BIG SWORD

by Paul Ash

He was taller than the tallest by nearly an inch, because the pod that hatched him had hung on the Tree more than twenty days longer than the rest, kept from ripening by all the arts at the People’s command. The flat spike sheathed in his left thigh was, like the rest of him, abnormally large: but it was because he represented their last defence that they gave him the name, if a thought-sign can be called that, of ‘Big Sword.’

He was a leader from his birth, because among the People intelligence was strictly proportional to size. They had two kinds of knowledge: Tree-knowledge, which they possessed from the moment they were born; and Learned-knowledge, the slow accumulation of facts passed on from one generation to another with the perfect accuracy of transmitted thought, which again was shared by all alike. The Learned-knowledge of the People covered all the necessities that they had previously experienced: but now they were faced with a wholly new danger and they needed somebody to acquire the Learned-knowledge to deal with it. So they made use of the long-known arts that could delay ripening of the pods on the Tree. These were not used often, because neighbouring pods were liable to be stunted by the growth of an extra-large one, but now there was the greatest possible need for a leader. The Big Folk, after two years of harmlessness, had suddenly revealed themselves as an acute danger, one that threatened the life of the People altogether.

Tree-knowledge Big Sword had, of course, from the moment of his hatching. The Learned-knowledge of the People was passed on to him by a succession of them sitting beside him in the treetops while his body swelled and hardened and absorbed the light. He would not grow any larger: the People made use of the stored energy of sunlight for their activities, but the substance of their bodies came from the Tree. For three revolutions of the planet he lay and absorbed energy and information. Then he knew all that they could pass on to him, and was ready to begin.

A week later he was sitting on the edge of a clearing in the forest, watching the Big Folk at their incomprehensible tasks. The People had studied them a little when they first appeared in the forest, and had made some attempt to get in touch with them, but without success. The Big Folk used thought all right, but chaotically: instead of an ordered succession of symbols there would come a rush of patterns and half-patterns, switching suddenly into another set altogether and then returning to the first, and at any moment the whole thing might be wiped out altogether. Those first students of the People, two generations ago, had thought that there was some connection between the disappearance of thought and the vibrating wind which the Big Folk would suddenly emit from a split in their heads. Big Sword was now certain that they were right, but the knowledge did not help him much. After the failure of their first attempts at communication the People, not being given to profitless curiosity, had left the Big Folk alone. But now a totally unexpected danger had come to light. One of the Big Folk, lumbering about the forest, had cut a branch off the Tree.

When they first arrived, the Big Folk had chopped down a number of trees - ordinary trees - completely, and used them for various peculiar constructions in the middle of the clearing, but that was a long time ago and the People had long since ceased to worry about it. Two generations had passed since it happened. But the attack on the Tree itself had terrified them. They had no idea why it had been made and there was no guarantee that it would not happen again. Twelve guardians had been posted round the Tree ready to do anything possible with thought or physical force to stave off another such attack, but they were no match for the Big Folk. The only safety lay in making contact with the Big Folk and telling them why they must leave the Tree of the People alone.

Big Sword had been watching them for two days now and his plan was almost ready. He had come to the conclusion that a large part of the difficulty lay in the fact that the Big People were hardly ever alone. They seemed to go about in groups of two or three and thought would jump from one to another at times in a confusing way: then again you would get a group whose thoughts were all completely different and reached the observer in a chaotic pattern of interference. The thing to do, he had decided, was to isolate one of them. Obviously the one to tackle would be the most intelligent of the group, the leader, and it was clear which one filled that position: he stood out among his companions as plainly as Big Sword. There were one or two factors to be considered further, but that evening, Big Sword had decided, he would be ready to act.

Meanwhile the Second Lambdan Exploratory Party had troubles of their own. Mostly these were the professional bothers that always accompany scientific expeditions; damaged equipment, interesting sidelines for which neither equipment nor workers happened to be available, not enough hours in the day. Apart from that there was the constant nag of the gravitation, twenty per cent higher than that of Earth, and the effect, depressing until you got used to it, of the monochromatic scenery, laid out in darker and fighter shades of black and grey. Only the red soil and red rocks varied that monotony, with an effect which to Terrestrial eyes was somewhat sinister. Nevertheless, the Expedition were having fewer troubles than they expected. Lambda, apparently, was a thoroughly safe planet. Whatever those grey-and-black jungles might look like it appeared that they had nothing harmful in them.

At thirty light-years away from Earth most personal troubles had got left behind. John James Jordan, however, the leader of the party, had brought his with him. His most urgent responsibility was in the next cabin, in bed and, it was to be hoped, asleep.

There was no doubt about it, a man who made his career in space had no business to get married. Some men, of course, could take their wives with them: there were three married couples on the expedition, though they were with the first party at base on the coast. But for a spaceman to marry a woman and leave her at home didn’t make sense.

He wondered, now, what he had thought he was doing. Marriage had been a part of that hectic interval between his first expedition and his second, when he had arrived home to find that space exploration was News and everybody wanted to know him. He had been just slightly homesick, that first time. The idea of having somebody to come back to had been attractive.

The actual coming back, three years later, had not been so good. He had had time to realize that he scarcely knew Cora. Most of their married life seemed to have been spent at parties: he would arrive late, after working overtime, and find Cora already in the thick of it. He was going to have more responsibility preparing for the third expedition: he was going to have to spend most of his time on it. He wondered how Cora was going to take it. She had never complained when he wasn’t there, during the brief period of their married life: but somehow what he remembered wasn’t reassuring.

Just the same, it was a shock to find that she had divorced him a year after his departure - one of the first of the so-called ‘space divorces.’ It was a worse shock, though, to find that he now had a two-year-old son.

The rule in a space divorce was that the divorced man had the right to claim custody of his children, providing that he could make adequate arrangements for them during his absence. That would have meant sending Ricky to some all-year-round school. There was no sense to that. Cora’s new husband was fond of him. Jordan agreed to leave Ricky with his mother. He even agreed, three years later on his next leave, not to see Ricky - Cora said that someone had told the little boy that her husband was not his real father and contact with somebody else claiming that position was likely to upset him.

Once or twice during his Earth-leaves - usually so crammed with duties that they made full-time exploration look like a holiday - Jordan got news of Cora. Apparently she was a rising star in the social world. He realized, gradually, that she had married him because for a brief time he had been News, and could take her where she wanted to be. He was vaguely relieved that she had got something out of their marriage: it was nice that somebody did. He was prepared to grant her doings the respect due to the incomprehensible. Nevertheless he was worried, for a moment, when he heard that she had been divorced yet again and remarried - to a prominent industrialist this time. He wondered how Ricky had taken it.

His first actual contact with Cora in about seven years came in the form of a request from her lawyer that he should put his signature to an application for entrance to a school. Merely a formality. The insistence on that point roused his suspicions and he made some inquiries about the school in question.

Half an hour after getting answers he had found Cora’s present address, booked a passage on the Trans-equatorial Flight and cancelled his engagements for the next twenty-four hours.

He was just in time to get aboard the flier. He had taken a bundle of urgent papers with him and he had three hours of flight in which to study them, but he hardly tried to do so. His conscience felt like a Lothornian cactus-bird trying to break out of the egg.

Why on Earth, why in Space, why in the Universe hadn’t he taken some sort of care of his son?

He had never visited Antarctica City before and he found it depressing. With great ingenuity somebody had excavated a building-space in the eternal ice and filled it with a city which was an exact copy of all the other cities. He wondered why anybody had thought it worth while.

Cora’s house seemed less a house than an animated set for a stereo on The Life of the Wealthy Classes. It had been decorated in the very latest style - he recognized one or two motifs which had been suggested by the finds of the First Lambdan Expedition, mingled with the usual transparent furniture and electrified drapes. He was contemplating a curious decorative motif, composed of a hooked object which he recognized vaguely as some primitive agricultural implement and what looked like a pileman’s drudge - but of course that particular mallet-shape had passed through innumerable uses -when Cora came in.

Her welcome was technically perfect: it combined a warm greeting with just a faint suggestion that it was still open to her to have him thrown out by the mechman if it seemed like a good idea. He decided to get the business over as soon as possible.

‘What’s the matter with Ricky, Cora? Why do you want to get rid of him?’

Cora’s sparkle-crusted brows rose delicately.

‘Why, Threejay, what a thing to say.’

The idiotic nickname, almost forgotten, caught him off balance for a moment, but he knew exactly what he wanted to say.

‘This school you want to send him to is for maladjusted children. It takes complete responsibility, replacing parents -you wouldn’t be allowed to see him for the next three years at least.’

‘It’s a very fine school, Threejay. Camillo insisted we should send him to the best one available.’

Camillo must be the new husband.

‘Why?’ repeated Jordan.

The welcome had drained right out of Cora’s manner. ‘May I ask why this sudden uprush of parental feeling? You’ve never shown any interest in Ricky before. You’ve left him to me. I’m not asking you to take any responsibility. I’m just asking you to sign that form.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s unbearable! Because I won’t have him in the house! He pries round - there’s no privacy. He finds out everything and then uses it to make trouble. He’s insulted half our friends. Camillo won’t have him in the house and neither will I. If you don’t want him to go to that school, perhaps you’ll suggest an alternative.’

Jordan was shaken, but tried not to show it. ‘I’d like to see him, Cora.’

As swiftly as it had arisen Cora’s rage sank out of sight. ‘Of course you can see him, Threejay!’ She turned to the wall-speaker and murmured briefly into it. ‘Who knows, maybe the sight of a really, truly father is all he needs! You can just have a nice fatherly chat with him before you have to catch your flier back, and then he’ll settle down and turn into a model citizen.’

The door slid open and a boy came quietly in. He was a very neat and tidy boy, small for his age, with a serious, almost sad expression. He said gently, ‘Good morning, Cora.’

Cora spoke over her shoulder. ‘Ricky, dear, who do you think this is?’

Ricky looked at the visitor and his eyes widened.

‘You… you’re Dr Jordan, aren’t you? You wrote that book about Cranil - it’s called “The Fossil Planet.” And I saw you on the stereo two nights ago. You were talking about that place where all the forests are grey and black. And—’ Ricky stopped with his mouth half open. His face went blank.

‘That’s who I am,’ said Jordan gravely.

‘I know,’ Ricky swallowed. ‘But you’re here … I mean … this sounds silly, but I suppose … I mean, you wouldn’t be my father, would you?’

‘Don’t put on an act, Ricky,’ said Cora harshly. ‘You know perfectly well he’s your father.’

Ricky turned rather white. He shook his head. ‘No, honestly. I knew my father’s name was Jordan, but I just didn’t connect it up. I say—’ he stopped short.

‘Yes, Ricky?’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t have time to talk to me a little? About Lambda, I mean. Because I really am interested - not just kid stuff. I want to be a xenobiologist.’

Cora laughed, a delicate metallic sound.

‘Why be so modest, Ricky? After all, he’s your father. He’s apparently decided it’s time he took an interest in you. He’s due back to that place that fascinates you so much in a week or two, so I don’t see how he’ll do that unless he takes you with him. Why not ask him to?’

Ricky went scarlet and then very pale. He looked quickly away, but not before Jordan had had time to see the eager interest in his face replaced by sick resignation.

‘Why shouldn’t you take him, Threejay?’ went on Cora. 5These Mass-time ships have lots of room. You’ve decided that it’s time you were responsible for him instead of me. Those books he reads are full of boys who made good in space. Why don’t you—’

‘Yes, why don’t I?’ said Jordan abruptly.

‘Don’t!’ said Ricky sharply. ‘Please, don’t! Honestly, I know it’s a joke… I mean I don’t read that kid stuff now… but—’ ‘No joke,’ said Jordan. ‘As Cora says, there’s lots of room.

Do you want to come?’ And I’d had my psycho check only the week before, reflected

Jordan, and they didn’t find a thing.

He noticed suddenly that a report was moving through the scanner on his desk - the latest instalment of Woodman’s researches on the sexual cycles of Lambdan fresh-water organisms. He’d intended to read that tonight instead of mulling over all this stuff about Ricky.

He pushed the switch back to the beginning, but it was no use. He remembered how he had felt - how Cora’s needling had made him feel - and how Ricky had looked when he grasped that the proposal was serious. No chance at all of backing out then - not that he had wanted to. It was true that, with Mass-time flight, there was plenty of room; one feature of the drive was that within certain limits the bigger the ship the faster it would go. And he had complete authority over the selection of personnel for this second expedition, which was to reinforce the team already settled on Lambda. Ricky’s inclusion was taken with a surprising lack of concern by the rest of the staff. And it had looked as though his insane action was working out all right. Until the last two days Ricky had been no trouble at all.

If anything, Ricky had been too desperately anxious to keep out of the way and avoid being a nuisance, but he had seemed completely happy. Jordan’s project of getting to know him had never got very far, because his time was fully occupied, but Ricky had spent the weeks before blast-off mainly in the Interstellar Institute, chaperoned by young Woodman, who had taken a fancy to him. Jordan had taken time out once or twice during that period to worry over the fact that he was hardly seeing the boy, but once they got aboard ship it would be different.

Once aboard ship, absorbed in checking stores and setting up projects to go into operation as soon as they landed, it was -once the party’s settled and working, it’ll be different. He’d have some time to spare.

Unfortunately that hadn’t been soon enough. He should have paid some attention to Cora. She wouldn’t have got worked up like that over nothing. She had said Ricky made trouble. He’d done that all right. And Jordan had known nothing about it till it attained the dimensions of a full-blown row.

Rivalry on the expedition was usually friendly enough. Unfortunately Cartwright and Penn, the two geologists, didn’t get on. They had different methods of working and each was suspicious of the value of the other’s work. But without Ricky they wouldn’t have come to blows on it.

Quite accidentally the riot had been started by Ellen Scott. As soil specialist she had an interest in geology. Talking to Cartwright she had happened to say something about the date of the Great Rift. Cartwright had shot out of his chair.

‘Ellen - where did you get that idea? Who told it to you?’

Ellen looked surprised.

‘I thought you did, Peter. The Great Rift’s your pet subject. If you didn’t, I suppose it was Penn.’

‘I haven’t mentioned it to anyone. I only worked it out a couple of days ago. It’s in my notes now, on my desk. Penn must have been going through them. Where is he?’

‘Calm down, Peter!’ Ellen got to her feet in astonishment. ‘Probably he worked it out too - you may have mentioned something that set him on the track. He must have mentioned it to me in the last few days, I think… that is, if he was the one who told me.’ She looked puzzled. ‘I don’t remember discussing it with him. No, I believe—’ she broke off suddenly and refused to say any more. Cartwright, unmollified, strode off to look for Penn. Dr Scott departed in search of Ricky.

‘Ricky, do you remember a day or two ago we were talking about the Great Rift?’

Ricky looked up from the microscope he was using.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Why?’ His smile faded and he began to look worried. ‘What’s happened?’

‘You remember you said something about the date - that it was about fifteen thousand years ago? You did say that, didn’t you?’

Ricky’s expression had faded to a watchful blank, but he nodded.

‘Well, who told you that? How did you know?’

‘Somebody said it,’ said Ricky flatly. He did not sound as though he expected to be believed.

Ellen Scott frowned.

‘Listen, Ricky. Dr Cartwright’s got the idea that somebody must have looked through the papers on his desk and read that date. He says he didn’t mention it to anyone. There may be trouble. If you did get curious and took a look at his notes -well, now is the time to say so. It’s not a good thing to have done, of course, but nobody’ll pay much attention once it’s cleared up.’

‘I didn’t look,’ said Ricky wretchedly. ‘I don’t remember how I knew, but I didn’t look. Honestly not.’

Unfortunately by that time Cartwright and Penn had already started arguing, which ended with both of them crashing through the wall of the dining cabin - which had not been built to take assaults of that kind - and throwing Barney the cook into a kind of hysterics. After that Jordan came on the scene.

Ricky had come and told him about it all. At least, he’d said that he had somehow learned that the date of the Great Rift had been fixed, and had mentioned it to Dr Scott while they were talking about geology. He didn’t know how he had learned it. He denied looking through Cartwright’s papers.

It was something that he had told the story, but then he must have thought that Ellen Scott would if he didn’t.

Jordan’s thoughts wandered off to Ellen for a moment. She was another person who believed that people who chose to work on alien planets must avoid personal ties-. How right she was.

Nothing more had happened. Cartwright and Penn seemed to be on somewhat better terms, having purged their animosity. But Ricky had been going round with a haunted and hopeless look on his face and Jordan was going crazy trying to think up an approach to the matter which would not drive the boy still farther away from him. But if he really made a habit of prying into private papers - and Cora had accused him of just that, after all - something must be done about it.

But what?

Jordan sighed, turned the viewer back to the beginning again and started to concentrate on Woodman’s report. He had read three frames when the silence was split by a terrified bellow from the direction of the forest.

‘Uelph! Uelph! Dewils. Uelph!’

Jordan shot through the door, grabbing a flashlight on the way. It was hardly needed: three moons were in the sky and their combined light was quite enough to show him the huge shape blundering among the cabins.

‘Barney!’ he shouted. ‘Stand still! What’s the matter?’

Barney - seventeen stone on Earth, over twenty on Lambda -came to a halt and blinked at the flashlight. He put up a huge hand, feeling at his face. He seemed to be wearing some sort of mask or muffler over his mouth - otherwise he was draped in flannelette pyjamas of brilliant hue and was barefooted. He ripped off the muffler - whatever it was - and threw it away. His utterance was a little clearer, but not much.

‘Dewils in a voresh. Caught eee. Woot ticky tuff on a wouth.’

He was gasping and sweating and Jordan was seriously worried. Barney was a superb cook, but he was apt to get excited and the extra gravitation of Lambda produced a slight strain on his heart. At that moment Ricky appeared like a silent shadow at his father’s elbow.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ As usual the boy looked neat and alert, although at the moment he was wearing pyjamas and a robe. Jordan gestured towards his cabin.

‘Take Barney in there and see what’s sticking his mouth up.’ Several other people had appeared by this time, including Ellen Scott in a brilliant robe and Woodman in rumpled pyjamas. Jordan sent Ellen to switch on the overhead floods and organized a search party.

Half an hour later Barney’s mouth had been washed free from the gummy material which had been sticking his lips together, and he was in some shape to explain:

‘I woke up suddenly lying out in the forest. All damp it was.’ He groaned faintly. ‘I can feel my lumbago coming on already. I was lyin’ flat on my back and there was somethin’ over my arms - rope or somethin’. My mouth was all plastered up and there was a thing sittin’ on my chest. I got a glimpse of it out of the aack of me eyes, and then it went. There was more of them round. They was shoutin’.’

‘Shouting?’ repeated Jordan. ‘You mean just making a noise?’

‘No, sir, they was shouting in English. I couldn’t hear what, but it was in words all right. They said “People”. That was the only word I got, but that’s it right enough. “People.” Then I got my arms free and started to swipe around. I got hold of one of them and it stung me and I let it go.’

He pointed to a neat puncture wound in the flesh at the base of his thumb. Jordan got out antiseptics and bathed it.

‘I got up and ran back,’ Barney went on. ‘I was only a little way into the forest - I could still see the lights here. I ran as hard as I could but me feet kept slippin’.’ The light of remembered panic was in his eyes. ‘They stuck somethin’ over me mouth - I couldn’t breathe. It took me hours to get it off. I dunno what it was.’

‘It was a leaf,’ said Woodman. He produced a large leaf, perhaps twenty inches long: it was dark grey and one surface was smeared with a dully shining substance. ‘It’s been coated with some kind of vegetable gum.’

‘But how did you get into the forest, Barney?’ demanded Dr Scott.

Barney shook his head miserably.

‘He walked,’ said another of the party. ‘On his own. Tracks of his feet in the mud. You’ve been sleep-walking, Barney.’

‘Then where did he get the gag?’ demanded Woodman. ‘This gum comes from a plant which is quite rare and there aren’t any within a hundred yards of the clearing. Besides, we found the place where he’d been lying. A couple of saplings were bent over and the ends shoved in the mud - those were used to hold his arms down, I reckon. No, he was attacked all right, but what did it?’

‘I suppose,’ said Dr. Scott slowly, ‘this couldn’t have been somebody’s idea of a joke?’

There was a brief silence. Ricky looked up suddenly and caught his father’s eye. His face went rigid, but he said nothing.

‘We shall have to assume it wasn’t,’ said Jordan. ‘That means precautions. We always assumed that Lambda was a safe planet. Apparently we were wrong. Until we know what happened no one goes out alone. Those of you who have observations to make outside will have to work in pairs and with your radios turned on. We’ll arrange for a monitor on all the individual frequencies. The floods had better stay on tonight and we’ll have a patrol - three men keeping in touch. Two hours for each of us. Doc, will you see to Barney?’

The medical officer nodded and took Barney off to his cabin, and its specially strengthened bunk. Jordan looked thoughtfully at his son.

‘You’d better get back to bed, Ricky. Unless you have anything to contribute.’

Ricky was standing stiffly upright. ‘I haven’t,’ he said.

‘Get along, then. Now about this patrol—’

Jordan put himself on the first shift of the patrol - he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Why in Space had he brought Ricky? Either he had brought him into danger or - worse - Ricky was somehow at the bottom of this. He spent a good deal of time running errands for Barney. He had not seemed to mind it, but how did you tell what a boy was thinking? Might he have thought it funny to send big Barney lumbering in panic through the forest? And how could he have done it?

Jordan remembered that Ricky had once been found reading the article on Hypnosis in the Terrestrial Encyclopedia.

And if Ricky was innocent, what could be at the bottom of that ludicrous and inefficient attack?

In the top of the tallest tree available, Big Sword waited for daylight and brooded over the failure of his plan.

It was easy enough to get the biggest of the Big Folk into the forest. He had discovered that for part of the time they lay folded out flat in their enclosures, with their eyes shut, and during this time they were more sensitive to suggestion than when they were active. Big Sword, whose own eyes had an internal shutter, found eyelids rather fascinating: he had been tempted to experiment with Barney’s but had refrained. He thought bitterly that he might as well have done so.

He had summoned twelve of the People and all of them thinking together had got the Big Person to its feet and walking. It had occurred to Big Sword that the receptiveness of the Big Person might be improved if they got it to lie down again. He had further decided that, in view of the blanking-out of thought when the creatures began to blow through their face-split, this aperture had better be shut.

That, he now knew, had been a mistake. No sooner was the gummed leaf in place on the Big Person’s face than its eyes had popped open and showed every sign of coming right out of its face. There had been just warning enough in its thoughts for the band of People to hop out of range, except for Big Sword, who had had to use his spike for the first time in his life, to get free. Then the great arms had swung dangerously about and the creature had thrashed to its feet. After that there was no hope of making contact. Its mind was in a turmoil, making the People actively uncomfortable: they had retreated as far as they could, until the interwoven lives of trees and other forest creatures were sufficiently interposed to reduce the Big Person’s thoughts to a comfortable intensity.

Big Sword had been surprised by the low level of intelligence shown by the Big Person. It had made no effort at all to understand him - its thoughts were a much worse muddle than any of the others he had investigated. Perhaps he had made a mistaker^1 Perhaps size among these monsters was not directly connected with intelligence? Or perhaps it was an inverse relationship?

Big Sword was suddenly desperately thirsty and tired. He slid into the rain-filled cup of an enormous leaf - to soak up water through the million mouths of his skin and make his plans afresh.

The camp next morning was subdued and rather weary. Nobody had got their full sleep. Now there was all the awkward business of rearranging a full-time research programme so that nobody should have to go into the forest alone. The lurking menace which last night had provided a formidable thrill, this morning was nothing more than a vague, dreary uneasiness. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that it would turn out to be nothing more than the work of an ingenious kid with a distorted sense of humour. And nobody liked to think what that would do to Jordan.

The working parties dispersed. Those whose work took them to the laboratory sheds tried to concentrate on it. Ricky, who had decided that this was not a morning for wrestling with lessons, slipped off to see if Barney wanted any odd jobs done, and was sent to pick fresh beans in the hydroponics shed.

The mechanical job helped to keep his mind steady. Having once got out of a nightmare, it was creeping round him again. This time with a difference.

There had got to be an explanation somewhere.

When he had left the house in Antarctica he had seemed to leave all his troubles behind. No more need to keep a continual watch on himself, in case he let something out. No more temptation, when in spite of himself he had put his foot in it again, to come out with something really startling and see what they could do about it. He was free. He had been free for months.

Then it started happening all over again. He had heard all sorts of scientific gossip - people here talked shop all the time. How was he to know what he’d heard and what he hadn’t? How could he stop this happening again, now that whatever it was had followed him out here?

There was just one ray of hope. He couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with what happened to Barney. If he could only find out what did that, some real solid explanation he could show everybody, then he might somehow be able to tell someone of the way he seemed to pick up knowledge without noticing it, knowledge he had no right to have—

Anyway, doing something was better than just sitting and waiting for things to go wrong again.

He delivered the beans to the kitchen and wandered out. The raw, red earth of the clearing shone like paint in the sun. In places he could still see the traces of Barney’s big feet, going and coming, leading into the forest. There, among the black leaves and blacker shadows, lurked some real, genuine, tangible menace you could go for with a stick. There was a good supply of sticks stacked by his father’s cabin for the benefit of the working parties. Ricky provided himself with one.

Big Sword had finished drinking - or bathing, whichever way you looked at it - and had climbed out of the diminished pool in the leaf-cup to spread his membranes in the sun. He looked like a big bat, lying spread out on the leaf. The black webs that stretched between his arms and legs and his sides would snap back into narrow rolls when he wanted to move, but when he extended them to catch the sunlight they covered a couple of square feet. They absorbed all the light in the visible range and well into the ultra-violet and infra-red. Like most organisms on Lambda, Big Sword supported himself by a very efficient photosynthesis.

He had only just begun to make up for the wear and tear of the night - continuous activity in the dark was exhausting -when he felt the call out of the forest.

‘Longfoot is going, Big Sword. Longfoot is going on the Journey. You wished to see. Come quickly!’

Big Sword’s membranes snapped into thin ridges along his arms and legs and he bounded off among the trees. The Long Journey was mysterious to him, as it was to all of the People before the urge actually came to them - but the rest were content to leave it as a mystery. Big Sword wanted to know more.

He came in flying leaps to the edge of the forest, where the trees stopped short on the edge of the Great Rift. Some twenty or so of the People were gathered on the edge of the sheer cliff. Longfoot sat among them, his legs twitching occasionally with the urge to be off. As Big Sword arrived Longfoot shot to his feet, eager to depart.

‘Where are you going?’ demanded Big Sword. ‘What will you find over there, Longfoot? Why do you want to cross the waste, with no water and no shade? You will be dried to a stick before you get halfway across.’

But Longfoot’s mind was shut off; he had no longer any interest in Big Sword, or the People, or the danger to the Tree. He did not know why he had to go down on to the waste of boulders and small stones, but the urge could no longer be resisted. He dropped over the edge of the cliff, bouncing from ledge to ledge until he reached the bottom, and set off across the wide, rock-strewn plain, along the lines of shadow cast by the newly-risen sun.

Big Sword watched him sadly. He himself was nearly a year away from feeling that call which had come to Longfoot, and the thought of his own journeying did not trouble him yet. He had been warned early of the dangers of going out on to the waste and, with the habit of logical thought strongly cultivated in him, he was troubled about what would happen. The waste stretched almost as far as he could see - at least twelve miles. At the end of it was the dark line which might have been a far-off continuation of the Forest. But why Longfoot should have wished to go there, or the many thousands of the People who had made that journey before him, Big Sword could not see.

He went back into the forest and found another perch on the edge of the clearing. Few of the Big People were in sight. He was conscious of vague alarms emanating from those who were within reach - it was an emotion foreign to his experience, but he disliked it. He wondered how to set about detaching a specimen from the group, since the direct method had proved unsuitable.

He became suddenly and sharply aware that one had detached itself already and was coming slowly towards him.

Ricky had seen the little black figure sail out of the shadows and land on an equally black leaf. It took all his concentration to make it out when it had stopped moving, but he at last managed to fix its position. Slowly, casually, he wandered towards it, observing it out of the corner of his eye.

Its body was a blob perhaps four inches long and its head about half of that, joined on by a short neck. It rested on its bent fore-limbs and the hind legs stuck up like those of a grasshopper; they looked to be at least twice as long as trunk and head together. As he sidled closer Ricky could make out the big convex eyes, grey with black slit-like pupils, filling more than half the face. Ricky knew the fauna list of Lambda by heart; this creature was not on it. It must be one of Barney’s ‘little devils’ all right.

The creature sat quietly on its big leaf as he approached, with no sign of having noticed him. Now it was just within his reach if he stretched up. One more step and he would be right under it - ahhhh!

He had only begun to grab when Big Sword bounced over his head, landed lightly on the ground behind him and leaped sideways into another tree.

Ricky turned, slowly, and began his careful stalk again. He was murmuring softly to himself, coaxing words derived from rabbit-and guinea-pig owners of his acquaintance: ‘Come on, come on! Come to uncle. He won’t hurt you. Nothing to be afraid of. Come on, you little brute. Come—’

Big Sword sailed away from his grasping hand to land on a branch ten feet farther into the forest.

Ricky had entirely forgotten the prohibition on leaving the clearing; he had forgotten everything except the desire to get hold of this creature, to have it close enough to examine, to hold it gently in his hand and get it tame. His stick lay forgotten on the earth outside the forest.

Big Sword was getting irritated and slightly flustered. It was easy enough to avoid getting caught, but he didn’t wish to play tag with this creature, he wanted to tame it, to make it understand him. And its mind seemed to be shut. What was more, every so often it would begin that infuriating blowing process which seemed to drain away its thoughts out of his reach. To know when it was going to grab he had to watch it the whole time. Finally he took refuge on a branch ten feet above its head and sat down to consider.

Ricky, at the bottom of the tree, was experiencing all the emotions of a dog which has treed a squirrel and now has to persuade it to come within reach. Apparently he was licked. If only the little beast would drop on to that branch there -where that applelike object was - and begin to eat it, perhaps, so that it could forget he was there …

Suddenly, the little brute did. At least it dropped to the lower branch and put its long-fingered hands on the round knob. Ricky’s mouth opened in amazement.

His hands itched, but he kept them firmly at his sides. Perhaps he had been standing there so long that it had forgotten about him and thought he was part of the landscape. Perhaps if he spread his arms out very, very slowly it would take them for branches and—

Something like a small explosion happened inside his head. He blinked and gasped, forgetting all about immobility. He froze again hastily, expecting the creature to be out of sight. But it was still there.

Big Sword observed this reaction to his vehement negative with stirrings of hope. The idea of doing what this creature wanted, as a means of starting communication by demonstration, had seemed a singularly forlorn one. But the Big Creature had clearly noticed something.

Big Sword decided that it was time to try a suggestion of his own. He thought - hard - on the proposition that the Big Creature should turn around and look the other way.

The Big Creature ducked its head and blinked its eyes again. Big Sword got the impression that these reactions were caused by the strength of his thought. He tried again, gently.

Something was getting through. Weakly, faintly he felt a negative reply. The Big Creature refused to turn its back.

Big Sword put out another suggestion. Let the Big Creature take one step sideways, away from him.

Hesitantly, the Big Person did. Big Sword copied its direction in a joyful leap and ended on a level with the creature’s head.

The next thought reached him, fuzzy but comprehensible. ‘If you understand me, put your hands on top of your head.’

Watching suspiciously for any sudden move, Big Sword obeyed. The posture was not one he could keep up for long without losing his balance, but he felt the sudden surge of excitement in the Big Creature and was encouraged.

‘Now watch! I shall sit down on the ground. Do you understand what that means? I’m going to sit down.’

The Big Creature folded up in an awkward way; its knees were on the wrong side of its body, but Big Sword recognized the operation. He followed it with a thought of his own.

‘I will spread my membranes out.’

The Big Creature’s astonishment was a dazzling shock and he put out a protest. In reply came something which could be an apology. He sharpened his thoughts and put out the next one with all the clearness at his command.

‘We have proved that we can make contact. Now we have to practise thinking to and fro until we understand clearly.’

He had just felt the other’s incoherent agreement when the interruption began. Another of the Big Creatures came lumbering between the trees.

‘Ricky! Scatter my stuffing, what are you doing here? You’ll be in the doghouse for sure. Do you want Barney’s little black devils to carry you away?’

Ricky scrambled to his feet in alarm.

‘Sorry, Dr Woodman, I forgot. I was … looking at things and I came in here without thinking. I’m awfully sorry.’

‘No harm done. Come out before we have any more alarms and excursions.’

Big Sword felt an impulse of despair from the Big Creature which he had at last succeeded in taming; it seemed to regret this interruption even more than he did. It was anxious that the second Big Creature should not see him, so he remained still, one dark shape among many and effectively invisible; but he sent a thought after the tame one: ‘Come again! I will be on the edge of the clearing. Come again!’ and was nearly knocked over by the energy of its reply.

Woodman marched Ricky firmly out of the forest.

‘Now you’re here you may as well be useful. I want to go up to my pet pool and I can’t find a chaperone. If I’ve timed it rightly, we should find something interesting up there.’

Ricky summoned up a show of polite interest. Normally he would have been delighted.

‘Is it the pseudohydras again?’

‘That’s right. Remember when we saw them catching those things like two-tailed torpedoes?’

‘Yes, but you said all the ones in the pool had been eaten now.’

‘They have. Here we are. Don’t lean over like that - they won’t like your shadow. Lie down. So!’

Ricky lay on his belly and stared down into the transparent water. Except where it was shadowed it reflected the brilliant blue of the sky; the only thing on Lambda that had a familiar colour. He felt, suddenly, stirrings of homesickness, but they vanished quickly. Homesick, when the most wonderful thing possible had just happened? Nonsense!

He concentrated on the pseudohydras. They lived just where the pool overflowed into a small brown stream. Each consisted mainly of a network of branching white threads, up to six inches long, issuing from a small blobby body anchored on the stones. There were perhaps fifty of them, and together their tentacles made a net across the mouth of the stream which nothing larger than a wheat-grain could escape. The sluggish waters of the stream must all pass through this living mesh, carrying anything unlucky enough to swim out of the pool; the tentacles were immensely sticky and could hold struggling creatures several times the size of the pseudohydra’s own body, until the flesh of the tentacles had flowed slowly around them and enclosed them in a capsule whose walls slowly digested them away.

‘See there?’ whispered Woodman.

Here and there one of the tentacles ended in a transparent, hard-edged blob. Small dark cigar-shaped objects jerked uneasily within it, perhaps a dozen in each little case.

‘It’s caught some more torpedoes!’ whispered Ricky. ‘Little tiny ones this time.’

‘Not caught,’ answered Woodman. ‘I thought they’d be ripe today! Watch that one - it’s nearly ready to split.’

A few minutes later the capsule indicated did split. The tiny torpedo shapes, three or four millimetres long, spilled out into the water. They hovered uncertainly, veering here and there under the uneven propulsion of the water-jets emerging from the two-pronged hind end. Ricky gasped.

‘It’s let them go! And look - there’s one rubbing against a tentacle and not getting caught. What’s happened?’

Two of the little torpedo shapes came together. They jerked uncertainly round each other, then swivelled to lie parallel. They moved off together.

Others were paired already. One pair separated as Ricky watched them. The two little torpedoes shot off crazily. One came right under his eyes and he saw that it was emitting a faint milky stream.

Woodman’s hand came down, holding a pipette. The torpedo veered off. Woodman sucked up a drop of water and held out the pipette.

‘There,’ he said softly. Tiny specks, barely visible, floated in the drop.

‘Eggs,’ said Woodman.

‘Eggs! But - these are babies. The other ones were much bigger.’

‘So they were, Ricky. Do you know what these are going to hatch into? More torpedoes? Not on your life! Unless there’s something else crazy about the life cycle, these will hatch into little pseudohydras.’

Ricky rolled over to stare at him. ‘But what are the big torpedoes, then?’

‘This is how I see it. You know about the reproductive cycles in Coelenterates, back on Earth? Especially hydroids like Obelia and so on? The sessile ones reproduce by budding for a while. Then they start to produce buds which don’t turn out like the parents. Those break off and go swimming away on their own. They feed and get big and in the end they produce eggs or sperm, and the fertilized eggs produce a new sessile generation. Well, here the free-living forms - the torpedoes -are ready to lay eggs as soon as they’re released. They mate a few minutes after hatching and lay eggs as soon as they’re fertilized. But after that they aren’t finished. They go swimming around the pool and feed and get fat. And when they’re full grown, they come swimming back to the old pseudohydras, and the pseudohydras eat them and use the food to produce a whole new crop of little torpedoes. Get it?’

Ricky scowled. ‘What a disgusting animal.’

‘Nonsense! It’s a beautiful piece of natural economy. Don’t be a snob, Ricky. Just because no terrestrial organism evolved this way you think it’s unethical. Some Earth creatures beat pseudohydra hollow for nastiness - think of some of the parasites. Think of the barnacles, degenerate male parasitic on the female. There just aren’t any ethics in evolution except that the species shall survive, if you call that an ethic’

Ricky looked at him doubtfully. ‘We’ve evolved. And we bother about other species, too.’

Woodman nodded. ‘We try to - some of us. But our survival has meant that a good many other species didn’t.’

Something else occurred to Ricky. ‘This sort of whatsit -alternate generations - has evolved lots of times on Earth, hasn’t it?’

‘Sure. Dozens of different lines evolved it independently, not to mention all the Lambdan forms that have it, and a few on Arcturus III, and some on Roche’s - it’s one of the basic dodges, apparently. One stage makes the most of the status quo and the other acts as an insurance against possible changes. Once a well-balanced set of hereditary characters has appeared it can repeat itself fast by asexual reproduction, without the disorganization of chromosome reassortment and so on. On the other hand, should conditions change, a sexually produced population has a much better chance of showing up a few adaptable forms. Some lines of life have dropped the sexual stage, just as some have dropped the asexual, but it probably doesn’t pay in the long run.’

‘How does a stage get dropped?’

Woodman considered. ‘I suppose the first stage might go like this: one single asexual stage - one of these pseudohydras, for instance - happens to get isolated. Say all the rest in the pool die off. It can produce its little torpedoes, but there are no mates for them. The pseudohydra goes on reproducing asexually - you’ve seen how they split down the middle - and in the end a mutant form occurs which doesn’t waste its substance producing useless torpedoes and that breeds faster than the others and in the end replaces them. That’s just one way it could happen. In one of the African lakes there used to be annual swarms of jellyfish, all male. One single asexual stage must have got trapped in that lake, God knows how long ago, and it went on producing those useless male jellyfish century after century, while asexual reproduction kept the species going.’

‘What happened to it?’

Woodman scowled. ‘Silly fools polluted the lake with industrial waste and the jellyfish died out. Come on, it’s time for lunch.’

Ellen Scott put away the last of her soil samples and scowled thoughtfully at her apparatus. Tensions in the camp were mounting and everyone was snapping at everybody else. One party had decided that Barney’s adventure was somehow due to Ricky, and wanted to call off the precautions that hindered their work. The other stuck to it that Ricky could not have organized it and that precautions were still necessary. Anyway, who in the other party was prepared to tell Doc that there was no danger in the forest except for his son?

Ellen told herself that she was neutral. She didn’t know whether or not Ricky was behind their troubles and didn’t much care, if only he would leave off tearing his father’s nerves to pieces. She had heard a little gossip about him on Earth after it had been announced that he was to join the expedition, and though she had discounted it at the time, after the business of Cartwright’s report she was inclined to believe it.

People whose work lay in space had no business with marriage and children. She had decided that for herself years ago. You could run planetary research properly, or you could run a family properly. Not both. Children were part of life on Earth; the settled pattern of security, with which she had grown so bored, was necessary to them. When they were older, perhaps - Ricky had seemed perfectly happy at first.

But what on Lambda was the matter with him now? He’d been going around in a dream ever since the night of Barney’s adventure. Starting suddenly to talk to himself, breaking off with equal suddenness and an air of annoyance. He didn’t seem now to be particularly worried by the suspicions floating around the camp, although he seemed the sort of sensitive boy to be desperately upset by them. In fact, over that affair with Cartwright he had been upset, and this affair was worse.

And Jordan was obviously heading for a nervous breakdown if this went on much longer.

Ricky, lying in his cabin and theoretically taking his afternoon rest - imposed because of Lambda’s longer day - had come to the conclusion that it was time to tell his father about his Research. Despite his absorption in his overwhelming new interest, he was vaguely aware that the grown-ups were getting bothered. For another he could now ‘talk’ fluently with Big Sword and haltingly with the rest of the People; he knew what they wanted and there was no excuse for delaying any longer. Besides, the results of Research were not meant to be kept to oneself, they were meant to be free to everyone.

He allowed himself to think for a moment about the possibilities of his newly discovered power. Of course, people had been messing about with telepathy for centuries, but they had never got anywhere much. Perhaps only a fully developed telepath, coming of a race to which telepathy was the sole method of communication, could teach a human being how to control and strengthen his wayward and uncertain powers. Or perhaps, thought Ricky, the people who were really capable of learning the trick got into so much trouble before they could control it that they all simply shut it off as hard as they could, so that the only ones who tried to develop it were those in whom it never became strong enough to do anything useful. He himself had now, at last, learned how to shut off his awareness of other minds; it was the first necessity for clear reception that one should be able to deafen oneself to all minds except one. It occurred to him that he’d better make that point clear straight off: that he was not going to eavesdrop on anyone else’s thoughts. Never again.

But obviously the thing had terrific potentialities for research, not only into the difficult and thorny problem of the connection between mind and matter, or into contact with alien races. Why, he could probably find out what really went on in the minds of terrestrial animals, those that had minds; and he could find out what it was that people experienced in a Mass-Time field, which they could never properly remember afterwards, and - oh, all sorts of things!

Ricky got up from his bunk. His father ought to be free at this moment; it was the one time of day he kept to himself, unless an emergency happened. Quite unconsciously, Ricky opened his mind to thoughts from that directions to see whether it was a good time to visit his father’s cabin.

The violence of the thought he received nearly knocked him over. What on Lambda was stirring old Doc J. up to such an extent? And - bother, he was talking to somebody - Woodman, apparently. Ricky, unlike Big Sword, could still pick up thought at the moment when it drained into the level of speech, but even for him it was highly indistinct. He strained, trying to catch the cause of all this commotion. Woodman had found something - something unpleasant - something—

Ricky dashed out of the cabin door and crossed the half-dozen yards that separated his hut from his father’s. Just outside the voices were clearly distinct; Woodman was speaking excitedly and loudly.

‘It was absolutely devilish! Oh, I suppose it was physical -some sort of miasma - in fact it nearly knocked me down, but it felt just exactly as though somebody were standing and hating me a few yards off. Like that feeling you get after space ‘flu, as though nobody loves you, only this was magnified about a million times - the most powerful depressant ever, and absolutely in the open air, too.’

‘Where was this?’

‘The eighth sector - just about here.’

He was evidently pointing to a map. Cold with apprehension, Ricky deliberately tried to probe into his father’s mind, to see just what they were looking at. The picture was fuzzy and danced about, but he could see the pointer Jordan was using - the ivory stylus he always carried, and - yes, that was the clearing in the forest that housed the Tree itself! The guards about it had been all too successful in their efforts to keep intruders away.

Jordan laughed harshly. ‘Do you remember that we scheduled this planet as safe?’ He got to his feet. ‘First Barney encounters devils and now you’ve discovered the Upas Tree. You’re sure this gas or whatever it is came from the plants?’

‘I’m certain it was this one particular tree. It’s by itself in the middle of an open space. The feeling began when I was six feet from it. It has big pods - they may secrete the toxic - I collected a branch once before and didn’t feel anything. Perhaps it’s seasonal.’

‘Well, it’ll have to come down.’ Ricky, horrified, felt his father’s savage satisfaction at coming across an enemy he could deal with. ‘Ellen wants to push her soil examinations out in that direction - it’s the only sector we haven’t covered yet and a good many people want to work there.’

Ricky, horrified, straightened from his crouching position under the window and appeared like a jack-in-the-box over the sill.

‘You mustn’t, Doc! Honestly you mustn’t. That Tree’s terribly important. It’s only—’

‘Ricky!’ Jordan lunged to his feet, scattering objects across his desk. ‘Were you listening to my conversation?’

Ricky turned white. ‘Yes, I was, but—’

‘Go to your cabin.’

Woodman made a move to intervene, but Jordan brushed it aside.

‘I’ll speak to you later. For the moment, you’ll go to your cabin and stay there, until I have time to deal with you.’

Woodman thought that Ricky was about to make some further protest, but after a moment’s tension he turned and bolted.

Jordan picked up the stylus with a trembling hand.

‘I’ll come with you and investigate this thing at once, Woodman. We’ll need masks and an air-sampler, and we may as well take one of those portable detection kits. Can you draw chem from the store, please, and be ready in ten minutes. Get a blaster, too.’

Woodman thought of arguments and decided against them. Old Jordan had been stewing up for something like this for the last week and it was probably better to let him get it out of his system. When it came to the point Jordan wouldn’t start destroying things without careful consideration; he was too good a scientist for that. Woodman didn’t know why Ricky was so concerned, but he himself would take good care that a possibly unique specimen wasn’t damaged in a hurry. He went for the equipment.

Jordan hesitated at the entrance to Ricky’s cabin. He heard a slight movement within, and moved on. He was still trembling with a fury that he only half understood, and knew that he was in no state to conduct a delicate interview, or even to think straight. Better leave the boy alone until he had got things sorted out in his own mind.

Ricky, lying tense on his bunk, ‘listened’ with all his power. Old Woodman didn’t really approve of this expedition, made in such a hurry. Good. Doc J. was half aware that his own brain wasn’t working straight. Good again. Ricky spared a moment to wish that he had given more thought to his father during the last week, but it was too late for that now. Even if Jordan didn’t take a blaster to the Tree straight off the People were still perched on the thin edge of disaster. For the first time since he had understood what Big Sword wanted him to do, Ricky began to doubt whether it could be done. Were people going to listen to him? Were Doc J. and Woodman and Miss Ellen and the rest of them really any different from Cora and Camillo and all the other people on Earth who didn’t even try to understand?

No, there was only one way to make the People safe - if it would work. And he’d got to take it. Because this was his own fault for not telling Doc J. sooner. He’d acted like a silly kid, wanting to keep his secret to himself just a little longer. Well, now he was going to put things right, if he could - righter than they were before. With any luck it would be hours before anyone missed him. He might even be able to do what he wanted and call back on his transmitter to explain before they found that he had gone.

Ricky was already out of the clearing before Jordan, who had started out with Woodman, turned back to speak to Dr Scott.

‘Ellen, I’ve left Ricky in his cabin. We had a … disagreement. I think he’s better left to himself just now, but would you mind going to his cabin in an hour or so, to see that he’s all right?’

‘Of course, John. But what—?’

‘No time now. I’ll explain later. Thank you, Ellen. Goodbye.’

There was no undergrowth in the forest but the branches were extremely thick, and the darkness beneath them almost complete. Jordan, following Woodman through the trees and the slow pace enforced by these conditions, felt his anger drain away and a deep depression take its place. What sort of showing had he made, either as a father or as the head of the expedition? This particular episode was quite idiotic. There was nothing in Woodman’s report to call for this immediate dash into the forest. He should at least have stopped to find out what Ricky knew about it - and now that he was cooling off, Ricky’s anxiety seemed more and more puzzling. If it weren’t that to turn back would make him look even more of a fool than he did already, he would have given up and gone to find out what the boy knew.

In front of him Woodman came to a halt.

‘That’s it, sir! That’s the Tree! But - there’s no feeling about it now.’

Jordan brushed past him.

‘Stay here. Be ready to put your mask on.’ He walked slowly forward until he was right under the branches of the Tree.

On either side of the clearing, sitting in the treetops, the Guardians consulted anxiously.

‘The Contact said we must not drive them away. We must do as he suggested.’

Jordan looked up at the branches and dared them to depress him.

‘I don’t feel anything,’ he said at last. ‘Woodman, are you certain this is the right tree?’

‘Well, I was, sir.’ Woodman approached it in growing doubt. ‘All these little clearings are so much alike, I could have - no, it is the right one! I tied my handkerchief to this branch for a marker, before I bolted. Here it is.’

The Guardians gave the telepathic equivalent of a sigh and started on the next line of defence.

‘You know, sir—’ Woodman was carefully deferential, ‘I’ve never seen another specimen like this. After all, this little bit of the Forest is pretty well cut off - the Rift on one side, the Mountains on the other, and the River in the south. This type of soil doesn’t even extend as far as the River. You might get forms here which were unique - relics, or species evolved since the Rift opened. I don’t feel we ought to destroy it without very good reason.’

Jordan scowled up at the nearest pod.

‘I wasn’t proposing to destroy it here and now! If the thing is a potential menace we must find out about it, that’s all. I must say I don’t… what’s that?’

The sound of snapping twigs could be heard back along the path. Woodman started down it with Jordan at his heels; it was so dark that he was almost on top of Dr Scott before he saw her.

‘John! Thank goodness. Listen, you’ve got to come back at once. It’s… it’s Ricky. He’s gone. I went to his cabin like you said, and he wasn’t there. He isn’t anywhere in camp. He’s gone.’

There was a flurry in the camp, but it was an organized flurry. Jordan, white and sick-looking, nevertheless had himself well under control. Important facts were sorted out quickly.

Three parties working on the east side of the clearing could swear that Ricky had not passed them.

Various delicate gadgets which responded violently to the movement of humans anywhere near them were rigged in the wood to the north, which was taboo in consequence. They showed no sign of disturbance.

That left the south and the west. South was a, stretch of about eight miles of forest, unbroken until it reached the big river. West was about half a mile of forest, fairly well explored, and then the Great Rift.

‘There’d be no sense in going that way,’ Jordan laid a pointer on the map to indicate the Rift; he noticed in a detached way that his hand was quite steady. ‘It doesn’t lead anywhere. There’s just one place he could be making for, if we assume him to have an intelligible plan, and that is the First Base on the coast. The one way he could possibly get there would be to get to the river and float down it on one of the log-rafts - we saw plenty of them coming down while we were at the base.’

‘But the rapids—’ said somebody.

‘Has anyone reason to suppose that Ricky knew about the rapids?’ Beads of sweat stood out on Jordan’s forehead. No one answered. ‘We have to find him before he gets there. Unless any of you can suggest another way he might be trying to go.’

Nobody cared to suggest that Ricky, if he had flung off in blind panic, might be headed nowhere in particular under the shade of the black trees. On the south side the paths went only for half a mile or so, and if he left them he could be lost within a hundred yards of the camp. They had already tried to pick up the tracker he was supposed to carry, but he had evidently switched it off or thrown it away.

The geologist, Penn, spoke suddenly from the back of the group.

‘How about the Rift? It interested him. He might try to get across.’

‘That’s possible,’ said Jordan. ‘On the Rift he’d be relatively easy to spot. That’s why I propose to leave it till later. We have only one heliflier. If he’s gone through the forest to the river we have to catch him at once. He’s been gone two and a half hours. If he went straight to the nearest point of the river he might be there by now. The heliflier’s the only chance. I can patrol the whole stretch and spot him as soon as he comes to it. If he hasn’t reached it by dawn, I’ll go back and fly over the Rift. If he does happen to be there, he won’t take much harm in that time.’

‘There are two helifliers,’ someone suggested.

‘No,’ said Jordan sharply. ‘The other is unsafe.’

Not all the party were to join the hunt at once.

‘There are only a few profitable lines,’ said Jordan. ‘We don’t want everybody exhausted at the same time. This may be more than one day’s search. And some of you have long-term observations to continue.’ He raised his hand, stilling a protest. ‘If to take all of you would increase the … the speed with which we are likely to find Ricky by one per cent, or half that, I’d take you all. But I won’t ruin several months’ work for nothing.’

In the end several parties set out through the trees south and one went west. Jordan had already taken the one serviceable heliflier and departed. They had arranged an automatic sound-signal to go off every half hour in the clearing, in case Ricky was lost and trying to find his way back, and there were flares and a searchlight for when it became dark.

Ellen Scott had been left behind as part of the ‘reinforcements.’ She managed to catch Woodman before his party left.

‘You used the second heliflier, didn’t you? What’s wrong with it?’

Woodman grimaced. ‘It failed to co-operate over landing. I got down intact by the skin of my incisors and had to walk home - we fetched it finally on the truck. I found a rough patch on one of the power planes and cleaned it up. That may or may not have been the cause of the trouble. We haven’t got checking equipment here and nobody’s tried it out the hard way. Leave it alone, Ellen. When those things are good they’re very very good. Once they act up - leave them alone. It wouldn’t be any use over the Forest and Doc J. won’t miss anything on the River.’

‘How about the Rift?’

‘Why should he go there? He was upset but he wasn’t crazy. No, he must have set out for the base camp - probably thinks he’ll be treated as a hero if he gets there. I’ll give him heroics next time we meet.’

Ellen was occupied for the next hour with various laboratory jobs to be done for members of the search party. Reports came in every few minutes over the radio, but they were all negative. The ground was hard dry. If Ricky had stuck to the broken trails, he would leave no sign. Even off them, he was small enough to walk under the trees where a grown man would have had to push his way through. There were three chances: to see him from the air, to get a fix on his radio, and to come upon him among the trees. And however systematic the searchers were they knew perfectly well that they could only do that by chance.

Unless one could guess where he had gone. Jordan thought he had guessed.

Ellen prowled restlessly about. What would Ricky have done? Nothing had been taken from his room; had he set out without any equipment at all?

She went to the kitchen. Barney was muddling around among his store-cupboards, in a very bad mood. He had wanted to go with the search parties and had been turned down. ‘Barney,’ said Ellen quickly, ‘did Ricky take any food?’ ‘That’s what I’m trying to check, Miss. There’s some biscuits gone, I think. He could have taken them, or it could have been anyone this afternoon. And I think one of the big canteens has gone, but I suppose a search party took it.’

‘They didn’t,’ said Ellen sharply. ‘There are always plenty of streams, apart from the pools in the leaves. They only took small water bottles.’

‘One of the big canteens has gone,’ repeated Barney obstinately. ‘And one of the water bottles isn’t, if you take my meaning - Ricky did not take one of those, I mean, I’ve accounted for them. The canteen I can’t account for. But Ricky wouldn’t lumber himself up with that,’ he added morosely. ‘He couldn’t carry it if it was more than half full, and he knows about the streams as well as anybody. No, I reckon someone pinched it for a collecting tin or something. That’s how it goes in this place, and now we can see what comes of it. You can’t keep a proper check on anything—’ But Dr Scott had gone.

She waited, fuming, until the party which had gone west came back.

‘Yes, we looked over the Rift all right,’ said the leader morosely. ‘Hell, Ellen, the whole place is a heat-trap. With the haze and flickers visibility is about twenty yards. Even from the air you wouldn’t see anything, unless maybe when the shadows get longer and before they get too long. Jordan wouldn’t see anything if he did fly over it now. Besides, why should the kid have gone into that oven?’

Ellen turned away. Why should Ricky have gone that way? But why should he have taken a big canteen, unless he was going to cross a waterless area? If he had taken it, of course. But there were plenty of containers in the stores for scientific work.

Ricky had been interested in the Rift, certainly. He had been asking questions about it yesterday - one of the few times lately he had shown interest in anything at all.

But visibility in the Rift was bad now. When the shadows were longer—

Jordan called over the radio. He had been flying up and down the river and the adjacent forest for the last hour and a half. Ricky had been gone about four hours.

There were three hours of daylight left.

Two hours later the situation was unchanged. To the parties in the forest night would make little difference; they were using lights already. Jordan proposed to stay in the air - one or other of the-moons would be in the sky most of the night. There was about one hour of daylight left.

Ellen Scott listened to his report, and those of the search parties. Then she went briskly to the place where the one remaining heliflier was parked. She found another member of the expedition contemplating it gloomily.

‘Come away from there, Phil,’ she said severely.

‘Oh, hell, Ellen, there’s a seventy-five per cent chance the thing’s all right. Woodman said he’d fixed up a rough plane, didn’t he?’ The man turned away nevertheless. ‘What in Space did Jordan want to bring that kid here for?’

Ten minutes later he shot out of his cabin, where he had been dispiritedly collecting together the makings of a drink, in time to see the heliflier rise gently into the air and disappear towards the west.

Although the shadows were beginning to lengthen, the Rift was like a furnace. The water in the canteen was hot. Ricky and Big Sword sat in the slightly cooler earth on the north of a boulder and contemplated the forest lying away to the left -not the forest they knew, but the strange trees of the farther side.

Big Sword’s goggle eyes did not register emotion, but Ricky could feel the stir of curiosity in him. Big Sword was already reaching out to new streams, new treetops, new bare places that would be warm in the sun. For himself Ricky could only think about the two miles remaining to be walked.

He had hopelessly underestimated the time it would take him to pick his way through eight miles of boulders, too hot for the hand, walking on sliding shingle; he had managed less than two miles an hour. But now he had to get on. He stirred himself, got Big Sword perched again on his shoulder and re-strapped the canteen, lighter now but still a burden.

He had gone perhaps a dozen strides when the shadow of the heliflier came up behind and settled over his head.

Ricky started to run. There was no sense to it, and Big Sword disliked the effects, but he ran just the same, with the water sloshing about on his back. The shadow of the flier slid forward a hundred yards and it began to come down over a comparatively level place. Ricky swerved sideways. He heard a shout echo among the boulders, but the echo of combined relief and exasperation in his mind rang louder.

‘Ricky! Stop and talk! Whatever it is, I’ll help. There’s no sense in running. If I get in touch with your father, there’ll be another flier and several people here in twenty minutes. Stop! Listen to me, will you, you—’

The shouts echoed on for a moment, but the thought had stopped.

Dr Scott came whirling up through hot red mists to find herself lying beside a fire. A very hot fire, in a stone fireplace. It didn’t make sense. Warm water was being sloshed across her face and there was a murmur of voices - two of them.

‘She hit her head. That’s all. She fainted. She’ll come round in a minute. Then you’ll hear her. It isn’t sleep, no - not exactly. What’s the matter? Why don’t you—’

The second voice was no more than a vague murmur of curiosity; it was beginning to sound irritated as well.

Ellen remembered that she had been running among a lot of boulders and had twisted her foot. No doubt she had hit her head when she fell; certainly it ached. But what had she been doing that for?

She opened her eyes.

Ricky’s anxious face hung directly above her and he was pouring water from his cupped hand on to her forehead. Beside him was—

Ellen winced and shut her eyes.

‘Dr Scott. Please!’ Ricky sounded worried. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Delirious, I think,’ said Ellen faintly. She opened her eyes again. ‘Where did it go?’

Ricky’s face was a study in doubt and other emotions. Ellen put a hand to the aching spot of the back of her head and began very cautiously to sit up.

‘Come on, Ricky,’ she said firmly. ‘Who were you talking to?’

‘Aloud?’ said Ricky, in tones of surprise. ‘Oh, so that’s why he couldn’t hear.’

Ellen shut her eyes again. ‘I’m the one with concussion, not you,’ she pointed out. ‘Who couldn’t hear?’

‘Well, his name’s Big Sword,’ said Ricky doubtfully. ‘More or less, that is. He says he’s coming back, anyway.’

Ellen opened her eyes once more. They focused on the region of Ricky’s right ear. Laid gently over it was a skinny black hand with four long, many-jointed fingers. A slender arm stole into view, attached to what might have been a medium-sized potato that had happened to grow black. On top of this was perched a head about the size of a large egg. The greater part of this was occupied by two large light-grey eyes with slit pupils and dully shining surfaces. They goggled at her solemnly.

Once again she was aware of a vague murmur of curiosity, not divisible into words.

Ellen drew a deep breath. ‘Ricky, this … this friend of yours. Why did you bring him here?’

Ricky studied her face earnestly. ‘It was my idea, not his, Dr Scott. I wanted to get to the forest over there. To the other side of the Rift.’

‘But why?’

Ricky shook his head.

‘It wasn’t that at all. It was my idea, I tell you, not Big Sword’s. He didn’t… didn’t hypnotize me. He wouldn’t have done it to Barney except that he couldn’t think of anything else to do. And I’ve absolutely got to get there now!’

Ellen sat up and stared at him. ‘All right, Ricky. Listen, you tell me the reason. If it’s a good one … well, I must let your father know you’re safe. But I won’t tell him where you are. I’ll fly you to the forest, and then back. How about that?’

Ricky breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Is Doc J. very worried?’

‘Worried? Listen, make it quick. I’m going to call him in ten minutes, whatever. What are you doing here?’

Ricky sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘The idea began with the jellyfish, really,’ he said. ‘The male jellyfish in the lake.’

The heliflier had completed the fifth sweep down the river to the sea; back up the river to the rapids, where many rafts of floating vegetation broke up and re-formed, making Jordan’s heart jump as he hovered above them; on up the river to the point he had fixed as farthest east. It was no good to fly over the forest; he had found that he could not pick up the search parties when he knew they were directly below him. The river was his only hope.

Nearly time to make another report. His hand was on the button of the radio when the speaker came suddenly to life.

‘Calling all search parties. John Jordan please answer. Can you hear?’

Jordan’s voice came out as a harsh croak. ‘I hear. Is he—’

‘Ricky’s safe. He’s with me now. Turn everyone home. But -listen. He had a good reason for going off as he did. He had something to do and it’s not finished. So I’m not going to tell you where we are.’

Jordan’ shouted something incoherent, but her voice overrode him.

‘It’s important, John. I don’t know if it will come off, but he must have a chance to try. You can probably find out where we are, but - don’t come. Do you understand?’

‘Ellen, is he really all right? And are you?’

‘Sure I’m all right. We’re going to remain all right. We’ll be back some time next morning. Oh, and Ricky says’ - her voice broke off for a moment - ‘Ricky says he is very sorry to have worried you, honestly he is, but it was urgent, and will you please not do anything to damage that Tree.’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘John? You haven’t done something to it already?’

‘I haven t, no.’

‘Don’t let anyone touch it. Good night, John. Sleep well.’

‘Ellen—’

The speaker clicked and was silent.

The helifliers were designed for sleeping in, in an emergency but they were not air-conditioned. Ellen felt the compress on her head, which had long ceased to be cold, and envied bitterly Ricky’s ability to sleep under these conditions. A faint gleam of light from button-sized surfaces a couple of yards off showed that Big Sword was still sitting and watching as he had been doing ever since they lay down. Ellen wished bitterly that she had had the sense to lie beside the refrigerator so that she could get more cold water without having to lift her aching head.

The grey buttons moved. She felt small, strong fingers tugging gently at the compress. She lifted the pressure of her head and felt it go. There was a sound of faint movement and the click of the refrigerator door, with a momentary blast of lovely cold air. A few minutes later the compress, beautifully cold now, was poked carefully back under her head. She felt the thistledown touch of skinny fingers against her cheek.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured, and then, remembering, she repeated it inside her head, ‘Thank you, Big Sword.’

They had flown at dawn and the heliflier sat among the boulders at the foot of the cliff. Ellen and Ricky sat beside it, shivering a little in the morning cold, and waited.

Ellen looked at Ricky’s intent face. He could not hear strange members of the People distinctly, she had gathered, but he could usually detect their presence.

‘What does it feel like?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Hearing thoughts?’ Ricky considered. ‘It feels like thinking. You can’t really tell other thoughts from your own - unless they’ve been specially directed. That’s what made it all so very difficult.’

‘I see,’ Ellen sighed. What on Earth, or of it, could Ricky’s future be? True telepaths would not fit in Earth’s scheme of things.

‘I used to pick up thoughts all the time,’ Ricky went on. ‘I didn’t know that until I found out how to shut them off. It was a sort of fuzzy background to my thinking. Do you know, I think all real good thinkers must be people with no telepathy, or else they learn to shut it right off. Now I can do that I think much clearer.’

‘So you don’t overhear thoughts accidentally now?’ Ellen felt encouraged.

‘No, I don’t. I only get directed thoughts. I’m not going to overhear anyone ever again, it’s just a nuisance.’

‘Stick to that. I don’t think uncontrolled telepathy is much good to a human being.’

‘It isn’t. I tell you what, I think there are two ways of evolving communication, telepathy and communication between senses, and people who are good at the one aren’t good at the other. I’ll never be a real good communicator like the People, my mind doesn’t work the right way. But I’ll be good enough to be useful for research. I’m going to—’ Ricky broke off, seized his companion’s arm and pointed.

Ellen looked up at the cliff. It was about thirty feet high, here, with only a couple of six-inch ledges to break the sheer drop. Black foliage overhung it in places.

‘There!’ whispered Ricky. Slowly there came into view a black head the size of an egg - a black head in which eyes shone grey.

‘Is he coming back?’ whispered Ellen. ‘Has he given up, then?’

There was a faint rustling among the leaves. Ricky’s grip tightened painfully on her arm.

A second black head appeared beside the first.

‘You see,’ said Ricky anxiously, ‘I didn’t really think you’d go and destroy the Tree straight off, but I couldn’t be sure. And everyone was angry with me about one thing or another and I didn’t know if they’d listen.’

‘Speaking for myself,’ said Woodman, ‘there were one or two moments when if I’d had a blaster handy the Tree would have been done for there and then.8

‘So you were just taking out insurance,’ said Jordan.

‘Yes, because if we found other Trees the species would continue anyway. Big Sword and I meant to ask you to help about that, later - the Journey, I mean - only then I thought we’d better try that straightaway in case I was stopped later. I thought if I could show people it was better than telling them.’

‘Isn’t Big Sword coming?’ said another of the party. The whole of the expedition, including even Barney, was seated around a square table raised on trestles in the centre of the clearing. Ricky nodded.

‘As soon as we’re ready,’ he said. ‘Now, if you like. But he bays if too many people think at him at once it may hurt, so he wants you to be ready to start talking if I give the signal.’

‘What about?’ said Cartwright.

‘Anything. Anything at all. Shall I call him?’

There was half a minute’s expectant silence. Then lightly as a grasshopper Big Sword flew over Ellen’s head and landed with a slight bounce in the centre of the table.

There was a simultaneous forward movement of heads as everybody bent to look at him, and he sat up and goggled out of pale bulging eyes. Then—

Most of them felt the sharp protest of discomfort before Ricky waved his hand. Nobody had really thought out what to say and there was a moment of silence, then somebody began to talk about the weather, the statistician began on the multiplication table, Jordan found himself muttering,’ ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves …’ - after a minute or so only Ricky was still silent.

‘He says, he’ll go to one person after another, but the rest keep talking,’ reported Ricky presently. ‘You can ask him to do things if you like.’

Solemnly Big Sword went round the table, sitting for a few moments in front of each person, snapping out his membranes, revolving to present his back view, and then going on.

‘That’s him!’ said Barney as Big Sword came to a halt in front of him. ‘But how did he sting me?’

The spindly hand whipped to Big Sword’s flat thigh and flashed back holding a flat grey spike two and a half inches long. He held it out and Barney fingered the point in a gingerly fashion.

‘That’s the sword, is it?’ murmured Woodman. ‘Do they secrete it, Ricky?’

‘I think so, but I haven’t asked him.’

Woodman breathed out a long sigh.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is the answer to a biologist’s prayer.’

Big Sword bounced suddenly back into the middle of the table. ‘He’s tired,’ said Ricky. ‘He says he’ll send someone else another day.’ Ricky yawned uncontrollably as Big Sword took a flying leap off the table and hopped across the clearing. He had had a hard day the day before and a very early start this morning and a lot of excitement since.

‘Can we just have the story straight?’ said the statistician suddenly. ‘The biological story, I mean. You people may have been able to follow it through all the interruptions, but I didn’t. I gathered that Ricky had discovered the female of the species, but that’s all. How did they get lost?’

‘I’ll tell it,’ said Jordan, looking at Ricky, who was nodding sleepily, ‘and Ricky can correct me. Big Sword’s People are the active and intelligent offspring of an organism which to all intents and purposes is a large tree. They are produced by an asexual budding process inside pods. When they are a year or so old they are seized by the urge to migrate across the Rift. They never knew why, and probably none of them ever got across. It occurred to Ricky that alternation of generations usually turns out to have sex at the bottom of it. Big Sword’s People couldn’t reproduce themselves - they simply hatched from the Tree. So Ricky thought that there might be another Tree on the other side of the Rift which produced females. And when I very foolishly considered destroying the Tree because of Woodman’s experience, he thought he had to go and find them straight off, so that at least the species would survive. And I’m glad to say he was quite right - they were there.’

‘You mean to say,’ said Cartwright, ‘that the Tree has been producing People for the last fifteen thousand years without a sexual generation at-all?9

‘Not necessarily,’ said Woodman. “There may have been several on this side of the Rift, at first, and this Tree may be the last offspring of a small population. It must have been an outlier, if so, because the migration was so firmly set for the west.’

‘And there’s another tree on the far side which produces females?’

‘There are two female trees and three that bear males, but two of the male ones are very old and have few offspring, and none of the seeds have been fertile for at least fifty generations. Apparently not many come to full maturity at the best of times, but this outcross may really save the species.’

‘And what exactly is the plan?’ demanded the statistician. ‘To ferry them across? What will they do when we leave?’

‘No,’ said Jordan. ‘We don’t propose to interfere more than we have to. The tragedy of the whole process was that the People who took the Journey almost certainly died on the way. Twelve miles in the sun, with no water, was too much for them. We propose to provide a green belt - a black belt rather - along the migration route. Tiven is looking into the possibilities—’

Tiven looked up from his slide rule. ‘Easy as π,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We can make the channel in a week, once we get the digger from First Base, and a cooker for concrete, and there are any number of streams which run down to the Waste and then vanish underground. It’s just a question of training one of them in the way it should go, and protecting it from evaporation in the first year or two until the vegetation gets thick enough.’

The conversation flowed on. But Ricky, his head resting en the table, was already asleep.

Jordan stood at the edge of the Rift and looked over the embryo river-valley that Tiven had designed. Seedlings had been planted along the channel, in earth transported for that purpose, and were already taking hold. The revolving sun-cutters designed to protect them at this stage and to stop excessive evaporation gave the whole thing a mechanical air at present, but they would be done within a year or two; they were designed to go to dust then, so that even if the expedition had to leave they would not be left. There are places for poorly built things!

Two of the People shot down the cliff a little to one side and disappeared into the shade along the channel.

‘Are they off on the Journey?’ said Ellen Scott.

‘I don’t think so. They go singly, as a rule. No, I think … look there!’

There were four People now at the end of the line of saplings. Two were presumably the ones who had passed a few minutes before; the other two were linked hand in hand and bore across their shoulders a kind of yoke with a long pod dangling from it. The two from the near side of the Forest had taken the hands of the newcomers and were helping them up the cliff.

‘This is the result of your soil report, I think,’ said Jordan. ‘Woodman says that one reason for the lack of germination on the other side is the exhaustion of the few pockets of suitable soil. I wonder whether it was the necessity of finding the right soil, as well as of looking after the seedling, that led them to develop intelligence?’

The two newcomers had reached the top of the cliff. They seemed hardly to notice the helpers, nor did the latter seem to expect it. The burdened couple moved slowly along, pausing every now and then to investigate the soil. They stopped close to Ellen’s feet and prodded carefully.

‘Not here, little sillies!’ she murmured. ‘Farther in.’

John smiled. ‘They’ve got plenty of time. One couple planted their pod just under one of Branding’s tripods; trying not to step on them drove him nearly crazy. He had to move the whole lot in the end. It takes them weeks sometimes to find a spot that suits them.’

‘Continuing the species,’ said Ellen thoughtfully. ‘I always thought it sounded rather impersonal.’

Jordan nodded. ‘The sort of thing you can take or leave,’ he agreed. ‘I used to think that you could either explore space or you could…well, continue the species is as good a way of putting it as any. Not both.’

‘I used to think that, too.’

‘Once it was true. Things have changed, even in the last few years. More and more people are organizing their lives to spend the greater part of them away from Earth. Soon there’s going to be a new generation whose home isn’t on Earth at all. Children who haven’t been to Terrestrial schools, or played in Terrestrial playrooms, or watched the Terrestrial stereos, or—’

‘Suffered the benefits of an advanced civilization?’

‘Exactly. How do you feel about it, Ellen? Or … that’s a shirker’s question. Ellen Scott, will you marry me?’

‘So as to propagate the species?’

‘Blast the species! Will you marry me?’

‘What about Ricky?’

‘Ricky,’ said Jordan, ‘has been careful to let me know that he thinks it would be a very suitable match.’

‘The devil he has! I thought—’

‘No telepathy involved. If everyone else knows I love you, why shouldn’t he? Ellen - did I say please, before? Ellen, please, will you marry me?’

There was a silence. Depression settled on Jordan. He had no right to feel so sure of himself. Ellen was ten years younger and had a career to think of. He had made a mess of one marriage already and had a half-grown son. He had taken friendliness for something else and jumped in with both feet much too soon. He had made a fool of himself-probably.

‘Well?’ he said at last.

Ellen looked up and grinned.

‘I was just making sure. I’m not quite certain I could take being married to a telepath - which you are not, my dear. Absolutely not. Of course I’m going to.’

Ricky, with Big Sword on his shoulder, was strolling along a path in the sun. He saw his father and Dr Scott return to the camp arm in arm, and nodded with satisfaction. About time, too. Now perhaps Doc J. would stop mooning around and get on with his work for a change. He’d had Ricky’s and Woodman’s last report on the biology of the People for two weeks without making the slightest attempt to read it, and it was full of interesting things.

Just for a moment. Ricky wondered what it was like to get all wrapped up in one individual like that. No doubt he’d find out in time. It would have to be somebody interested in real things, of course - not an Earth-bound person like poor Cora.

Meanwhile he was just fourteen and free of the Universe, and he was going to have fun.

Big Sword, from his perch on Ricky’s shoulder, noticed the couple with the pod. He saw that this one was fertile, all right -the shoot was beginning to form inside it. One of them was an old friend from this side of the Rift, but it was no good trying to talk to him - his mind would be shut. The whole process of taking the Journey, finding a mate and taking care of one’s seedling was still a mystery to Big Sword in the sense that he could not imagine what it felt like. Just now he was not very interested. He had nearly a year in which to find out things, especially things about the Big People who, now they were domesticated, had turned out to be so useful, and he was going to enjoy that and not speculate about the Journey, and what it felt like to take it.

Because, eventually, the call would come to him, too, and he would set off up the new little stream to the other side of the Rift where the trees of the Strangers grew. And then he would know.