Ilf ran on, reached Sam’s sleeping place. Sam lay there unmoving, like a great mossy boulder filling the pit. Ilf picked up a stone and pounded on the front part of the shell.
“Wake up!” he said desperately. “Sam, wake up!”
Sam didn’t stir. And the men were getting closer. Ilf looked this way and that, trying to decide what to do.
“Don’t let them see you,” Auris called suddenly.
“That was the girl over there,” Mr. Terokaw’s voice shouted. “Go after her, Bliman!”
“Auris, watch out!” Ilf screamed, terrified.
“Aha! And here’s the boy, Kugus. This way! Het,” Mr. Terokaw yelled triumphantly, “come down and help us catch them! We’ve got them spotted . . . ”
Ilf dropped to hands and knees, crawled away quickly under the branches of the blue flower thicket and waited, crouched low. He heard Mr. Terokaw crashing through the bushes towards him and Mr. Bliman braying, “Hurry up, Het! Hurry up!” Then he heard something else. It was the sound the giant greenweb sometimes made to trick a flock of silverbells into fluttering straight towards it, a deep drone which suddenly seemed to be pouring down from the trees and rising up from the ground.
Ilf shook his head dizzily. The drone faded, grew up again. For a moment, he thought he heard his own voice call “Auris, where are you?” from the other side of the blue flower thicket. Mr. Terokaw veered off in that direction, yelling something to Mr. Bliman and Kugus. Ilf backed farther away through the thicket, came out on the other side, climbed to his feet and turned.
He stopped. For a stretch of twenty feet ahead of him, the forest floor was moving, shifting and churning with a slow, circular motion, turning lumps of deep brown mold over and over.
Mr. Terokaw came panting into Sam’s sleeping place, red-faced, glaring about, the blue and silver gun in his hand. He shook his head to clear the resonance of the humming air from his brain. He saw a huge, moss-covered boulder tilted at a slant away from him but no sign of Ilf.
Then something shook the branches of the thicket behind the boulder. “Auris!” Ilf’s frightened voice called.
Mr. Terokaw ran around the boulder, leveling the gun. The droning in the air suddenly swelled to a roar. Two big gray, three-fingered hands came out from the boulder on either side of Mr. Terokaw and picked him up.
“Awk!” he gasped, then dropped the gun as the hands folded him, once, twice, and lifted him towards Sam’s descending head. Sam opened his large mouth, closed it, swallowed. His neck and head drew back under his shell and he settled slowly into the sleeping pit again.
The greenweb’s roar ebbed and rose continuously now, like a thousand harps being struck together in a bewildering, quickening beat. Human voices danced and swirled through the din, crying, wailing, screeching. Ilf stood at the edge of the twenty-foot circle of churning earth outside the blue flower thicket, half stunned by it all. He heard Mr. Terokaw bellow to Mr. Bliman to go after Auris, and Mr. Bliman squalling to Het to hurry. He heard his own voice nearby call Auris frantically and then Mr. Terokaw’s triumphant yell: “This way! Here’s the boy, Kugus!”
Uncle Kugus bounded out of some bushes thirty feet away, eyes staring, mouth stretched in a wide grin. He saw Ilf, shouted excitedly and ran towards him. Ilf watched, suddenly unable to move. Uncle Kugus took four long steps out over the shifting loam between them, sank ankle-deep, knee-deep. Then the brown earth leaped in cascades about him, and he went sliding straight down into it as if it were water, still grinning, and disappeared.
In the distance, Mr. Terokaw roared, “This way!” and Mr. Bliman yelled to Het to hurry up. A loud, slapping sound came from the direction of the stump of the Grandfather Slurp. It was followed by a great commotion in the bushes around there; but that only lasted a moment. Then, a few seconds later, the greenweb’s drone rose and thinned to the wild shriek it made when it had caught something big and faded slowly away . . .
Ilf came walking shakily through the opening in the thickets to Sam’s sleeping place. His head still seemed to hum inside with the greenweb’s drone but the Queen Grove was quiet again; no voices called anywhere. Sam was settled into his pit. Ilf saw something gleam on the ground near the front end of the pit. He went over and looked at it, then at the big, moss-grown dome of Sam’s shell.
“Oh, Sam,” he whispered, “I’m not sure we should have done it . . . ”
Sam didn’t stir. Ilf picked up Mr. Terokaw’s blue and silver gun gingerly by the barrel and went off with it to look for Auris. He found her at the edge of the grove, watching Het’s aircar on the other side of the road. The aircar was turned on its side and about a third of it was sunk in the ground. At work around and below it was the biggest member of the clean-up squad Ilf had ever seen in action.
They went up to the side of the road together and looked on while the aircar continued to shudder and turn and sink deeper into the earth. Ilf suddenly remembered the gun he was holding and threw it over on the ground next to the aircar. It was swallowed up instantly there. Tumbleweeds came rolling up to join them and clustered around the edge of the circle, waiting. With a final jerk, the aircar disappeared. The disturbed section of earth began to smooth over. The tumbleweeds moved out into it.
There was a soft whistling in the air, and from a Queen Tree at the edge of the grove a hundred and fifty feet away, a diamondwood seedling came lancing down, struck at a slant into the center of the circle where the aircar had vanished, stood trembling a moment, then straightened up. The tumbleweeds nearest it moved respectfully aside to give it room. The seedling shuddered and unfolded its first five-fingered cluster of silver-green leaves. Then it stood still.
Ilf looked over at Auris. “Auris,” he said, “should we have done it?”
Auris was silent a moment.
“Nobody did anything,” she said then. “They’ve just gone away again.” She took Ilf’s hand. “Let’s go back to the house and wait for Riquol and Meldy to wake up.”
The organism that was the diamondwood forest grew quiet again. The quiet spread back to its central mind unit in the Queen Grove, and the unit began to relax towards somnolence. A crisis had been passed—perhaps the last of the many it had foreseen when human beings first arrived on the world of Wrake.
The only defense against Man was Man. Understanding that, it had laid its plans. On a world now owned by Man, it adopted Man, brought him into its ecology, and its ecology into a new and again successful balance.
This had been a final flurry. A dangerous attack by dangerous humans. But the period of danger was nearly over, would soon be for good a thing of the past.
It had planned well, the central mind unit told itself drowsily. But now, since there was no further need to think today, it would stop thinking . . .
Sam the mossback fell gratefully asleep.
A Nice Day for Screaming
As soon as the Marsar Shift began, Adacee newscaster Keth Deboll had the feeling that he wasn’t going to like this assignment. In part, it might be simply a reaction to the pitch-blackness which closed down instantly on the pseudospace ship. He knew the lights in the personnel section around him were on. Yet not the faintest glow was visible anywhere—not even from Furnay’s control console directly before him. It was the deadest, emptiest black he had ever experienced . . . the kind of black that might be left after the Universe ended. The thought came suddenly that, if he had to stay in it for any length of time, it would drain everything out of him and leave him sitting here, an empty, black shell, as dead as the rest of it.
However, the shift wouldn’t last long. The Navy men with whom Keth Deboll had talked during his briefing the day before had emphasized the eerie aspects of Space Three, no doubt deliberately. Keth knew he wasn’t welcome on board, and he couldn’t have cared less. It had taken a great deal of maneuvering and string-pulling by the Adacee News Viewer System to get him the assignment on one of the fourteen pseudospace ships presently in operation. The Navy wanted more money for its enormously expensive Space Three projects; and in the end the argument had prevailed that the best way to get popular support for their wishes was to have a popular newscaster provide an enthusiastic, first-hand projected report on one of the sorties into pseudospace. And there were simply no more popular newscasters in the Federation that year than Keth Deboll.