The forest had not changed since the last time they saw it. The trees rocked gently, high up, in a breeze they could not feel, and it was all hushed and solemn and self-contained, owing nothing to the mind or the hands of man.
And somewhere in it, hidden away in the very many miles of woods that spread along the flanks of the mountain range up to the timberline and down again to the verge of the prairie, something waited.
They had an instinctive desire to go softly and not attract anybody's attention. But the litter of fallen twigs and branches trapped their clumsy feet until it sounded to Kirby like a herd of cattle crashing along. He swore at the others, or started to, and then he realized that it did not make any difference. It did not have to hear them to know they were there. And anyway, they were here to find the thing, not hide from it. Crash away. Shout, whistle, and sing. The sooner the better. The sooner it's over, the sooner to—
To what?
To life? Death? Freedom? Or the R-ship and the long voyage home, become in their own persons the utter negation of what they had risked so much to prove.
You, thought Kirby, you faceless thing in the shadows, you stumbling block, watch out. Man has trampled down better things than you on his way over the mountains—gods and kings, parents and children, cities, nations, races, planets. Who are you to hold us back?
Fine words, murmured the restless trees. Fine words. But before you can trample you must find, and the days are short, and the speed of the R-ship is very great.
They came to the place where they had been before, with the futile axe-marks white on the one great dark bole, and the memory of fear clinging thick in the shadows.
"Stick close," said Kirby, quite unnecessarily, because they were already treading on one another's feet. "Shari, can't you hear anything yet?"
"The forest is full of voices, but they are all animal. They do not speak thoughts."
Quite unjustifiably, Kirby accused her of not trying. "It reached us here before, strong enough."
"I am doing my best," she answered, on a note of controlled fury he had never heard her use before.
"All right, all right, I'm sorry. I guess we'll have to wait."
They waited. Shari sat cross-legged on the ground. Her eyes were closed and she was frowning.
Nothing happened.
Shari's frown became deeper, the lines of her body more tense. The men sat down too, close together. Alternately they watched Shari and the spaces under the trees around them.
Time passed.
Nothing happened.
Shari groaned and lay back flat on the matted leaves. She said, "I'm tired."
Kirby patted her. "Get some rest. You can try again later."
"I don't understand it," she said. "The whole forest is watching us. Many, many creatures—oh, little creatures, Kirby, nothing to be afraid of. Some are alarmed, and some only curious, but none of them think. I can't touch any intelligence."
She rolled over, hiding her face in her arms. "It's no good. The thing's mind is too well guarded. I have not the skill nor the strength to break that barrier."
Kirby looked across her at the others. Hanawalt said, "Well, it was a good try. Now what?"
"Look for the swamp, I guess."
"The swamp?" said Krejewski "Why?"
"Well, it took Marapese there, didn't it? That must be where it holds out. There, or close to it."
"Marapese didn't see anything."
"It must have hidden from him. Or maybe it's something he wouldn't recognize as being alive if he did see it." Kirby picked up bits of twig and threw them down again one by one into the mat of leaves. "Besides, remember what he said about falling over things, and then they weren't there? Doesn't that sound like teleportation? It must have been close by, playing with him."
They thought about that. Finally Wilson said, "Yeah, but even so, how are we going to find that swamp? It could be anywhere."
"Well," said Kirby, "I figure—"
"Look," said Wilson, "I'll lay it on the line. I asked to come here, didn't I? I wanted to find this thing just as much as you, didn't I? And we figured Shari could do it. Okay. So it didn't turn out that way, and I've got a wife and kids to think of. I'm not going to go blundering around in this forest looking for something that may be a hundred miles away, and maybe not be able to find my way back in time. If Sally and the kids go aboard that ship, I'm going to be there, too."
Kirby nodded slowly. He looked from Wilson to Krejewski and Hanawalt and Weiss. "I guess you felt the same way."
Weiss stared uncomfortably at the ground. "If there was more time, or we had any idea where the place was—"
"After all," Hanawalt said, "you know how you'd feel if Shari was back there waiting."
"Sure," said Kirby. He got up and went away from them between the trees. When he was out of sight he sat down again and put his head in his hands. He heard them calling after him but he did not answer. He was not angry with them. He did not blame them in the slightest. He simply did not want to be around them for a while.
He sat there for a long time, not thinking about anything in particular, feeling low and beyond caring any more. The shadows shifted as the twin suns climbed higher in the sky. It was hot, with the breathless unstirring heat of deep woods on a summer day. After a while the pangs of hunger began to nag him. Oh hell, he thought, what's the use? He got up and started back to join the others, and he had not taken more than half a dozen steps when he heard Wilson give a yelp like a schoolgirl who finds a mouse in her slipper. A shocker cracked, and then two more, very briefly. Then there was nothing but a confusion of voices, out of which emerged Krejewski's bull bellow, shouting Kirby's name.
Kirby began to run.
They were all standing together, looking wildly around. Perhaps six feet away a long unpleasant thing that had not been able to decide whether to be a lizard or a snake lay flapping its jaws and squirming feebly. Hanawalt was still pointing his shocker at it and futilely pressing the stud.
"It won't work," he said.
"None of them will. Kirby, It's found us! The minute we used the shockers on that brute—" Wilson waved his own inoperative weapon under Kirby's nose. "It stopped them."
"All right." said Wilson, pointing. "It crawled right up on my foot before I saw it."
"Did Shari—" Kirby stopped suddenly. "Where is Shari?"
"Right here. At least she was a minute ago. When It stopped the shockers she kind of groaned, and then she ran off a little bit that way, northwest. She said that's where the thing was. She didn't go far, only a step or two. She's right here."
Kirby took a step or two that way himself, and then a lot more steps, shouting, calling, tearing into the shadows and the thorny fastnesses of windfalls. Once he thought he saw something peering at him through a curtain of vines but when he got there was nothing.
And Shari was gone.
"Just like Marapese," said Weiss. He shivered, and Wilson said quickly,
"He wasn't hurt, Kirby. He got back all right."
"Yeah." said Kirby. "Sure." He stood still with his hands clenched and all the color ran out of his face under the brown burn so it looked like a piece of dead wood. And he was thinking about a lot of things, about Shari saying, "Where you are concerned my choice is never free," and about Pop Bar-stow asking him a question he could not answer.
The others watched, shocked and silent, afraid to speak to him, as though it were somehow their fault that this had happened.
Kirby said, "Go back to the ship. I don't want you on my conscience too."
He started to pick up the things he had laid aside. His fingers shook like an old man's.
"What are you going to do?" asked Wilson.
"Find her."
"We'll go with you."
"Get back to your families," Kirby said fiercely. "Tell Pop he was right. Go home."
He went away in the direction Shari had gone, northwest, half running, ripping and floundering by main strength through curtains of hanging vines and occasional patches of undergrowth. The others looked after him for a minute, and then at each other. Wilson muttered, "Maybe it's not too far. Another day won't matter."
They followed Kirby.
Kirby neither knew nor cared. He went on his way like a charging bull until he could not go any farther, and then he sat for a while on the ground, his head bent over his knees and his flanks heaving. After that he took it slower, but he did not stop again until it got dark and he fell over a big branch into a drift of leaves and just stayed there. The others, searching carefully with their lights along his trail, came up with him about an hour later and built a fire, roused him enough to get some food in him. He was up before daybreak and gone again. And again they followed, lagging even farther behind because now Kirby had got his second wind and was going at a pace that was steady but fast, so that only a driven man could keep up with it.
The long hot day drew on to another night, and there was no swamp and no sign of Shari.
Over the campfire Wilson said, "She may be back at the ship by now. Like Marapese."
"Maybe," Kirby said.
"Look, we've got to start back in the morning."
"I told you to go in the first place."
"But we can't leave you alone up here, Kirby. It wouldn't be right."
"Go on," said Kirby. "Thanks. You're good friends. But I told you, go on!"
He went to sleep, and so did they. In the morning he was gone, and this time they did not follow but turned their faces reluctantly toward the plain.
"If Shari's there when we get back," said Hanawalt, "we can let him know by radio. We ought to be able to get that much of a message through." Kirby was still carrying his light pack with the portable field radio.
"Sure," said Krejewski. "Or maybe he'll find her soon and they can catch up with us."
"Sure," said Krejewski. "He'll be okay."
"Hell," said Weiss. "What a fine bunch of liars we are."
Kirby had ceased to think about them. He was already miles away, moving in as straight a line as he could make it by compass, angling in toward the foothill slopes of a great saddle peak. He was not clearly aware of anything except the need to keep going toward Shari. He kept her name and his thoughts about her clear on the top of his mind so that if she was still alive she might hear them and know that he was coming. Twice, with a sort of animal cunning, he used his shocker in the hopes that It might teleport him too if he attracted Its attention. But all It did was damp the current in the shocker and ignore him.
He spent that night alone, lying where he happened to be when darkness overtook him.
He had neither food nor fire. It was not that he was too tired or distraught to bother. He simply did not think of them. He slept like a dead man, without dreams, and was away again with the first gray gleam of morning. The forest seemed queer and misty. He thought vaguely that the mist would clear as the sun rose, but it did not, and after a while he realized that he was carrying the mist with him, inside his head. Distances became uncertain. Sometimes a tree that seemed no more than twenty feet away would take him half an hour to get to. He tested his mind frequently to make sure it was still functioning clearly, reciting whole passages of the Spaceman's Manual and the Laws of Astrogation. As long as he could remember those, he knew he was all right.
What he did not know was that he had reached the borders of the swamp.
It was not until he fell down that he noticed that. He was used to falling down and it did not bother him anymore, but this time he went headfirst into a slough of muddy water. The shock was startling. He scrambled up, shaking his head and gasping, and some of his wits fell back into their proper places. Cautiously he looked around.
There was a low piece of land close by, with a huge dead tree on it shooting up stark and white, dangling fringes of pale moss from what was left of its limbs. Shari was standing beside it, looking at him. She had something in her arms.
"Shari," he whispered, and then shut his eyes. When he opened them she was still there. He started to shout and run toward her, making a mighty churning of the water, and she held up one hand and said, "Softly, softly! Oh, Kirby, be careful!"
She was muddy, as Marapese had been, from head to foot, and her face showed chalk white where the streaks did not cover it. The thing in her arms was muddy, too. It moved and she stroked it. "Oh, Kirby," she murmured, and then she sat down carefully on the muddy ground and began to cry.
Kirby moved toward her, not speaking nor making any more noise than he could help. He got out of the water and crouched down in front of her. The thing she was holding gurgled and snorted in a contented, infantile way.
"Beloved." said Shari, no louder than a whisper, "how I have waited for you!" And the thing thrust out a moist little snout and nuzzled Kirby's hand.