I took a step to get turned around, headed back toward the door, and stumbled. My head ballooned and as it ballooned, was filled with fuzziness. I saw that Hoot stood to one side of the open door, but that the way through it was blocked by a perfect flood of the ratlike creatures. They were piling up over one another, as if a wide front of them, running hard, had converged upon the narrowness of the door and now were funneling through it like water through a high-pressure hose, driven on by the press of their frantic need to gather up the fallen seeds.
I fell-no, I floated-down through an eternity of time and space. I knew that I was falling, but not only was I falling slowly, but as I fell the ground seemed to draw away from me, to surge downward, so that no matter how I fell it always was as far away, or farther, than it had been to start with. And finally there was no ground at all, for night had fallen as I fell, and now I was plunging down through an awful blackness that went on and on forever.
After what seemed an endless time, the darkness went away and I opened my eyes, for it seemed that I had closed them as I fell into the darkness. I lay upon the ground and when I opened my eyes I found that I was looking up into a deep-blue sky in which the sun was rising.
Hoot was standing to one side of me. The ratlike things were gone. The cloud of dust, slowly settling back to the ground, still stood above where the tree had fallen. To one side of me the red stone wall of the great building reared up into the sky. A heavy, brooding silence hung above the land.
I rose to a sitting position and found that it took all the strength I had to lever up the top half of my body. The rifle lay to one side of me and I reached out and picked it up. It took no more than a single glance to see that it was broken. The shield of the tube was twisted out of shape and the tube itself had been knocked out of alignment. I dragged it to me and laid it across my lap. I don’t know why I bothered; no man in his right mind would ever dare to fire that gun again and there was no way I could fix it.
“Drink your fluids I have done,” Hoot honked cheerfully, “and put them back again. I hope you have no anger at me.”
“Come again?” I croaked.
“No need to come again,” he hooted at me. “Done it is already.”
“What is done already?”
“Your fluids I have drunk…”
“Now wait just a goddamn minute,” I said. “What is this fluid drinking?”
“Filled you were with deadly substances,” he said, “from being struck by seeds. Deadly to you, but deadly not at all to me.”
“So you drank my fluids?’
“Is only thing to do,” said Hoot. “Procedure is approved.”
“Lord love us,” I said. “A walking, breathing dialysis contraption.”
“Your words I do not grab,” he complained. “I empty you of fluids. I subtract the substances. I fill you up again. The biologic pump you have inside you scarcely missed a pump. But worry worry worry! I think I was too late. Apparently now I wasn’t.”
I sat there for a long moment-for a long, long moment-and it was impossible. And yet I was alive, weak and drained of strength, but still alive. I thought back to how my head had ballooned and how I’d fallen slowly and there had been something very wrong with me, indeed. I had been hit by seeds before, but only glancing blows that had not broken skin. This time, however, there had been blood upon my hand when I wiped my neck.
“Hoot,” I said, “I guess I owe . . .”
“No debt for you,” he hooted happily. “I the one who pay the debt. My life you saved before. Now I pay you back. We all even now. I would not tell you only that I fear great sin I had committed, maybe. Perhaps against some belief you hold. Perhaps no wish to have body tampered with. No need to tell you only for this reason. But you undismayed at what I do, so everything all right.”
I managed to get to my feet. The rifle fell from my lap and I kicked it to one side. The kick almost put me on my face again. I still was wobbly.
Hoot watched me brightly with his eyed tentacles.
“You carry me before,” he said. “I cannot carry you. But if you lie down and fasten yourself securely to my body, I can drag you. Have much power in legs.”
I waved the suggestion off.
“Get on with you,” I said. “Lead the way. I’ll make it.”
NINE
Tuck tried to play the man. He and Sara got me hoisted up on Dobbin’s back and then he insisted that Sara ride the second unladen hobby and that he lead the way on foot. So we went down the ramp and up the trail, with Tuck striding in the fore, still with the doll clutched against his chest, and with Hoot bringing up the rear.
“I hope,” Dobbin said to me, “you have failure to survive. I yet will dance upon your bones.”
“And the same to you,” I said.
It wasn’t a very brilliant answer, but I wasn’t at my best. I still was fairly shaky and it was about all that I could do to hang onto the saddle.
The trail led up a short rise and when we reached the top of it, we could see the tree. It was several miles away and it was bigger, even at that distance, than I had imagined it would be. It had fallen squarely across the trail and the impact of its fall had shattered the trunk from its butt up almost half its length, as any hollow tree might shatter when it falls victim to the axe. Pouring out of the great rents in the wood were crawling, creeping things, gray and even from that distance, with a slimy look to them. There were great piles of them heaped along the fallen trunk and more were crawling out and others of them were crawling down the trail, humping in their haste. From them came a thin and reedy wailing that set my teeth on edge.
Dobbin rocked nervously and whinnied with what might have been disgust or fright. “This you will regret,” he shrilled at me. “No other things have ever dared to put hands upon a tree. Never in all time have the tenants of the tree been loosed upon the land.”
“Buster,” I told him, “the tree drew a bead on me. There don’t nothing shoot at me that I don’t shoot back.”
“We’ll have to go around,” said Sara.
Tuck looked up at us. “Around that way is shorter,” he said. He swept his arm toward the left, where the stump of the free still stood, sliced diagonally by the laser beam.
Sara nodded. “Go ahead,” she said.
Tuck stepped off the trail and the hobbies followed. The ground was rough, strewn with rounded stones the size of a person’s head, studded with small, ground-hugging plants armed with heavy thorns. The ground itself was sand, interspersed with a reddish clay and mixed in both the sand and clay were shattered chips of stone, as if throughout millions of years busy little creatures had beaten rocks with hammers to reduce their mass to shards.
As soon as we moved off the trail to begin our detour around the tree, the heaving mass of gray and slimy creatures moved out convulsively in their bumping, hitching motion, to cut us off. They moved in a mass, a flowing sheet of motion with many tiny bobbing eddies, so that the entire group of them seemed to be in constant agitation. They looked very much, I thought, like an expanse of choppy water.
Tuck, seeing them move to cut us off, increased his pace until he was almost galloping, but stumbling and falling as he galloped, for the ground was most uneven and treacherous to the feet. Falling, he bumped his legs and knees against the rounded stones and his outstretched hands, flung out against the falls, smashed into the thorn-bearing vegetation that flowed along the ground. He dropped the doll and stopped to pick it up and blood from his thorn-torn fingers ran into the fabric.
The hobbies increased their pace as well, but slowed or came to a halt each time that Tuck, his legs entangled in his robe, came crashing down.
“We’ll never make it,” Sara said, “with him out there floundering around. I’m going to get down.”