The Getaway Special

38

Judy’s first impulse was to go help them. They were fellow astronauts in a bind, after all, no matter what their nationality. But they were also a third of the way around the planet, and even if she and Allen could locate them precisely enough to land anywhere nearby, they would only wind up dangling from the treetops with them.

She sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag while Tippet described the unfolding situation as the French astronauts on the ground emerged from their capsules, cut down the ones caught in the trees, and helped their companions out. There were two per capsule, which made eighteen in the landing party. The tree that had been topped by the hyperdrive had quit twitching, but the humans milled around on the ground next to it for a while, the other treetops obscuring all but the most general impression of their motion that could be detected through infrared sensors.

After fifteen minutes or so, during which Judy supposed they were testing the air and cleaning out their spacesuits, they began dragging their landing vehicles together. That must have been a huge job, but they managed it one capsule at a time, six of the landing party going out for a lander and hauling it into the clearing made by the dead tree, then another six going for the next one, then the last six, and so on until they had retrieved them all.

Then they started cutting down more trees.

“What the hell do they think they’re doing?” Judy demanded when Tippet reported another tree flailing its limbs, then falling over. “Didn’t they see what happened the first time?”

“They apparently don’t care,” Allen said.

“I believe they have orders to create a secure perimeter that they can defend,” Tippet said. “We are making a little progress deciphering some of their language, based on English cognates, and that seems to be the gist of the transmissions from orbit.”

“Military thinking again,” Judy said. “Never mind if the trees are sentient beings; if they’re in the way, cut ’em down.”

“Calling them ‘sentient’ might be overstating their abilities,” Tippet said. “They react to injury, but they don’t seem to be able to defend themselves, or even to notice that their neighbors have been killed.”

“The one we saw last night was curious, and when we shined our flashlights at it, it took off like a scared rabbit. That’s sentient behavior as far as I’m concerned.”

“Perhaps so,” Tippet said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

Judy grew more agitated as he continued to relay the French soldiers’ actions. They felled a dozen more trees, then cut them into sections and dragged the trunks into a circle around their landing vehicles. By that point, the butterflies on Tippet’s starship could see directly into the camp through the gap in the forest, and they could see in detail as the soldiers also cut the limbs into lengths, which they attempted to use for tent poles. The rubbery branches proved too flexible for that, so they tried setting one on fire, and when that worked satisfactorily, they cut the rest into smaller lengths and stacked them in the middle of the camp.

“Holy shit,” Judy said. “The trees burn when they’re green. How can that be?”

“There must be a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere than we thought,” Allen asked.

“It is nearly one part in three,” said Tippet.

“That would explain it. We’re used to twenty-one percent.”

Judy wondered if that was why the stove had burned so hot. She would have thought the fuel would be the limiting factor, but maybe the burner design wasn’t totally efficient and the extra oxygen had reacted with the unburned excess.

That still didn’t answer her first question. “If green wood burns here, how could the forests keep from burning down? There’d be nothing to stop a fire. The first lightning strike would set off the entire thing, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe the trees run away,” Allen said.

Maybe they did. But if that was the case, then why didn’t they run away from people with axes? And why had the one last night run away from them when they simply shined a light at it?

They might get the chance to answer that question soon, or at least gather some more data. The sun was setting behind the mountains; in another hour or two, it would be dark.

Not a moment too soon, either. The hike to the river and back had evidently taken more out of Judy than she had thought; she was definitely ready to call it a day.

While it was still light enough to see, she set to work boiling water, then pouring it into the three empty beer cans where it could cool off and remain sterile. That way they would have water ready to drink in the morning, and they wouldn’t have to carry the stove with them if they decided to explore some more. The wind in the treetops picked up while she was doing that, and she made sure the stove was stable. She didn’t want it tipping over and catching the ground cover on fire, especially not with the air thirty percent oxygen—and at higher air pressure than on Earth at that.

Allen puttered around the Getaway Special, tightening straps and checking the parachutes to make sure everything was ready to go, then as the sky darkened and the shadows deepened beneath the trees, they climbed inside the tank and settled in for the night. Judy put the water bucket back where it had been before, and carefully nested the open circuitry beside it. The open beer cans fit tightly into the corrugations in the side of the tank, where they wouldn’t get knocked over in the night.

Judy’s watch said 3:42. That seemed awfully early for sunset, but then she realized it was 3:42 a.m. The longer day here had lulled her into forgetting the time. And she had only eaten one real meal today. No wonder she was so tired.

She wondered how Tippet was holding up. “How long is the day on your home planet?” she asked him. For all their talk today, there were still a million things they didn’t know about each other.

He had settled in on top of the main hyperdrive engine, where he would be safe from human clumsiness in the dark. Allen had set his walkie-talkie on the water bucket so its speaker wouldn’t blast Tippets ears every time he spoke. “Our day is nearly twice as long as here,” Tippet said. “What about yours?”

“Shorter,” Judy said. “It’s already early morning by our clocks.”

“Does that cause difficulties for you?” he asked.

“A little. We’ll be okay after a little sleep.”

Allen had already crawled into his sleeping bag. “That’s exactly what I intend do if you two will quit yakking,” he said. “Wake me up if anything interesting happens.”

Tippet waited a few seconds, then said, “Allen! A member of my overmind has just confirmed the reliability a new method to differentiate between skkttp and sttkkp during power-up.”

“What?”

“You said to wake you if—”

“Interesting to me,” Allen said.

“You didn’t specify that. Ha, ha, ha.”

“Very funny.”

Judy giggled, only partially at Tippet’s joke. There was an alien staying the night in her spaceship! And they were lying low to see if an ambulatory tree would come for a visit again tonight. When she stopped to think about it, she either had to laugh or scream.

She switched out the light and settled into her own sleeping bag, leaving it unzipped so she could get out of it in a hurry if she had to. She listened for sounds from outside, but the forest was silent save for the soft whisper of air moving through the tops of the trees. She focused on it, letting it soothe her jangled nerves, until she drifted off to sleep.

The smoke was thick enough to mask the neon Open sign in the window, and the jukebox was blasting out a rap rampage at top volume, but Judy didn’t care. She was just diving into her second helping of batter-fried butterfly with hearts of palm on the side when Tippet’s voice cut through the dream.

“Wake up! Wake up! It’s coming!”

She sat up, instantly awake, her heart already hammering. There was a deep bass rumble that came through the ground more than the air, accompanied by the same creaking noise and wet slurping sound that she had heard last night. It seemed much louder than before, as if the entire forest were on the move this time.

She yanked her flashlight free from its duct-tape loop and made sure the plastic bag wasn’t in the way of the beam this time, but she didn’t turn it on yet.

She couldn’t see a thing in the dark. She couldn’t hear Allen moving, either. “Allen?” she whispered. “Allen, wake up.”

“I’m up,” he said. Soft blue light blossomed from his side of the tank: the computer waking up from “suspend” mode.

Tippet was on the rim of Judy’s hatch.

“What do you see?” she asked.

“Three trees are approaching us from uphill. The others are moving out of their way.”

Judy felt for the pistol with her left hand, got her finger on the trigger and her thumb on the hammer, then stuck her head up through the hatch. There was just enough starlight to see the forest opening up like a crowd of peasants when the king passes through, leaving a wide avenue for the dark silhouettes of three short but bulky-looking trees that shook the ground as they stomped down the slope toward the Getaway Special.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” she said. “Get ready on that hyperdrive.”

Allen snorted. “If we jump now, you’ll get blown out into space in your pajamas.”

“I didn’t say ‘jump’; I just said get ready. I’ll close the hatches if we have to bail out.”

“You’d better.” Allen turned on his video monitor and swiveled his camera to face the oncoming trees. Judy looked down at it once and saw three ghostly images on the screen, then she looked back out into the night again. The surveillance cameras gave a clearer image, but if she had to shoot, she needed to keep her eyes dark-adapted.

Tippet was filming, too. The trees slowed down when they came within fifty feet or so, but they kept advancing one cautious step at a time.

“What do you think?” Judy asked him. “Are they just curious, or are they going to try to trample us? Or both?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I hear a great deal of high-frequency vocal communication between them, and in the surrounding forest. Hold up a walkie-talkie and let’s see what they do if I echo some of it back to them.”

“They’re talking?” After seeing the trees’ reaction—or lack of it—to the French landing party, Judy had figured them for the vegetable equivalent of cows, but cows didn’t talk.

Tippet said, “It has the give and take of speech, but that’s not necessarily what it is. It could also be mating calls, or territorial warnings, or simple echo-location.”

Judy couldn’t hear anything but their footsteps—or was that “rootsteps”? But Tippet evidently had a wider hearing range than she did. Whether the walkie-talkies had the fidelity to handle it was anybody’s guess, but she tucked the pistol in her waistband long enough to grab the one on the water bucket and set it up on the flat spot between her hatch and Allen’s, thumbing the volume all the way up as she did. Then she transferred her flashlight into her left hand and took the pistol in her right. That felt a little less awkward, but she couldn’t say it was comfortable either way.

The walkie-talkie screeched like a public address system going into feedback. She plugged her ears with the ends of her thumbs and waited to see what would happen, but she didn’t have long to wait. The three trees hooted like monkeys, their branches waving like semaphores, then they leaned forward and rushed the tank.

“What did you say to them?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” Tippet replied, “but it apparently wasn’t good.”

The ground shook and squelched beneath the trees’ weight. Judy imagined the sound the Getaway Special would make if they stepped on it, but she didn’t intend to let them get that close. When they were still thirty feet or so away, she aimed her flashlight at them and flicked it on.

They definitely didn’t like that, but unlike the tree she had pinned down with it last night, these didn’t stop. All three of them whipped their branches backward, as if they were leaning into a hurricane, and kept coming.

“All right, then,” she muttered. “Let’s try plan B.” She cocked the pistol with her thumb, aimed it high in the air, and pulled the trigger.

A tongue of flame shot about six feet out of the barrel, and the report echoed off the surrounding forest like a clap of thunder. That did what the flashlight hadn’t: the three charging trees split apart like magnets with their same poles shoved together, and with a roar like a mile-wide strip of Velcro tearing loose, the rest of the woods yanked up their roots and leaped a few steps backward as well.

Judy’s hand tingled from the recoil. What a rush! For just an instant, while the gates of Hell had opened up at her command, she had felt like a god. An omnipotent and impatient god at that. No wonder some people liked guns so much; it gave them at least a fleeting sensation of mastery over an otherwise indifferent universe.

But “fleeting” was the word. Two of the three trees had fled, but the one in the middle kept coming straight for the Getaway Special.