“No, you’re not,” I said.
I tried to vault out of the saddle and I did get out of it, but it was an awkward operation and could by no stretch of imagination have been called a vault. I landed on my feet, but it was only with the utmost effort that I kept from falling on my face, right into a patch of the prickly vegetation. I managed to stay upright and ran ahead and grabbed Tuck by the shoulder.
“Get back and climb up on Dobbin,” I panted. “I’ll take it from here on.”
He swung around on me and there were tears of anger in his eyes. His face was all squeezed up and there was no question that he hated me.
“You never let me have a chance!” he screamed. “You never let anyone have a chance. You grab it all yourself.”
“Get back there and get on that hobby,” I told him. “If you don’t, I’ll clobber you.”
I didn’t wait to see what he did, but went on ahead, picking my way as best I could over the difficult terrain, trying only to hurry, not to run, as had been the case with Tuck.
My legs were wobbly and I had a terrible, unhinged sense of emptiness in. my gut; my head had a tendency to float lazily upward and take on a spin.
During all of this, the wobbly legs, the empty gut, the floating head, I still managed to keep plunging ahead at a fairly steady pace and at the same time stay aware of the progress of that flowing blanket of gray sliminess that poured out from the fallen tree.
It was moving almost as fast as we were moving and it was proceeding on what a military man probably would have called an interior line and I could see that no matter what we did we couldn’t quite escape it. We would brush against the outer edge of it; the creatures in the forefront of the mass would reach us, but we’d escape the main body of them.
The keening of the creatures, as the distance between us lessened, became sharper-an unending wail, like the crying of lost souls.
I looked back over my shoulder and the others were coming on, very close behind me. I tried to speed up a bit and almost came a cropper, so settled down to covering ground as rapidly as I could with safety.
We could swing a little wider on the detour, and have had a chance of outdistancing the wailing horde that humped across the land. But the chance was not a sure one and would lose a lot of time. As we were going, we would just graze the outer edge of them.
There was no way, of course, to figure out beforehand what danger they might pose. If they should prove too dangerous, we could always run for it. If the laser rifle had not been broken, we could have handled almost any danger, but the ballistics weapon Sara carried was all that we had left.
For a moment I thought that after all we would reach our point of intersection before they had arrived, that we would move on past them and be on our way and free of them. But I miscalculated and they came rolling up on us, the edge of that great humping carpet of them hitting us broadside as we cross their front.
They were small, not more than a foot or so in height and they looked like naked snails except that instead of snail faces they had a parody of human faces-the kind of ridiculous, vacant, pitifully staring faces that can be found upon certain cartoon characters, and now their keening wails turned into words-not into the actual sound of words, perhaps, but inside one’s head that sound of wailing turned into words and you know what they were crying. Not all of them were crying the same thing, but crying about the same thing and it was horrible.
Homeless, they cried in their many tongues. You have made us homeless. You have destroyed our home and now we have no home and what will become of us? We are lost. We are naked. We are hungry. We will die. We know no other place. We want no other place. We wanted so little and we needed so little and now you have taken that very little from us. What right did you have to take that very little from us-you who have so much? What kind of creatures are you that you fling us out into a world we do not want and cannot know and cannot even live in? You need not answer us, of course. But there will be a time when an answer will be asked of you and what will be your answer?
It wasn’t that way, of course, not all of it flowing together, not connected, not a definitive statement, not a structured question. But in the bits and pieces of the crying that hammered in on us that is what it meant, that is what those slimy, bumping, bereft creatures meant to say to us-knowing, I think, that there was nothing we could do for them or would be willing to do for them, but wanting us to realize the full enormity of what we’d done to them. And it was not only the words that were carried in their crying, but the look of those thousands of pathetic faces that hurled the cries at us-the anguish and the lostness, the hopelessness and the pity, yes, the very pity that they felt for us who were so vile and so abandoned and so vicious that we could take their home from them. And of all of it, the pity was the worst to take.
We won our way free of them and went on and behind us their wailing faded and finally dropped to silence, either because we were too far away to hear it or because they had stopped the wailing, knowing there was no longer any purpose to it, knowing, perhaps, that there had never been a purpose to it, but still constrained to cry out their complaint.
But even with the wailing no longer heard, the words beat in my brain and the knowledge grew and grew and grew that by the simple act of pressing a trigger I had killed not only a tree, but the thousands of pitiful little creatures that had made the tree their home and I found myself, illogically, equating them with the fairies which, in my boyhood, I’d been told lived in an ancient and majestic tree which grew behind the house, although these wailing things, God knows, looked not in the least like fairies.
Dull anger rose inside me to counterweigh the guilt and I found myself trying to justify the felling of the trees and that part of it was easy, for it could be stated and set forth in very simple terms. The tree had tried to kill me and would have killed me if it had not been for Hoot. The tree had tried to kill me and I had killed it instead and that was as close to basic justice as anyone could come. But would I have killed it, I asked myself, if I had known that it had been the home of all the wailing creatures? I tried to tell myself that I might not have acted as I had if I had only known. But it was no use. I recognized a lie even when I told it to myself. I had to admit that I would have acted exactly as I did even if I’d known.
A sharp ridge rose up ahead of us and we began to climb it. As we started up it the sharpened upper edge of the tree stump barely showed above the ridge, but as we climbed more and more of the massive stump came into view. At the time I had used the laser I had been facing north and had aimed at the tree’s western face, then had raked the laser down, cutting the stump on a sharp diagonal, making the tree fall eastward. If I had used my head, I told myself, I could have started on the eastern edge and made the tree fall to the west. That way it would not have blocked the trail. It beat all hell, I told myself, how a man never thinks of a better way to do a thing until he’d already done it.
Finally we reached the ridge-top and from where we stood looked down upon the stump, the first time we had really seen it in its entirety. And the stump was just a stump, although a big one, but in a neatly drawn circle about it was a carpeting of green. A mile or more in diameter, it stretched out from the stump, an oasis of green-lawn neatness set in the middle of a red and yellow wilderness. It made one ache to look at it, it looked so much like home, so much like the meticulously cared-for lawns that the human race had carried with it and had cultivated or had tried to cultivate on every planet where they had settled down. I’d never thought of it before, but now I thought about it, wondering what it was about it, wondering what it was about the trimmed neatness of a greensward that made the humanoids of Earth carry the concept of it deep into outer space when they left so much else behind.