Ten minutes later he was wider awake than ever. Busy with his hammock, busy with his dinner, he had not paid attention to distant sounds; now he became aware of all the voices of the night. Insects buzzed and sang and strummed, foliage rustled and whispered, something coughed below him. The cough was answered by insane laughter that ran raggedly up, then down, and died in asthmatic choking.
Rod hoped that it was a bird.
He found himself straining to hear every sound, near and far, holding his breath. He told himself angrily to stop it; he was safe from at least ninetenths of potential enemies. Even a snake, if this place ran to such, would be unlikely to crawl out to the hammock, still less likely to attack if he held still. Snakes, button-brained as they were, showed little interest in anything too big to swallow. The chances of anything big enough to hurt him and interested in hurting him being in this treetop were slim. So forget those funny noises, pal, and go to sleep. After all, they’re no more important than traffic noises in a city.
He reminded himself of the Deacon’s lecture on alarm reaction, the thesis that most forms of death could be traced to the body’s coming too urgently to battle stations, remaining too long at full alert. Or, as his sister had put it, more people worry themselves to death than bleed to death. He set himself conscientiously to running through the mental routines intended to produce sleep.
He almost made it. The sound that pulled him out of warm drowsiness came from far away; involuntarily he roused himself to hear it. It sounded almost human. . . no, it was human the terrible sound of a grown man crying with heartbreak, the deep, retching, bass sobs that tear the chest.
Rod wondered what he ought to do. It was none of his business and everyone there was on his own but it went against the grain to hear such agony from a fellow human and ignore it. Should he climb down and feel his way through the dark to wherever the poor wretch was? Stumbling into tree roots, he reminded himself, and falling into holes and maybe walking straight into the jaws of something hungry and big.
Well, should he? Did he have any right not to?
It was solved for him by the sobs being answered by more sobs, this time closer and much louder. This new voice did not sound human, much as it was like the first, and it scared him almost out of his hammock. The chest strap saved him.
The second voice was joined by a third, farther away. In a few moments the peace of the night had changed to sobbing, howling ululation of mass fear and agony and defeat unbearable. Rod knew now that this was nothing human, nor anything he had ever heard, or heard of, before. He suddenly had a deep conviction that these were the stobor he had been warned to avoid.
But what were they? How was he to avoid them? The one closest seemed to be higher up than he was and no farther than the next tree . . . good grief, it might even be this tree!
When you meet a stobor in the dark what do you do? Spit in its face? Or ask it to waltz?
One thing was certain: anything that made that much noise in the jungle was not afraid of anything; therefore it behooved him to be afraid of it. But, there being nothing he could do, Rod lay quiet, his fear evidenced only by tense muscles, gooseflesh, and cold sweat. The hellish concert continued with the “stobor” closest to him sounding almost in his pocket. It seemed to have moved closer.
With just a bit more prodding Rod would have been ready to sprout wings and fly. Only at home on the North American continent of Terra had he ever spent a night alone in the wilderness. There the hazards were known and minor . . . a few predictable bears, an occasional lazy rattlesnake, dangers easily avoided.
But how could he guard against the utterly unknown? That stobor he decided that he might as well call it that that stobor might be moving toward him now, sizing him up with night eyes, deciding whether to drag him home, or eat him where it killed him.