Alien Earth

CHAPTER 4 Incredible World

Farris awoke, and for a dazed moment wondered what it was that so bewildered him. Then he realized.

It was the daylight. It came and went, every few minutes. There was the darkness of night in the bedroom, and then a sudden burst of dawn, a little period of brilliant sunlight, and then night again.

It came and went, as he watched numbly, like the slow, steady beating of a great pulse — a systole and diastole of light and darkness.

Days shortened to minutes? But how could that be? And then, as he awakened fully, he remembered.

“Hunati! He injected the chlorophyll drug into my bloodstream!”

Yes. He was hunati, now. Living at a tempo a hundred times slower than normal.

And that was why day and night seemed a hundred times faster than normal, to him. He had, already, lived through several days!

Farris stumbled to his feet. As he did so, he knocked his pipe from the arm of the chair.

It did not fall to the floor. It just disappeared instantly, and the next instant was lying on the floor.

“It fell. But it fell so fast I couldn’t see it.”

Farris felt his brain reel to the impact of the unearthly. He found that he was trembling violently.

He fought to get a grip on himself. This wasn’t witchcraft. It was a secret and devilish science, but it wasn’t supernatural.

He, himself, felt as normal as ever. It was his surroundings, the swift rush of day and night especially, that alone told him he was changed.

He heard a scream, and stumbled out to the living-room of the bungalow. Lys came running toward him.

She still wore her jacket and slacks, having obviously been too worried about her brother to retire completely. And there was terror in her face.

“What’s happened?” she cried. “The light—”

He took her by the shoulders. “Lys, don’t lose your nerve. What’s happened is that we’re hunati now. Your brother did it — drugged us at dinner, then injected the chlorophyll compound into us.”

“But why?” she cried.

“Don’t you see? He was going hunati himself again, going back up to the forest. And we could easily overtake and bring him back, if we remained normal. So he changed us too, to prevent that.”

Farris went into Berreau’s room. It was as he had expected. The Frenchman was gone.

“I’ll go after him,” he said tightly. “He’s got to come back, for he may have an antidote to that hellish stuff. You wait here.”

Lys clung to him. “No! I’d go mad, here by myself, like this.”

She was, he saw, on the brink of hysterics. He didn’t wonder. The slow, pulsing beat of day and night alone was enough to unseat one’s reason.

He acceded. “All right. But wait till I get something.”

He went back to Berreau’s room and took a big bolo-knife he had seen leaning in a corner. Then he saw something else, something glittering in the pulsing light, on the botanist’s laboratory-table.

Farris stuffed that into his pocket. If force couldn’t bring Berreau back, the threat of this other thing might influence him.

He and Lys hurried out onto the veranda and down the steps. And then they stopped, appalled.

The great forest that loomed before them was now a nightmare sight. It seethed and stirred with unearthly life great branches clawing and whipping at each other as they fought for the light, vines writhing through them at incredible speed, a rustling uproar of tossing, living plant-life.

Lys shrank back. “The forest is alive now!”

“It’s just the same as always,” Farris reassured. “It’s we who have changed — who are living so slowly now that the plants seem to live faster.”

“And Andre is out in that!” Lys shuddered. Then courage came back into her pale face. “But I’m not afraid.”

They started up through the forest toward the plateau of giant trees. And now there was an awful unreality about this incredible world.

Farris felt no difference in himself. There was no sensation of slowing down. His own motions and perceptions appeared normal. It was simply that all around him the vegetation had now a savage motility that was animal in its swiftness.

Grasses sprang up beneath his feet, tiny green spears climbing toward the light. Buds swelled, burst, spread their bright petals on the air, breathed out their fragrance — and died.

New leaves leaped joyously up from every twig, lived out their brief and vital moment, withered and fell. The forest was a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of colors, from pale green to yellowed brown, that rippled as the swift tides of growth and death washed over it.

But it was not peaceful nor serene, that life of the forest. Before, it had seemed to Farris that the plants of the earth existed in a placid inertia utterly different from the beasts, who must constantly hunt or be hunted. Now he saw how mistaken he had been.

Close by, a tropical nettle crawled up beside a giant fern. Octopus-like, its tendrils flashed around and through the plant. The fern writhed. Its fronds tossed wildly, its stalks strove to be free. But the stinging death conquered it.

Lianas crawled like great serpents among the trees, encircling the trunks, twining themselves swiftly along the branches, striking their hungry parasitic roots into the living bark.

And the trees fought them. Farris could see how the branches lashed and struck against the killer vines. It was like watching a man struggle against the crushing coils of the python.

Very likely. Because the trees, the plants, knew. In their own strange, alien fashion, they were as sentient as their swifter brothers.

Hunter and hunted. The strangling lianas, the deadly, beautiful orchid that was like a cancer eating a healthy trunk, the leprous, crawling fungi — they were the wolves and the jackals of this leafy world.

Even among the trees, Farris saw, existence was a grim and never-ending struggle. Silk-cotton and bamboo and ficus trees— they too knew pain and fear and the dread of death.

He could hear them. Now, with his aural nerves slowed to an incredible receptivity, he heard the voice of the forest, the true voice that had nothing to do with the familiar sounds of wind in the branches.

The primal voice of birth and death that spoke before ever man appeared on Earth, and would continue to speak after he was gone.

At first he had been conscious only of that vast, rustling uproar. Now he could distinguish separate sounds — the thin screams of grass blades and bamboo-shoots thrusting and surging out of the earth, the lash and groan of enmeshed and dying branches, the laughter of young leaves high in the sky, the stealthy whisper of the coiling vines.

And almost, he could hear thoughts, speaking in his mind. The age-old thoughts of the trees.

Farris felt a freezing dread. He did not want to listen to the thoughts of the trees.

And the slow, steady pulsing of darkness and light went on. Days and nights, rushing with terrible speed over the hunati.

Lys, stumbling along the trail beside him, uttered a little cry of terror. A snaky black vine had darted out of the bush at her with cobra swiftness, looping swiftly to encircle her body.

Farris swung his bolo, slashed through the vine. But it struck out again, growing with that appalling speed, its tip groping for him.

He slashed again with sick horror, and pulled the girl onward, on up the side of the plateau.

“I am afraid!” she gasped. “I can hear the thoughts — the thoughts of the forest!”

“It’s your own imagination!” he told her. “Don’t listen!”

But he too could hear them! Very faintly, like sounds just below the threshold of hearing. It seemed to him that every minute — or every minute-long day — he was able to get more clearly the telepathic impulses of these organisms that lived an undreamed-of life of their own, side by side with man, yet forever barred from him, except when man was hunati.

It seemed to him that the temper of the forest had changed, that his slaying of the vine had made it aware of them. Like a crowd aroused to anger, the massed trees around them grew wrathful. A tossing and moaning rose among them.

Branches struck at Farris and the girl, lianas groped with blind heads and snakelike grace toward them. Brush and bramble clawed them spitefully, reaching out thorny arms to rake their flesh. The slender saplings lashed them like leafy whips, the swift-growing bamboo spears sought to block their path, canes clattering together as if in rage.

“It’s only in our own minds!” he said to the girl. “Because the forest is living at the same rate as we, we imagine it’s aware of us.”

He had to believe that, he knew. He had to, because when he quit believing it there was only black madness.

“No!” cried Lys. “No! The forest knows we are here.”

Panic fear threatened Farris’ self-control, as the mad uproar of the forest increased. He ran, dragging the girl with him, sheltering her with his body from the lashing of the raging forest.

They ran on, deeper into the mighty grove upon the plateau, under the pulsing rush of day and darkness. And now the trees about them were brawling giants, great silk-cotton and ficus that struck crashing blows at each other as their branches fought for clear sky — contending and terrible leafy giants beneath which the two humans were pigmies.

But the lesser forest beneath them still tossed and surged with wrath, still plucked and tore at the two running humans. And still, and clearer, stronger, Farris’ reeling mind caught the dim impact of unguessable telepathic impulses.

Then, drowning all those dim and raging thoughts, came vast and dominating impulses of greater majesty, thought-voices deep and strong and alien as the voice of primal Earth.

“Stop them!” they seemed to echo in Farris’ mind. “Stop them! Slay them! For they are our enemies!”

Lys uttered a trembling cry. “Andre!”

Farris saw him, then. Saw Berreau ahead, standing in the shadow of the monster banyans there. His arms were upraised toward those looming colossi, as though in worship. Over him towered the leafy giants, dominating all the forest.

“Stop them! Slay them!”

They thundered, now, those majestic thought-voices that Farris’ mind could barely hear. He was closer to them — closer—

He knew, then, even though his mind refused to admit the knowledge Knew whence those mighty voices came, and why Berreau worshipped the banyans.

And surely they were godlike, these green colossi who had lived for ages, whose arms reached skyward and whose aerial roots drooped and stirred and groped like hundreds of hands!

Farris forced that thought violently away. He was a man, of the world of men, and he must not worship alien lords.

Berreau had turned toward them. The man’s eyes were hot and raging, and Farris knew even before Berreau spoke that he was no longer altogether sane.

“Go, both of you!” he ordered. “You were fools, to come here after me! You killed as you came through the forest, and the forest knows!”

“Berreau, listen!” Farris appealed. “You’ve got to go back with us, forget this madness!”

Berreau laughed shrilly. “Is it madness that the Lords even now voice their wrath against you? You hear it in your mind, but you are afraid to listen! Be afraid, Farris! There is reason! You have slain trees, for many years, as you have just slain here— and the forest knows you for a foe.”

“Andre!” Lys was sobbing, her face half-buried in her hands.

Farris felt his mind cracking under the impact of the crazy scene. The ceaseless, rushing pulse of light and darkness, the rustling uproar of the seething forest around them, the vines creeping snakelike and branches whipping at them and giant banyans rocking angrily overhead.

“This is the world that man lives in all his life, and never sees or senses!” Berreau was shouting. “I’ve come into it, again and again. And each time, I’ve heard more clearly the voices of the Great Ones!

“The oldest and mightiest creatures on our planet! Long ago, men knew that and worshipped them for the wisdom they could teach. Yes, worshipped them as Ygdrasil and the Druid Oak and the Sacred Tree! But modern men have forgotten this other Earth. Except me, Farris — except me! I’ve found wisdom in this world such as you never dreamed. And your stupid blindness is not going to drag me out of it!”

Farris realized then that it was too late to reason with Berreau. The man had come too often and too far into this other Earth that was as alien to humanity as thought it lay across the universe.

It was because he had feared that, that he had brought the little thing in his jacket pocket. The one thing with which he might force Berreau to obey.

Farris took it out of his pocket. He held it up so that the other could see it.

“You know what it is, Berreau! And you know what I can do with it, if you force me to!”

Wild dread leaped into Berreau’s eyes as he recognized that glittering little vial from his own laboratory.

“The Burmese Blight! You wouldn’t, Farris! You wouldn’t turn that loose here!’’

“I will!” Farris said hoarsely. “I will, unless you come out of here with us, now!”

Raging hate and fear were in Berreau’s eyes as he stared at that innocent corked glass vial of gray-green dust.

He said thickly, “For this, I will kill!”

Lys screamed. Black lianas had crept upon her as she stood with her face hidden in her hands. They had writhed around her legs like twining serpents, they were pulling her down.

The forest seemed to roar with triumph. Vine and branch and bramble and creeper surged toward them. Dimly thunderous throbbed the strange telepathic voices.

“Slay them!” said the trees.

Farris leaped into that coiling mass of vines, his bolo slashing. He cut loose the twining lianas that held the girl, sliced fiercely at the branches that whipped wildly at them.

Then, from behind, Berreau’s savage blow on his elbow knocked the bolo from his hand.

“I told you not to kill, Farris! I told you!”

“Slay them!” pulsed the alien thought.

Berreau spoke, his eyes not leaving Farris. “Run, Lys. Leave the forest. This — murderer must die.”

He lunged as he spoke, and there was death in his white face and clutching hands.

Farris Was knocked back, against one of the giant banyan trunks. They rolled, grappling. And already the vines were sliding around them — looping and enmeshing them, tightening upon them!

It was then that the forest shrieked.

A cry telepathic and auditory at the same time — and dreadful. An utterance of alien agony beyond anything human.

Berreau’s hands fell away from Farris. The Frenchman, enmeshed with him by the coiling vines, looked up in horror.

Then Farris saw what had happened. The little vial, the vial of the blight, had smashed against the banyan trunk as Berreau charged.

And that little splash of gray-green mould was rushing through the forest faster than flame! The blight, the gray-green killer from far away, propagating itself with appalling rapidity! “Dieu!” screamed Berreau. “Non — non—”

Even normally, a blight seems to spread swiftly. And to Farris and the other two, slowed down as they were, this blight was a raging cold fire of death.

It flashed up trunks and limbs and aerial roots of the majestic banyans, eating leaf and spore and bud. It ran triumphantly across the ground, over vine and grass and shrub, bursting up other trees, leaping along the airy bridges of lianas.

And it leaped among the vines that enmeshed the two men! In mad death-agonies the creepers writhed and tightened.

Farris felt the musty mould in his mouth and nostrils, felt the construction as of steel cables crushing the life from him. The world seemed to darken—

Then a steel blade hissed and flashed, and the pressure loosened. Lys’ voice was in his ears, Lys’ hand trying to drag him from the dying, tightening creepers that she had partly slashed through. He wrenched free. “My brother!” she gasped.

With the bolo he sliced clumsily through the mass of dying writhing snake-vines that still enmeshed Berreau.

Berreau’s face appeared, as he tore away the slashed creepers. It was dark purple, rigid, his eyes staring and dead. The tightening vines had caught him around the throat, strangling him.

Lys knelt beside him, crying wildly. But Farris dragged her to her feet.

“We have to get out of here! He’s dead — but I’ll carry his body!”

“No, leave it,” she sobbed. “Leave it here, in the forest.”

Dead eyes, looking up at the death of the alien world of life into which he had now crossed, forever! Yes, it was fitting.

Farris’ heart quailed as he stumbled away with Lys through the forest that was rocking and raging in its death-throes.

Far away around them, the gray-green death was leaping on. And fainter, fainter, came the strange telepathic cries that he would never be sure he had really heard.

“We die, brothers! We die!”

And then, when it seemed to Farris that sanity must give way beneath the weight of alien agony, there came a sudden change.

The pulsing rush of alternate day and night lengthened in tempo. Each period of light and darkness was longer now, and longer—

Out of a period of dizzying semi-consciousness, Farris came back to awareness. They were standing unsteadily in the blighted forest, in bright sunlight.

And they were no longer hunati.

The chlorophyll drug had spent its force in their bodies, and they had come back to the normal tempo of human life.

Lys looked up dazedly, at the forest that now seemed static, peaceful, immobile — and in which the gray-green blight now crept so slowly they could not see it move.

“The same forest, and it’s still writhing in death!” Farris said huskily. “But now that we’re living at normal speed again, we can’t see it!”

“Please, let us go!” choked the girl. “Away from here, at once!”

It took but an hour to return to the bungalow and pack what they could carry, before they took the trail toward the Mekong.

Sunset saw them out of the blighted area of the forest, well on their way toward the river.

“Will it kill all the forest?” whispered the girl.

“No. The forest will fight back, come back, conquer the blight, in time. A long time, by our reckoning — years, decades. But to them, that fierce struggle is raging on even now.”

And as they walked on, it seemed to Farris that still in his mind there pulsed faintly from far behind that alien, throbbing cry.

“We die, brothers!”

He did not look back. But he knew that he would not come back to this or any other forest, and that his profession was ended, and that he would never kill a tree again.