“I shouldn’t think,” Farris said incredulously, “that chlorophyll could have any effect on an animal organism.”

“Your saying that,” Berreau retorted, “shows that your biochemical knowledge is out of date. Back in March of Nineteen Forty-Eight, two Chicago chemists engaged in mass production or extraction of chlorophyll, announced that their injection of it into dogs and rats seemed to prolong life greatly by altering the oxidation capacity of the cells.

“Prolong life greatly — yes! But it prolongs it, by slowing it down! A tree lives longer than a man, because it doesn’t live so fast. You can make a man live as long—and as slowly—as a tree, by injecting the right chlorophyll compound into his blood.”

Farris said, “That’s what you meant, by saying that primitive peoples sometimes anticipate modern scientific discoveries?”

Berreau nodded. “This chlorophyll hunati solution may be an age-old secret. I believe it’s always been known to a few among the primitive forest-folk of the world.”

He looked somberly past the American. “Tree-worship is as old as the human race. The Sacred Tree of Sumeria, the groves of Dodona, the oaks of the Druids, the tree Ygdrasil of the Norse, even our own Christmas Tree — they all stem from primitive worship of that other, alien kind of life with which we share Earth.

“I think that a few secret worshippers have always known how to prepare the chlorophyll drug that enabled them to attain complete communion with that other kind of life, by living at the same slow rate for a time.”

Farris stared. “But how did you get taken into this queer secret worship?”

The other man shrugged. “The worshippers were grateful to me, because I had saved the forests here from possible death.”

He walked across to the corner of the room that was fitted as a botanical laboratory, and took down a test-tube. It was filled with dusty, tiny spores of a leprous, gray-green color.

“This is the Burmese Blight, that’s withered whole great forests down south of the Mekong. A deadly thing, to tropical trees. It was starting to work up into this Laos country, but I showed the tribes how to stop it. The secret hunati sect made me one of them, in reward.”

“But I still can’t understand why an educated man like you would want to join such a crazy mumbo-jumbo,” Farris said.

“Dieu, I’m trying to make you understand why! To show you that it was my curiosity as a botanist that made me join the Rite and take the drug!”

Berreau rushed on. “But you can’t understand, any more than Lys could! You can’t comprehend the wonder and strangeness and beauty of living that other kind of life!”

Something in Berreau’s white, rapt face, in his haunted eyes, made Farris’ skin crawl. His words seemed momentarily to lift a veil, to make the familiar vaguely strange and terrifying.

“Berreau, listen! You’ve got to cut this and leave here at once.”

The Frenchman smiled mirthlessly. “I know. Many times, I have told myself so. But I do not go. How can I leave something that is a botanist’s heaven?”

Lys had come into the room, was looking wanly at her brother’s tare.

“Andre, won’t you give it up and go home with me?” she appealed.

“Or are you too sunken in this uncanny habit to care whether your sister breaks her heart?” Farris demanded.

Berreau flared. “You’re a smug pair! You treat me like a drug addict, without knowing the wonder of the experience I’ve had! I’ve gone into another world, an alien Earth that is around us every day of our lives and that we can’t even see. And I’m going back again, and again.”

“Use that chlorophyll drug and go hunati again?” Farris said grimly.

Berreau nodded defiantly.

“No,” said Farris. “You’re not. For if you do, we’ll just go out there and bring you in again. You’ll be quite helpless to prevent us, once you’re hunati.”

The other man raged. “There’s a way I can stop you from doing that! Your threats are dangerous!”

“There’s no way,” Farris said flatly. “Once you’ve frozen yourself into that slower life-tempo, you’re helpless against normal people. And I’m not threatening. I’m trying to save your sanity, man!”

Berreau flung out of the room without answer. Lys looked at the American, with tears glimmering in her eyes.

“Don’t worry about it,” he reassured her. “He’ll get over it, in time.”

“I fear not,” the girl whispered. “It has become a madness in his brain.”

Inwardly, Farris agreed. Whatever the lure of the unknown world that Berreau had entered by that change in life-tempo, it had caught him beyond all redemption.

A chill swept Farris when he thought of it — men out there, living at the same tempo as plants, stepping clear out of the plane of animal life to a strangely different kind of life and world.

The bungalow was oppressively silent that day — the servants gone, Berreau sulking in his laboratory, Lys moving about with misery in her eyes.

But Berreau didn’t try to go out, though Farris had been expecting that and had been prepared for a clash. And by evening, Berreau seemed to have got over his sulks. He helped prepare dinner.

He was almost gay, at the meal — a febrile good humor that Farris didn’t quite like. By common consent, none of the three spoke of what was uppermost in their minds.

Berreau retired, and Farris told Lys, “Go to bed — you’ve lost so much sleep lately you’re half asleep now I’ll keep watch.”

In his own room, Farris found drowsiness assailing him too. He sank back in a chair, fighting the heaviness that weighed down his eyelids.

Then, suddenly, he understood. “Drugged!” he exclaimed, and found his voice little more than a whisper. “Something in the dinner!”

“Yes,” said a remote voice. “Yes, Farris.”

Berreau had come in. He loomed gigantic to Farris’ blurred eyes. He came closer, and Farris saw in his hand a needle that dripped sticky green.

“I’m sorry, Farris.” He was rolling up Farris’ sleeve, and Farris could not resist. “I’m sorry to do this to you and Lys. But you would interfere. And this is the only way I can keep you from bringing me back.”

Farris felt the sting of the needle. He felt nothing more, before drugged unconsciousness claimed him.