To Fell a Tree

The First Day

Just before the treeman’s lift began to rise, Strong swung it around so that his back would be toward the trunk. The less he saw of the tree during the initial phase of his ascent, the better. But the lift was little more than a triangular steel frame suspended vertically from a thread-thin winch cable, and before it had risen a hundred feet it swung back to its original position. Whether he liked it or not, the tree was going to be with him right from the start.

The trunk was about fifteen feet away. What it made Strong think of most was a cliff, a convex, living cliff, with bark-prominences eight to ten feet long and fissures three to four feet deep—an arboreal precipice rising into a green and majestic cloud of foliage.

He hadn’t intended to look up, but his eyes had followed the sweep of the trunk of their own volition. Abruptly he lowered them. To reassure himself, he looked down into the shrinking village square at the familiar figures of his three companions.

Suhre and Blueskies were standing on one of the ancient burial mounds, smoking morning cigarettes. Strong was too high to see the expressions on their faces, but he knew that Suhre’s stolid features were probably set in stubborn resentment and that Blueskies was probably wearing his “buffalo-look.” Wright was about a hundred feet out from the base of the tree, operating the winch. His face would be essentially the same as it always was, a little pinched from worry, perhaps, but still embodying that strange mixture of gentleness and determination, still unmistakably a leader’s face.

Strong raised his eyes to the houses surrounding the square. They were even more enchanting seen from above than from below. Omicron Ceti’s red-gold radiance lay colorfully on chameleon rooftops, danced brightly on gingerbread facades. The nearer houses were empty now, of course—the village, within a three hundred yard radius of the tree, had been vacated and roped off—but looking at them, Strong got the fanciful impression that pixies had moved in during the night and were taking over the household chores while the villagers were away.

The thought amused him while it lasted, but it did not last long. The convoy of huge timber-carriers that moved into the square and parked in a long waiting line sent it scurrying.

Once again he confronted the tree. He was higher now, and the trunk should have become smaller. It had not—at least not perceptibly. It still resembled a convex cliff, and he felt more like a mountain climber than he did a treeman. Looking up, he saw the first limb. All he could think of was a horizontal sequoia growing on the vertical slope of a dendritic Everest.

Wright’s crisp voice sounded over the tree-to-ground radio hookup, the receiver and minuscule batteries of which were attached to Strong’s left ear lobe: “Seen any dryads yet?”

Strong tongued on the tiny transmitter attached to his lower lip. “Not yet.”

“If you do, let me know.”

“Like hell! That long blade of grass I drew gave me exclusive treerights, remember? Whatever I find up here is mine!” Wright laughed. “Just trying to help out.”

“I don’t need any help, thanks. What’s my height?”

There was a pause. Strong watched the cigarette-size figure of Wright bend over the winch-control panel. Presently: “One hundred and sixty-seven feet. Another hundred and twenty more and you’ll be even with the first limb… How do you feel?”

“Not bad.”

“Good. Let me know if anything goes wrong. The least little thing.”

“Will do.” Strong tongued off.

It was growing darker. No, not darker, Greener. The little sunlight that filtered down through the countless strata of foliage in a pale, chlorophyllic glow deepened in hue in ratio to his ascent. Tree-fright touched him, but he dispelled it by applying an antidote he’d learned in treeschool. The antidote was simple: concentrate on something, anything at all. He took inventory of the equipment attached to the basebar of the lift: tree-pegs, tree-rations, blankets; tree-tent, heating unit, peg-hammer; cable-caster, cutter, first-aid pack; climbing belt, saddle-rope, limb line (only the ringed end of the limb line was attached to the bar—the line itself trailed down to a dwindling coil at the tree’s base), Timkin-unit, tree-tongs, canteen…

At length the lift drew him into the lower foliage. He had expected the leaves to be huge, but they were small and delicate, reminiscent of the leaves of the lovely sugar maple that once had flourished on Earth. Presently he came opposite the first limb, and a flock of scarlet hahaha birds derided his arrival with a chorus of eldritch laughter. They circled around him several times, their little half-moons of eyes regarding him with seeming cynicism, then they spiraled out of sight into the upper branches.

The limb was like a ridge that had torn itself free from a mountain range to hover high above the village. Its branches were trees in their own right, each capable, were it to fall, of demolishing at least one of the houses the colonists loved so dearly.

Why, Strong wondered for the dozenth time, had the original inhabitants of Omicron Ceti 18’s major continent built their villages around the bases of such arboreal monsters? The Advance Team had stated in its report that the natives, despite their ability to build beautiful houses, had really been very primitive. But even so, they should have realized the potential threat such massive trees could pose during an electrical storm; and most of all they should have realized that excessive shade encouraged dampness and that dampness was the forerunner of decay.

Clearly they had not. For, of all the villages they had built, the present one was the only one that had not rotted into noisome ruin, just as the present tree was the only one that had not contracted the hypothetical blight that had caused the others to wither away and die.

It was the Advance Team’s contention that the natives had built their villages close to the trees because the trees were religious symbols. But, while the fact that they had migrated en masse to the “death-caves” in the northern barrens when the trees began to die certainly strengthened the contention, Strong still found it difficult to accept. The architecture o the houses suggested a practical as well as an artistic race of people, and a practical race of people would hardly commit self-genocide just because their religious symbols turned out to be susceptible to disease. Moreover, Strong had removed trees on a good many newly-opened planets, and he had seen the Advance Team proved wrong on quite a number of occasions.

The foliage was below him now, as well as above and around him. He was in a world apart, a hazy, greenish-gold world stippled with tree-flowers (the month was the Omicron Ceti 18 equivalent of June and the tree was in blossom), inhabited only by himself and the hahaha birds, and the insects that constituted their diet. He could see an occasional jigsaw-patch of the square through the intervening leaves, but that was all. Wright was out of sight; so were Suhre and Blueskies.

About fifteen feet below the limb over which he had made his original cable-cast, he told Wright to halt the winch. Then he detached the cable-caster from the base-bar, fitted the butt to his shoulder and started the lift swinging back and forth. He selected the highest limb he could see, one about eighty feet up, and at the extremity of one of his swings on the winch side of the tree, he aimed and squeezed the trigger.

It was like a spider spitting a filament of web. The gossamer cable drifted up and over the chosen limb, and its weighted end plummeted down through leaf and flower to dangle inches from his outstretched fingers. He caught it on the next swingback and, still swinging, pressed it against the apex of the lift-triangle till its microscopic fibers rooted themselves in the steel; then he snipped the “new” cable free from the caster with his pocket-snips and returned the caster to the base-bar. Finally he increased the arc of his swing till he could grasp the original cable, which slanted down through the foliage to the winch. He held on to it long enough to squeeze together the two cables—the “old” and the “new”—till they automatically interspliced, and to sever the bypassed section.

The slack in the “new” cable caused the lift to drop several feet. He waited till the swing diminished sufficiently, then told Wright to start the winch again. The infinitesimal Timkens coating the thread-thin cable began rolling over the “new” limb, and the lift resumed its upward journey. Strong leaned back in his safety belt and lit a cigarette.

That was when he saw the dryad.

Or thought he did.

The trouble was, the dryad talk had been a big joke. The kind of a joke that springs up among men whose relationships with real women are confined to the brief intervals between assignments.

You didn’t believe it, you told yourself; you knew damned well that no matter what tree you climbed on whatever planet, no lovely lady elf was going to come skipping down some leaf-trellised path and throw herself into your yearning arms. And yet all the while you were telling yourself that such a thing was never going to happen, you kept wondering in the dark outlands of your mind where common sense had never dared set foot, whether some day it might happen.

All during the voyage in from Earth and all during the ride from the spaceport to the village, they had tossed the joke back and forth. There was—if you took credence in Suhre’s and Blueskies’ and Wright’s talk… and in his own talk too —at least one dryad living in the last giant tree on Omicron Ceti 18, and what a time they were going to have catching her!

All right, Strong thought. You saw her. Now let’s see you catch her.

It had been the merest glimpse—no more than a suggestion of curves and color and fairy-face—and as the image faded from his retina, his conviction faded too. By the time the lift pulled him up into the bower where he’d thought she’d been, he was positive she would not be there. She was not.

He noticed that his hands were trembling. With an effort he steadied them. It was ridiculous to become upset over a prankish play of sunlight on leaf and limb, he told himself.

Then, at 475 feet, he thought he saw her again.

He had just checked his elevation with Wright when he happened to glance toward the trunk. She appeared to be leaning against the bark, her long leg braced on the limb he had just come abreast of. Tenuous of figure, pixyish of features, golden of hair. She couldn’t have been over twenty feet away.

“Hold it,” he told Wright in a low voice. When the lift stopped rising, he unfastened his safety belt and stepped out upon the limb. The dryad did not move.

He walked toward her slowly. Still she did not move. He rubbed his eyes to clear them, half-hoping she would not. She went on standing where she was, back propped against the trunk, long legs braced on the limb; immobile, statuesque. She wore a short tunic woven of leaves, held in place by a strap looped over her shoulder; delicate sandals, also woven of leaves, interlaced halfway to her calves. He began to think she was real. Then, without warning, she twinkled out of sight.

There was no other phrase for it. She did not walk away or run away or fly away. In the strict sense of the word, she did not even disappear. She was simply there one second and not there the next second.

Strong stood still. The exertion he had expended to gain the limb and walk along it had been negligible, and yet he was sweating. He could feel sweat on his cheeks and forehead and neck; he could feel it on his chest and back, and he could feel the sweated dampness of his tree-shirt.

He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his face. He took one step backward. Another. The dryad did not re-materialize. There was a cluster of leaves where she had been, a patch of sunlight.

Wright’s voice sounded in his eareceiver: “Everything all right?”

Strong hesitated a moment. “Everything’s fine,” he said presently. “Just doing a little reconnaissance.”

“How’s she look?”

“She—” He realized just in time that Wright was referring to the tree. He wiped his face again, wadded up the handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket. “She’s big,” he said, when he could trust his voice. “Real big.”

“We’ll take her all right. We’ve had big ones before.”

“Not this big we haven’t.”

“We’ll take her anyway.”

“I’ll take her,” Strong said.

Wright laughed. “Sure you will. But we’ll be here to help you, just in case… Ready to ‘climb’ again?”

“In a minute.”

Strong hurried back to the lift. “Let her go,” he said.

He had to cable-cast again at around 500 feet, and again at around 590. At about 650 the foliage thinned out temporarily and he was able to make a cast of better than one hundred and fifty feet. He sat back to enjoy the ride.

In the neighborhood of 700 feet, he dropped off his tree-tent, blankets and heating unit on a wide limb, and tied them down. The sleeping was always better in the big branches. As his height increased, he caught occasional glimpses of the village. Foliage below, but he could see the outermost ones, and beyond them the chemically enriched fields that stretched away to the horizon. The fields were at low ebb now—gold-stubbled with the tiny shoots of recently sown wheat, an endemic variety unequalled elsewhere in the galaxy. But by mid-summer the tide would be full and the colonists would reap another of the fabulous harvests that were turning them into first-generation millionaires.

He could see the specks of housewives puttering in backyards, and gyro-cars crawling like beetles through the streets. He could see children the apparent size of tad-poles swimming in one of the artificial lakes that were a feature of each block. All that was missing from the scene was a painter painting a house or a roofer repairing a roof. And for a good reason: these houses never ran down.

Or hadn’t, up till now.

The wood and the carpentry that had gone into their construction was without parallel. Strong had been inside only one building—the native church that the colonists had converted into a hotel—but the owner, who was also mayor of the village, had assured him that the hotel, basically, was no more than a larger and more ornate counterpart of the other buildings. Strong had never seen such flawless woodwork before, such perfect paneling. Everything was in perfect balance, unified to a degree where it was impossible to tell where foundation and underpinning left off and floor and wall began.

Walls blended into windows and windows blended into walls. Stairways didn’t simply descend: they rippled down like wood-grained rapids. As for artificial lighting, it emanated from the very wood itself.

The Advance Team, in classifying the natives as primitive, had based its conclusion largely—and perhaps stupidly, Strong thought—on the fact that they had not learned how to use metals till late in their ethnological tenure. But, the eagerness of the colonists to preserve the one remaining village (which the Department of Galactic Lands had permitted) indicated that the miracles the natives had been able to perform with wood more than compensated for the miracles they had been unable to perform with iron and bronze.

He made three more cable-casts before abandoning the lift, then, standing on the limb beneath the one over which he had made the final cast, he buckled on his climber’s belt and attached the articles he would need to its snap-locks. Finally he transferred the end of the limbline from the base-bar to the snap-lock nearest his right hip.

His approximate height now was nine hundred and seventy feet, and the tree had tapered to the proportions of the long extinct American elm. He moved in on the limb to the trunk, fashioned a safety belt out of his saddle-rope and snubbed himself into “walking” position. Then, leaning back at a forty-five degree angle, he “walked” around the trunk till he could obtain a clear view of the overhead branches.

He chose a centrally located crotch, about seventeen feet up, for the limbline, then coiled the first nine or ten feet of the line into a lineman’s loop and pulled up about thirty feet of slack. He had to turn sideways on the trunk to make the throw, but he got it off perfectly, and the coil, which comprised the nucleus of the loop, soared through the crotch and unwound down to where he could easily reach the ringed end.

He returned to the limb, untied his safety belt, and climbed the double line to the crotch. Omicron Ceti 18’s lighter gravity had reduced his 180 pounds Earth-weight to a feathery 157 ½: he did not even draw a deep breath.

After notifying Wright, he settled himself comfortably, detached the V-shaped Timken-unit from his belt and clamped it into place in the crotch. He opened the unit and laid the limb line over the near-frictionless bearings, then closed the unit and locked it. Although he could not see what was taking place on the ground, he knew that Wright was directing the relocating of the winch, the sinking of new winch-anchors, and the substitution of the limbline for the winch-cable. The winch-cable, unneeded for the moment, would be secured to the base of the tree by means of a tree-peg.

After testing the Timken-unit by pulling the limbline back and forth several times, Strong attached the tree-tongs to the line’s ringed end. Then he looked around for a good saddle-crotch. He found one presently. It was about fifteen feet above him and its location promised him excellent access to the area he was concerned with—the section ninety feet down from the top of the tree where the limbs began exceeding the one hundred foot limit Wright had set as maximum crest-length.

After making the throw, he “snaked” the rope down till he could reach it, and tied his saddle. The instruction manual they gave you at treeschool had a lot to say about saddles: about the double bowline tied on the shorter length that provided you with a seat, and the tautline hitch—tied round the longer length with the slack from the bowline—that gave you maneuverability. The manual had a lot to say about saddle-technique, too: told you how to descend by putting your weight in the seat and exerting pressure on the top of the hitch; warned you always to feed the slack through the hitch after you climbed to a higher level or when you were walking in from a tonging. If you used it right, the manual said, your saddle was your best friend.

Strong didn’t slip into the seat right away. He declared a ten-minute break instead. Leaning back in the limbline crotch, he tried to close his eyes; but the sun got in them, the sun and the leaves and the tree flowers, and the bright blue patches of sky.

The saddle-rope hung down like a silvery liana from the lofty crotch of his choosing, swayed gently in the morning breeze. The crotch was about twenty feet below the highest point of the tree, or over a thousand feet above the ground.

The figure was hard to assimilate. He had climbed a good many tall trees; some of them had even run as high as five hundred feet. But this one made them seem insignificant. This one was over a thousand feet high.

A thousand feet!…

The swaying saddle-rope took on a new meaning. He reached over and touched its knurled surface. He glanced up along its double length. Almost before he knew it, he was climbing; hand over hand at first, then intertwining his feet in the rope and letting it glide between them as he raised his body, “standing” in it while he obtained new hand-holds. Enthusiasm joined his exertion; his blood coursed warmly through his body; his senses sang. He climbed leisurely, confidently. When he reached the crotch, he pulled himself into it and looked upward.

The trunk rose into a final bifurcation some ten feet above. He pressed the tiny studs that released the steel spurs contained in the insteps of his tree-boots and stood up. He placed his hands on the dark gray bark. At this height the trunk was less than a foot in diameter and was as smooth as a woman’s throat. He raised his left foot and brought it down on an angle. Hard. The spur sank deep into the wood. He put his weight on his left foot and raised his right. He sank the second spur.

He began to climb.

Even if you closed your eyes, you could tell when you were nearing the top of a tree. Any tree. The crest swayed more and more as your height increased; the trunk grew smaller beneath your hands; the warmth of the sun intensified as the foliage thinned out around you; your heart beat in ever faster cadence…

When he reached the final crotch, Strong slipped one leg through it and looked down upon the world.

The tree was a green cloud, seen from above now rather than from below—a vast green cloud that obscured most of the village. Only the outlying houses were visible along the lacy periphery. Beyond them the “Great Wheat Sea”—as he had come to call it in his mind—rolled soundlessly away to the horizon.

“Archipelago” would have been a better metaphor than “sea.” For there were “islands” wherever you looked. “Islands” of rotted villages, sometimes surmounted by the gaunt gray lighthouse of a dead tree, sometimes littered with the gray debris of a fallen one. “Islands” of storage bins built of durable steel-foil; “islands” of equipment sheds built of the same material and filled with the sowing-copters and lightweight combines the colonists had leased from the Department of Galactic Lands.

Nearer the village there were other, smaller “islands”: the sewage disposal plant; the incinerator; the crematory. Finally there was the brand new “island” of the lumber mill, where the colonists hoped to salvage the wood from this tree.

In a way the tree would be a harvest in itself, for wood was dear on Omicron Ceti 18—almost as dear as it was on Earth. But they wouldn’t be getting it for nothing, Strong thought; not if you figured the goodly sum they were going to have to shell out to Tree Killers, Inc. for the tree’s removal.

He laughed. He had little sympathy for the colonists. He knew as well as Blueskies what they were doing to the soil, what Omicron Ceti 18 would look like half a century in the future. Sometimes he hated them.

But he found it hard to hate them now. He found it difficult to hate at all, with the morning wind fluttering his tree-shirt and the morning sun fingering his face and the vast blue sky spread out around his shoulders and the whole world spread out beneath his feet.

He lit and smoked a cigarette, and it tasted good on the top of the world, in the wind and the alien sun. He smoked it down till it stung his fingers, then ground it out on the instep of his boot.

When he raised his hand, there was blood on his forefinger and thumb.

At first he thought he had cut himself, but when he wiped the blood away there was no sign of a cut or even a scratch. He frowned. Could he possibly have injured his foot? He leaned forward… and saw the redness of his instep and the bloody, dripping spur. He leaned farther forward… and saw the bloody trail his spurs had left on the smooth gray trunk. Finally he realized that it wasn’t his blood at all.

It was the tree’s.

The foliage twinkled in the sun and the wind, and the trunk swayed lazily back and forth. And back and forth and back and forth.

Sap!

He had begun to think that the word would never assert itself, that its false synonym would pre-empt his mind forever.

Sap…

It didn’t have to be transparent. If the right pigments were present, it could be any color—any color under the sun. Purple. Green. Brown. Blue. Red—

Blood-red…

There was no reason to assume that, simply because a certain characteristic was present in ordinary trees, it necessarily had to be present in this one. There was no arboreal law that said a tree’s juice had to be colorless.

He began to feel better. Red sap, he thought. Wait’ll I tell Wright!

But he didn’t say a word about it to Wright when, a moment later, Wright contacted him.

“Almost ready?” Wright asked.

“Not—not quite. Doing a little reconnaissance.”

“Quite a favorite occupation of yours this morning.”

“In a way.”

“Well, since you’re going to keep the dryads all to yourself, I won’t try to muscle in. Too high for a middle-aged treeman like myself to be climbing, anyway. The reason I called was to tell you we’re knocking off for chow. I suggest you do the same.”

“Will do,” Strong said.

But he didn’t. He had tree-rations in his pocket, but he had no appetite to go with them. Instead, he sat quietly in the crotch and smoked another cigarette, then he descended the trunk to the saddle-rope crotch. Quite a bit of the sap got on his hands and he had to wipe it off on his handkerchief.

He retracted his spurs, intertwined his feet in the middle-rope and “skinned” down to the limbline-crotch. He paused there long enough to slip into his saddle, then he “burned” down to the end of the limbline, and attached the tongs to his belt. The first one hundred-footer was about twenty feet below him. He “burned” the rest of the way down to it, the limbline trailing behind him, and started walking out. The limb was quite large at its juncture with the trunk, but it tapered rapidly. When he judged he had covered two thirds of its length, he affixed the pointed tongs into the wood, adjusting them so that when the limbline tightened, they would get a firm bite on the limb.

The action had a calming effect, and when he tongued on his transmitter, he was his usual tree-self, and automatically lapsed into the mock-formal mode of address he and Wright sometimes used in their tree-to-ground exchanges:

“Ready when you are, Mr. Wright.”

There was a pause. Then: “You don’t believe in long noonings, do you, Mr. Strong?”

“Not when there’s a tree the size of this one staring me in the face.”

“I’ll turn on the winch. Sound off when the slack is out.”

“Will do, Mr. Wright.”

In its present position the limbline straggled back along the limb to the trunk, then up the trunk to the limbline-crotch. When the winch went into action, it rose into a sagging arc… a less pronounced arc… a straight line. The limb quivered, creaked—

“Hold it, Mr. Wright.”

He walked back to the trunk, feeding his saddle-slack through the tautline hitch. At the trunk, he put his weight into the seat and “burned” down till he was even with the underside of the limb. Then he leaned back in the saddle and drew his pistol-shaped cutter. He set the beam for ten feet and directed the muzzle at the bottom of the limb. He was about to squeeze the trigger when he caught a hint of curves and color on the periphery of his vision. He glanced out to where the limb’s leaf-laden branches brushed the noonday sky.

And saw the dryad.

“We’re waiting for the word, Mr. Strong.”

Strong swallowed. Sweat had run down from his forehead into his eyes. He wiped them on his shirtsleeve. He still saw the dryad.

She was half sitting, half reclining, on a bough too small to support her weight, and her wispy garment blended so flawlessly with her leafy surroundings that if it had not been for her pixy-face and golden limbs, and her gentle shock of yellow hair, he would have sworn he was not really seeing her at all; and even as it was, he almost would have sworn, because her face could have been a newly-opened flower, her limbs graceful patterns of golden wheat showing through the foliage, and her hair a handful of sunlight.

He wiped his eyes again. But she refused to disappear. He waved to her, feeling like a fool. She made no movement. He waved to her again, feeling even more like a fool. He tongued off his transmitter. “Get out of there!” he shouted. She paid no attention.

“What’s the holdup, Strong?” Wright’s impatience was evident both in his tone of voice and in his dropping of the mock-formal “Mr.”

Listen, Strong said to himself: You’ve climbed hundreds of trees and there wasn’t a single dryad in any of them. Not one. There’s no such thing as a dryad. There never was such a thing. There never will be. In this tree or any other tree. And there’s no more dryad out there on that limb than there’s champagne in your canteen!

He forced his eyes back to the underside of the limb towards which his cutter still pointed. He forced himself to squeeze the trigger. A slit appeared in the wood; he could almost feel pain. He tongued on his transmitter. “Up,” he said. The limbline twanged as it tightened; the limb sighed. He deepened the undercut. “Up,” he said again. This time the limb rose perceptibly. “Now keep a steady strain, Mr. Wright,” he said, and brought the invisible beam of the cutter slowly up through the wood tissue, freezing the molecular structure inch by inch. The limb rose up and back, separating from the stud. By the time he finished the cut, it was hanging parallel to the trunk and was ready to be lowered.

“Take her down, Mr. Wright!”

“Will do, Mr. Strong!”

He remained where he was while the limb passed, severing the larger subsidiary branches so that there would be less chance of its hanging up. When the final section came opposite him, he scrutinized it closely. But he saw no sign of a dryad.

He noticed that his hands were trembling again, and looking past them he saw something that made them tremble more: the cutter-beam had temporarily frozen the stub, but the sun was shining full upon it now, and blood was already beginning to ooze from the wound.

No, not blood. Sap. Red sap. My God, what was the matter with him? All the while he kept his eyes on the limbline so that he could notify Wright in case the limb became hung up. But the limb proved to be co-operative: it slipped smoothly through the lower branches and after a while, he heard Wright say, “She’s down, Mr. Strong. I’m raising the line again.” And then, in a shocked voice: “Did you cut yourself, Tom?”

“No,” Strong said. “That’s sap you’re looking at.”

“Sap! I’ll be damned!” Then: “Suhre says it looks pink to him. Blueskies, though, says it’s a deep crimson. What does it look like to you, Strong?”

“It looks like blood,” Strong said. He swung around to the other side of the trunk, out of sight of the stub, and waited for the end of the line to come within reach. While he waited, he gave the next limb down a good reconnaissance, but he saw no dryad lurking in any of its bowers. By the time he was set-up for the next cut, some of his confidence had returned and he had half forgotten about the “blood.”

And then the second limb began its downward journey, and he saw the new “blood” oozing from the new wound, and he was sick all over again. But not quite so sick this time: he was becoming inured.

He severed and sent four more limbs down in quick succession. He was lucky on all of them: not a single one became hung up. You needed luck when you delimbed a tree from the top down rather than from the bottom up and for that reason the top-to-bottom method was never used except in rare cases such as the present one, where the nearest houses were so close that the utmost care had to be taken in removing the lower, longer limbs. As the utmost care could not be taken if overhead growth interfered with their being drawn straight back against the trunk, the easier bottom-to-top method was out for Strong.

He was able to remove eight limbs before it became necessary to move the winch to the opposite side of the tree. After the winch-shift he removed eight more. An excellent afternoon’s work in any treeman’s book.

At quitting time Wright made the traditional offer: “Want to come down for the night?”

Strong made the traditional refusal: “Like hell!”

“The custom of staying in a tree till it’s finished shouldn’t apply to a tree the size of this one,” Wright said.

“Just the same, it does,” Strong said. “What’s for chow?”

“The mayor’s sending you over a special plate. I’ll send it up in the lift. In the meantime, climb in, and as soon as we change cables, you can ride down as far as your tree-tent.”

“Will do.”

“We’re going to sleep at the hotel. I’ll keep my eareceiver on in case you need anything.”

The mayor didn’t arrive for half an hour, but the plate he brought proved to be worth waiting for. Strong had spent the time setting up his tree-tent, and he ate, now, sitting cross-legged before it. The sun had set, and the hahaha birds were wearing scarlet patterns in the foliage and screaming a raucous farewell to the day.

The air grew noticeably colder, and as soon as he finished eating, he got out his heating unit and turned it on. The manufacturers of outdoor heating units took a camper’s morale as well as his physical comfort into consideration. This one was shaped like a small campfire and by adjusting a dial you could make its artificial sticks glow bright yellow, deep orange, or cherry-red. Strong chose cherry-red, and the heat emanating so cheerfully from the tiny atomic batteries drove away some of his loneliness.

After a while the moons—Omicron Ceti 18 had three of them—began to rise, and their constantly changing patterns on leaf and limb and flower had a lulling effect. The tree, in its new mood, was lovely. The hahaha birds had settled down for the night, and as there were no singing insects in the vicinity, the quiet was absolute.

It grew rapidly colder. When it was so cold he could see his breath, he withdrew into his tent and pulled his “campfire” into the triangular doorway. He sat there cross-legged in cherry-red solitude. He was very tired. Beyond the fire, the limb stretched out in silver-patterned splendor, and silver-etched leaves hung immobile in the windless night…

He saw her only in fragments at first: an argent length of leg, a shimmering softness of arm; the darkness where her tunic covered her body; the silvery blur of her face. Finally the fragments drew together, and she was there in all her thin pale loveliness. She walked out of the shadows and sat down on the opposite side of the fire. Her face was much clearer now than it had been those other times—enchanting in its fairy-smallness of features and bluebird-brightness of eyes.

For a long while she did not speak, nor did he, and they sat there silently on either side of the fire, the night all around them, silver and silent and black. And then he said:

You were out there on the limb, weren’t you?… And you were in the bower, too, and leaning against the trunk.

In a way, she said. In a way I was.

And you live here in the tree.

In a way, she said again. In a way I do. And then: Why do Earthmen kill trees?

He thought a moment. For a variety of reasons, he said. If you’re Blueskies, you kill them because killing them permits you to display one of the few heritages your race bequeathed you that the white man was unable to take away—your disdain for height. And yet all the while you’re killing them, your Amerind soul writhes in self-hatred, because what you’re doing to other lands is essentially the same as what the white man did to yours… And if you’re Suhre, you kill them because you were born with the soul of an ape, and killing them fulfills you the way painting fulfills an artist, the way creating fulfills a writer, the way composing fulfills a musician.

And if you’re you?

He discovered that he could not lie: You kill them because you never grew up, he said. You kill them because you like to have ordinary men worship you and pat you on the back and buy you drinks. Because you like to have pretty girls turn around and look at you on the street. You kill them because shrewd outfits like Tree Killers, Inc. know your immaturity and the immaturity of the hundreds of others like you, and lure you by offering to provide you with a handsome green uniform, by sending you to treeschool and steeping you in false tradition, by retaining primitive methods of tree-removal because primitive methods make you seem almost like a demigod to someone watching from the ground, and almost like a man to yourself.

Take us the Earthmen, she said, the little Earthmen, that spoil the vineyard; for our vineyards are in blossom.

You stole that from my mind, he said. But you said it wrong. It’s ‘foxes,’ not ‘Earthmen.’

Foxes have no frustrations. I said it right.

…Yes, he said, you said it right.

Now I must go. I must prepare for tomorrow. I’ll be on every limb you cut. Every falling leaf will be my hand, every dying flower my face.

I’m sorry, he said.

I know, she said. But the part of you that’s sorry lives only in the night. It dies with every dawn.

I’m tired, he said. I’m terribly tired. I’ve got to sleep.

Sleep then, little Earthman. By your little toy fire, in your little toy tent… Lie back, little Earthman, and cuddle up in your warm snug bed.

Sleep…