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VIII

After nearly six years of eternity, there was time again. There were days and nights, not abstractions marked out on a dial but actual risings and settings of the sun, with the warm light and the cool star-shot darkness in between. It was a fine thing to have time back again. For quite some stretch of it the people of the Lucy B. Davenport went as nearly sleepless as possible just for the pleasure of rediscovering dawn and seeing what the stars looked like with a kindly sky between to veil them off. Alpha Centauri III lacked a moon, and they were sorry about that. But they named it New Earth anyway, and they loved it perhaps more than they ever had Old Earth, simply because they had been so long without any world at all.

There was wind again, and rain, and all the smells that come with them, with wet grass and wet ground and then a hot sun on them to draw the steaming sweetness out. There were clouds, and the sound of thunder. The people of the ship stayed outside as much as they could, sheltering under bits of canvas or nothing at all, going in only when they were forced to. They worshipped the sun. They wallowed and gluttoned in the light of it, soaking it in, scalding themselves with it until they were red as lobsters, so greedy for it that they made no complaint about having two suns often in the sky, which made for double shadows and a quite un-Earthly glare.

They got muscles in their legs again, and the ship-born babies learned to walk properly, carrying their spines straight against the pull of gravity. And a queer thing happened. Kirby and Pop Barstow were rocket men, and all the others were technicians, expert workers with electricity and electronics and nucleonics and cybernetics. Not one of them had in his entire life turned a sod or planted a seed, nor had he ever felt the lack of it. Yet now, with an urge as deep and unspoken as the urge of the lemming, each one of them got hold of some sort of an implement and went out to dig with it.

There were two tractors in the Lucy, part of the cargo she had been carrying when her owner hid her away to evade the Government decree that all manned rockets be surrendered and broken up. They trundled these out and broke the prairie sod, scratching out lopsided fields and crooked furrows in them, wearing out the books they had on Farming: How To Do It. Wearing out their hands and their backs and their tempers, driven on by nearly six years of life on iron decks, between iron walls, hungry with a terrible hunger for the soil that they had never thought of before, and never been without.

The women put in gardens and the children helped to work them, and the ship-born babies took like small pigs joyously to the mud. And Kirby fought to have somebody look after the Lucy's hydroponics tanks because it would be a long time till harvest and God alone knew what might come up.

After they planted, they began to build. And so far, nothing had bothered them. No shape of menace had appeared, no voice had spoken. The automatic cameras of the RSS-1 had shown the planet to be uninhabited in the sense of human life, so there were no hostile natives to be feared. Even the game herds had withdrawn, not liking the noise and the activity of the unaccustomed smells. If there were large carnivores they had not come near the ship, perhaps because of the fires that burned all night around where the people were camped. But Kirby had not forgotten Shari's behavior on the day of landing. She seemed to have done so herself, but he knew her better than that, and he knew her better than to think it had all been nothing more than the nervous hysteria of the time.

There was a tributary stream that ran down from the foothills to the north, pouring into the river a half mile or so above where the ship had come down. From its bed they hauled flat stones to make foundations, and at its side, where there was a bay of slack water, they set up the sawmill they had put together during the voyage. And one evening, when he and Shari had finished laying three courses of stone, in an oblong form that was almost square at the corners, Kirby said, "We're going to start lumbering tomorrow."

"I know." She sat down on the hopeful little structure they had raised out of nothing toward being a house. She looked tired and dirty, and her knuckles were barked and bleeding. She sucked them methodically, staring at the ground.

Kirby said, "We'll be going up into the forest for the first time. There." He pointed, remembering how she had stood and the way she had been facing.

"Yes," she said. "I know."

"Do you want to tell me now what it was you saw or heard or thought, up there?"

"I can't." She hesitated, groping for words that would explain to him something he had never experienced. "It was not even thought, and yet it was, too. But—" She shook her head.

"But you had some kind of a contact. Have you had it since?"

"No."

Rather sharply, Kirby said, "You must know something about it. Is it dangerous? Is it animals or people or some life-form we never heard of?"

He shouted at him, "I don't know!"

He said down beside her. "All right, Shari. But you must know why you were afraid of it."

"Yes. I know that." And she began slowly to put words to the old nightmare they had shared between them, the thing they still dreamed about but almost never mentioned. "Do you remember the R-ship, the great brain it had, all the countless little tubes and tiny filaments and endless wiring as delicate as spider-threads?"

"I remember," Kirby said.

"When I was standing alone there, away from the others, looking toward the forest and thinking how strange and beautiful it was—it is the first one I have ever seen, except in pictures—suddenly the forest was blotted out and in my mind I saw something else. I saw the brain of the R-ship."

Kirby forgot to breathe.

"I saw it," said Shari, "from the inside."

Kirby said carefully, "From the inside? How was that?"

"First as a whole, with every tube and circuit clearly marked, and the linkages to the master controls lined out. Then, still as a whole, but with smaller things super-imposed on it, somehow staying all clear, though at the same time I could see the germanium crystals in the transistors. I could see exactly how the current flowed through circuits. I could see—structure."

She stopped, and Kirby said, "Go on."

"I could see atoms," she said, in a flat far-off voice. "I could see the particles inside the atoms. Quite clearly, Kirby. I could even see the spaces between the nucleons."

Kirby said, "My God."

He did not say anything more for a long time, and neither did she. The shadows got long, and a breeze went over the prairie, shaking the grass in wide slow ripples. Somewhere a creature that was almost, but not quite, a bird, sang an evensong composed of three sweet dropping notes.

Kirby shivered. "Total comprehension. Total visualization, total projection. And it can see inside atoms."

There was another long stillness. The far peaks turned to purple, and from the highest one a plume of snow like a white feather was blown out by a gale wind they could neither hear nor feel. The bird-creature stopped singing.

"All right," said Kirby. "Accept that. But why the R-ship's brain?"

"It—the one whose mind I touched—was trying to get in contact with the R-ship. It must have thought the Lucy was a robot ship, the RSS-1 come back again."

The forest grew darker and darker, creeping closer onto the plain. No, thought Kirby, that's only a trick of the light, and don't let us lose our grip altogether.

Something that can see the particles inside an atom, and wants to hold converse with the cybernetic brain of a robot ship.

"Why did it want to, Shari? Was it in welcome, fear, what?"

She said miserably, "I don't know. It came so fast, a flash like a—well, like a blow on the head. I can't describe it. I saw what I have told you, and then my own fear rushed up and closed it out. I don't know what it felt, or whether it felt at all."

With sudden violence Kirby said, "Is there something else now trying to take this away from us? Do we have to fight every step of the way?" He stared at the dark forest. For a long time the RSS-1 had been It, the enemy, the destroyer. Now there was another one. He was sick of things called It, and this one did not even have a face or a shape to it.

But it had a brain.

He turned and took her hands, "Shari."

"No, please, Kirby."

"I'm right here, nothing can hurt you."

"Please."

"I'm going up there tomorrow. A lot of us are going. I want you to try and contact this thing again. I want to know what it is, before I risk the lives of these men."

She sat silent for a moment, quite rigid. Then she said, "Very well, Kirby." Her face became closed and secret, but her hands were gripped on his, the hands of a child waiting for the lash to fall.

Silence, and the shadows stretched and flowed until they filled the plain. The mountains put off their purple, changing to a midnight blue.

Shari's hand relaxed. She sighed and said, "It's not there now. At least I can't hear it. There are many voices in the forest, but they say only the small animal things about fear and hunger and sleep."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

Kirby got up. "All right, we better get back to the ship. I'm hungry." They started to walk toward where the evening fires burned. "Don't say anything about this to the others."

"No."

"Damn it," said Kirby savagely, "I wish we had guns." Explosive weapons, like hunting and physical violence, had long been obsolete in the Solar System.

"Perhaps guns would not be any more use than the little shockers."

"Maybe not, but there was something very comforting, I remember, in just the feel of one in your hand."

He was too tired not to sleep that night, but not too tired to dream. He prowled the corridors of nightmare, angry and afraid, seeing nothing but knowing that he was seen, down to the last smallest particle of the atoms that made him. After a while he realized that he was holding a little world between his hands as a child holds a ball, and shouting as a child shouts that it was his, that he had fought for it and would not give it up. And nothing answered him but laughter, of a kind that was very ugly to his ears because it was neither human nor amused nor even cruel. He looked up and all around to see where it came from, clutching his world tight, and there was a Being, lapped in darkness and veiled in clouds, a thing incongruously like a mountain with a great domed head. It looked at him, with no eyes that he could see, and the atoms that were in him began to move apart until his body was like a film of smoke and the world slipped through his ghostly fingers, and the Being took it, saying, "It is mine." Kirby woke before dawn, not very much rested.

Shari was awake, too. She said, "Let me go with you."

"No. I took you into the R-ship with me because I had to, but this is different."

"I might be able to warn you."

"I've had a warning. There'll be twenty-five of us; it can't surprise us all at once. And if we do have to fight or run, I don't want you there to worry about."

She glowered at him, half rebellious and half relieved. He smiled. "Besides, if you came, all the other wives would want to come too. Don't wish that on me!"

Reluctantly she nodded and went to get his breakfast. While he was eating it she disappeared, and did not return until the party was almost ready to go, twenty-four sleepy-eyed men loaded with three portable chainsaws that worked on atomic batteries, and a dozen old-fashioned axes. Kirby carried a long double-handed saw, two hatchets, and a shocker. He still wished he had a gun.

Shari shook her head and said in rapid Martian so the others would not understand, "I tried again, but there was nothing. Be careful, Kirby."

The other wives were waving their good-byes. You let somebody else cut down those trees, Joe; I don't want you anywhere near them when they fall, you hear me, Joe? Be awfully careful with that axe; you could cut your leg off and bleed to death up there; did anybody remember to take plenty of bandages and things? And watch out for wild animals, and I'll be just sick with worry every minute until you get back.

The men trudged off, convinced that not one of them could possibly survive.

But the sun rose and burned away the gloom for everybody but Kirby. He was at the head of the column. Wilson was beside him, carrying the field radio, and big George Krejewski, and Weiss the cyberneticist, and the curly-headed kid Marapese who had studied to be a pilot on the voyage and who had spent several years simultaneously worshipping Kirby and hoping that he would break his neck, not permanently, of course, so that he, Marapese, might land the Lucy B. Davenport as no ship had ever been landed before. Wilson, Weiss, Krejewski, and Kirby had fought the R-ship together and it made a sort of bond between them, but at this moment it gave Kirby the creeps. It seemed too coincidental to be healthy.

They followed the course of the tributary, and by the time the companion sun came up they had reached the limits of their geographic knowledge. Nobody had thought it wise to go exploring by twos and threes or alone, and there had been too much to do to spare men for big parties like this one. The true forest, where the big trees were, was still a good way off. Kirby expected to reach it in the late afternoon, but he figured to make camp along the stream, and in the open. He wanted daylight before they went in among those mammoth trees.

There were tracks in the mud along the bank, where creatures had come down to drink. The hoofed ones seemed to be still in the odd-toed-ungulate stage, but there were others that showed a characteristic pad-and-claw pattern, and presently they came upon the remains of a carnivore's dinner. They looked at it for some time with the civilized town-man's disgusted wonder at the messiness of primitive living and dying, and Kirby said, "No stragglers, please. The critter must have been the size of a lion to pull down a buck that big."

They saw one later in the afternoon, a thick yellowish animal barred and splashed with brown. It watched them from the edge of a thicket, and snarled, and then melted silently away.

That was all. A menace, perhaps, but a normal one, and not dangerous if they stayed together. Nothing came out of the forest. There was no sound but the wind, and the bird-things calling.

Nothing happened that night, either. They built a ring of fires and set guards, armed with the shockers that were powerful enough to stun anything within reason at close range. There was no occasion to use them. At dawn Kirby talked by radio with the ship, mustered his forces, and covered the remaining mile or so to the forest's edge.

It was virgin forest, such as had not been seen on Earth for centuries. The trees went up and up until their tops were lost and the craning onlooker toppled backward. The trunks were of a size that made the idea of cutting them with little saws and axes seem like mere folly. They were hoary-looking trees, hung over with vines and moss and waxy parasitical flowers and huge fungi. Often they bore their own dead upon their shoulders, where some giant had reeled over in a storm-wind and not found room to fall. To these men, city-born and city-bred on mechanized, urban worlds, it was overpowering and in an odd way deeply exciting. When their first awed reaction was over they began to finger their axes and look hungrily at the trunks.

Kirby strained his ears and heard nothing but the rustle of leaves far overhead, and the faint skitterings and skreekings of the small people who live in all woods and are no danger to anybody.

He talked to the ship again. "It looks okay. We'll start setting up a permanent camp, and the boys reckon to cut down the first tree today, just to see how it's done."

Fenner, the Lucy's operator on the other end, laughed and started to say something, and then the radio exploded into the wildest burst of static a man ever had to deafen his ears. Kirby said a startled word or two, and suddenly realized that Wilson was tugging at his sleeve. He was jabbing his other hand in the air, and shouting. Kirby turned off the radio and in the abrupt silence Wilson bellowed, ". . . over there quick, before—"

Kirby jumped up. He sprang forward two or three steps in the direction Wilson was pointing, and Wilson finished in a much smaller voice, ". . . before it's gone."

"Where?" said Kirby, getting his shocker in his hand.

"Right there. Well, it was there. I guess it's gone now."

Kirby and all the others quartered the whole area. There was nothing there, not even any trackes showing on the thick mat left by a million years of falling leaves.

Kirby said, "What was it, Wils?"

"I didn't get a good look. But it was big."

"As big as a dog, or a man, or an elephant? How big?"

"About so." Wilson indicated a height and width that called nothing readily to mind, except that it was wider than a man and shorter than an elephant. "It didn't make any noise. I just happened to see it out of the corner of my eye, like a darker shadow, and then before I could attract your attention it was gone again."

"Must be fast on its feet," said Marapese, with an insulting note of doubt. "Also light, not to make any noise with all these branches and twigs lying around." He walked about, crackling at every step.

"Stop it," said Kirby. "We don't know what might be in here, or what it can do. Let's not get too sure of ourselves." He went to the radio again. He felt very insecure and uneasy. The static had stopped. Fenner had hung on, waiting, and he got perhaps three sentences through to him before the thing blew again. "That's fine," said Kirby. "That is just dandy."

McLeod, a small rusty-haired man who knew radios better than he knew his own children, looked it over. "Nothing wrong here. Interference of some kind, but I can't imagine what. It worked all right this morning." He turned the dial, frowning, and got another blast of static.

"Yeah," said Kirby. "It worked out on the plain." And he thought, Supposing a Thing that can see inside atoms, that Thing would not have any trouble at all jamming a radio.

It suddenly became immensely important to talk to the ship again. "Mac, let's take it out there and try it. George you come along too. Let's make that a rule, never go anywhere except in threes. Keep your eyes open, and if you want to cut something down, pick a tree close to the water."

They had a book on Lumbering: How To Do It. He left them with it and went back with Mac and George Krejewski, out onto the plain. They kept the radio on, but throttled down so that the static did not deafen them. Two or three times Kirby thought he heard Fenner's voice, but the static kept on. Kirby's spine grew colder and his steps faster. Mac said, "What's put the wind up you? It's only static."

And then it was gone. It was gone entirely and the voice of Fenner came through clear as a bell, saying quite insanely, ". . . sure it'll repeat, it's taped of course and set to start broadcasting by some kind of mass-proximity device. Still very faint, but it won't stay that way and Kirby, if you don't clear up that damn static jam—oh. You're there. Stay there, don't go away again."

MacLeod said, "What the hell?"

Krejewski looked at Kirby, and Kirby said into the transmitter, "Fenner. Stop babbling. What is it?"

Fenner said, "I'm going to shift my mike. It's coming in again. Listen."

Crackle, crackle, pop, very faint, like an old-fashioned phonograph record with dust on it.

Then a voice, also very faint, a midget speaking down a tube you could measure in fractions of a light-year. Speaking clearly and slowly, so that even an idiot child should understand.

"From the RSS-2 to the Lucy B. Davenport, a recorded message, Minor Howell, President of the United Worlds of the Solar System, to Captain Philip Kirby. Your data were incomplete. The full report of the RSS-1 showed an unidentified element present on Alpha Centauri III which makes it untenable for human life. I repeat, the planet is not habitable for humans. The RSS-2 is a converted carrier with all necessary supplies aboard to accommodate your entire company. The RSS-2 will make a single landing, and then return. For the sake of the women and children, I urge you to see that all your people return with it, as no further attempt can be made to rescue you. And I give you my personal assurance that no punitive action will be taken against you upon your return."

Crackle, scratch, click. And another voice.

"It is imperative that you broadcast your coordinates. RSS-2 cannot land unless your position is known. Broadcast your coordinates. Estimated landing time, 5 days, 14 hours, Solar Standard Time. This message will be repeated every hour."

Silence.

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