Unearthly Neighbors (6 page)

He looked up. Great dark clouds filled the sky, and the rumble of thunder sounded closer. He saw a jagged fork of white lightning flicker down into the forest. There was a heavy smell of rain in the air.

Monte made up his mind rapidly. He was
not
going to let that man get away. He called the sphere and dictated a fast report of what had happened. “What’s the extent of that forest, Ace?”

“It isn’t very wide, sir—not over half a mile. But it stretches out lengthwise a far piece in both directions—maybe two or three miles before it thins out any.”

“We’re going in after him. I want you to come down low, just above the trees. Let me know at once if he comes out the other side. Keep a fix on us, and if we holler you know what to do.”

“You’re the boss. But there’s a bad storm coming up—”

“I know that. Stand by.”

Monte cut off the radio and wiped at his beard with his hand. “He was walking, Charlie. That means there must be a path.”

Charlie Jenike eyed the gathering rain clouds without enthusiasm. “What if he takes to the trees?”

“What if he does?” Monte asked impatiently. “Didn’t you ever play Tarzan when you were a kid?”

Charlie put his hands on his ample hips and tried to figure out whether or not Monte was seriously considering taking to the trees after the man. He couldn’t decide, possibly because Monte himself wasn’t sure at this point of what he would or would not do.

Monte picked up his rifle and pushed his way into the forest where the man had vanished. He thought for a moment that he heard the whine of an animal, but that was probably his imagination working. It was hot and breathless among the trees, and the subtly
wrong
shapes of the ferns and bushes gave the whole thing the improbable air of a make-believe world. The woods were dark with shadows. He felt cut off, as though he had stepped behind an invisible wall.

Thunder boomed high above them and the blue-black limbs of the tall trees stirred fitfully.

“Look there,” he said. “There
is
a path.”

It was just a narrow, twisting trail through the forest. In one place, where the leaves had been scraped away, there was a fresh print—the mark of a naked man-like foot, with the big toe sticking out at an angle like a human thumb. The path looked like a trail through the woods back home; there was nothing sinister about it.

But it was quiet; too quiet. Even the birds were silent at their approach, and no animal stirred.

Monte thought of nothing at all and started down the path.

The storm hit with a cold wet fist before they had gone two hundred yards.

A wall of wind smashed through the trees and a roar of metallic thunder exploded in the invisible sky. Great gray sheets of wind-driven rain pelted the trees and overflowed into silver waterfalls that drenched the forest floor.

Monte put his head down and kept going. He heard Charlie swearing steadily behind him.

The rain was cool and oddly refreshing on his damp back, and the storm seemed to clear the air in a way that was surprisingly welcome. In spite of the nerve-jangling bedlam of sound, he felt better than he had before. His nose stopped itching and even his sandpapered throat lost some of its rawness.

He kept a sharp lookout, but it was hard to see anything except the rivers of rain and the dripping bushes and the water-blackened trunks of the trees. The crashing thunder was so continuous that it was impossible to talk. Far above him, the branches of the trees swayed and moaned in the wind.

He was soaked to the skin, but it didn’t matter. He shoved his streaming hair out of his eyes and kept on walking. He concentrated just on putting one foot before the other, feeling his feet squishing inside his boots, and he kept looking, looking…

There was still light, but it was a gray and cheerless light that was almost as heavy as the rain. It was a ghost light, fugitive from a hidden sun, and it had the feel of imminent darkness in it…

There.

A tremendous tree to the right of the trail, a tree that looked curiously like a California redwood, a tree that had a black opening in it like a cave…

And a frightened copper face staring out of the hollowness within; two dark eyes peering into the rain.

Monte held up his hand. “There he is!” he hollered.

Charlie came up beside him, his pudgy features almost obscured by countless trickles and rivulets of rain. “Let’s grab him and run for it. We can make friends later where it’s dry.”

Monte smiled and shook his head. It might come to that eventually, but it would be a singularly poor beginning. He stood there with the storm howling around him and desperately tried to come up with something—anything—that would get across the idea that he meant no harm.

He had never before felt quite so keenly the absolute necessity for language. He was hardly closer to the man in the tree than if he had stayed on Earth.

Oh, Charlie had worked out a few phrases in one of the native languages and he
thought
he knew approximately what they meant. But none of the phrases—even assuming that they were correct—went with the situation. It wasn’t the fault of the first expedition; they had planted their mikes and cameras well. It was simply the fact that you just don’t
say
the right things in casual everyday conversations. A man can go through a lot of days without ever saying, “I am a friend.” He can go through several lifetimes very nicely without ever saying something as useful as: “I am a man from another planet, and I only want to talk to you.”

The closest thing they had was a sentence that Charlie thought meant something like, “I see that you are awake, and now it is time to eat.”

That didn’t seem too wildly promising.

“Why doesn’t he ask us in?” Charlie hollered. “He’s looking right at us.”

“I don’t need any engraved invitation. Let’s barge on in and see what happens.”

Monte stepped toward the tree.

The old man looked out at him with dark, staring eyes. Those eyes, Monte thought, reflected a lifetime of experiences, and
all
of those experiences were alien to a man from Earth. The man seemed somehow to be of another time as well as another world; a creature of the forests, shy and afraid, ready to panic…

“Charlie! Give it a try!”

Charlie Jenike cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed a strange series of sounds; it sounded a bit like singing, although his voice was distinctly unmusical. “I see that you are awake,” he hoped he said in the native tongue, “and now it is time to eat!”

The old man shrank back into the hollow of the tree, his mouth falling open in astonishment.

Monte took another step closer.

Instantly, without any warning, the man bolted.

He lunged out of his shelter, very fast despite his age, and ran awkwardly, his long arms pumping the air. He came so close that Monte actually touched him as he passed. He scrambled up a tree with amazing agility, wrapping his arms around the trunk and pushing with his feet on the wet bark. When he got up to where the limbs were strong, he threw one questioning glance back down at the two strangers and then leaped gracefully from one limb to another. He used his hands almost like hooks, swinging his body on his long arms in breath-taking arcs. The rain didn’t seem to bother him at all; he moved so fast that he was practically a blur.

In seconds, he was gone—lost on the roof of the world.

“Well, Tarzan?”

Monte stood there in the pouring rain. He was beginning to get a trifle impatient with this interminable game of hide-and-seek.

“I’m going inside,” he said, taking out his pocket flashlight.

Charlie eyed the dark cave in the hollow tree. “That thing may not be empty, you know.”

“I hope it isn’t.”

“After you, my friend—and watch out for Rover.”

Monte walked steadily over to the opening in the tree and stepped inside.

There was a heavy animal smell inside the chamber in the hollow tree, but Monte knew at once that the place was empty. He flashed the light around to make certain, but his eyes only confirmed the evidence of an older, subtler sense. The room—if that was the word for it—felt empty and was empty.

In fact, it was the
emptiest
place Monte had ever seen.

He moved on in, making room for Charlie, and the two men stood there in the welcome dryness, trying to understand what they saw—and what they didn’t see.

The interior of the trunk of the great tree was hollow, forming a dry chamber some twelve feet in diameter. About ten feet above their heads, smooth wood plugged the tubular shaft, forming a ceiling that reflected their lights.

The place was a featureless vault made entirely from the living wood of the tree. Even the floor was wood—a worn, brownish wood that was porous enough so that the water that dripped from their clothes seeped away before it had a chance to collect in puddles. The curving walls were a lighter color, almost that of yellow pine, and they were spotlessly clean.

There was a kind of shelf set into one wall; it was little more than an indentation in the wood. The piece of raw meat that the wolf-thing had taken was on the shelf, and so was the cluster of red berries.

That was all.

There was no furniture of any kind. There were no beds, no chairs, no tables. There were no decorations on the walls, no art-work of any sort. There were no tools, no weapons. There were no pots, no bowls, no baskets.

The place was absolutely barren. There were no clues as to what sort of a man might live there.

It was just a big hole in a tree: simple, crude, unimpressive.

And yet…

Monte looked closely at the walls. “No sign of chopping or cutting.”

“No. It’s smooth as glass. No trace of charring, either.”

“How the devil did he make this place?”

“Like Topsy,” Charlie said, “it just growed.”

Monte shook his head. “I doubt that. I never saw a hollow tree that looked like this on the inside, did you?”

“Nope—but then I haven’t been in just a whole hell of a lot of them.”

Outside, the rain poured down around the tree and the wind moaned through a faraway sky. It was not unpleasant to be in the hollow tree; there was something secure and enduring about the place, as though it had weathered many seasons and many storms.

But how could a man have lived here and left so few traces of his existence?

“Maybe he doesn’t live here,” Monte said slowly. “Maybe this is just a sort of temporary camp—a shelter of some kind.”

Charlie shrugged. There were dark circles around his eyes and he looked very tired. “I’d say that these people have no material culture at all—and that, my friend, doesn’t make sense. You know what this place looks like? It looks like an animal den.”

“It would—but it
feels
wrong. Too clean, for one thing. No bones, no debris of any kind. And I’m not at all sure that this is a natural tree.”

“Supernatural, maybe?”

“I mean I think it has been
shaped
somehow.”

Charlie sighed. “If they can make a tree grow the way they want it to, why can’t they chip out a hunk of flint? It’s crazy. This place gives me the creeps, Monte. Let’s get out of here before we poke our noses into something we really can’t handle.”

Monte thought it over. It seemed obvious that the man would not return while they were in the tree. Nothing would be gained by parking here indefinitely. But he didn’t like the idea of just pulling out. He was beginning to feel a trifle futile, and it was a new experience for him. He didn’t like it.

He reached into his pack and took out a good steel knife. He carried it over and placed it on the shelf with the meat and the berries.

“Do you think that’s wise?”

Monte rubbed at his beard, which was beginning to itch again. “I don’t know. Do you?”

Charlie didn’t say anything.

“We’ve got to do something. And I’d like to see what that guy will make of a real-for-sure tool. I’m going to get one of the boys in here and plant a scanner and a mike before he comes back. Then maybe we’ll see something. I’ll take the responsibility.”

He cut in his radio and called the sphere. Ace sounded as though he were not exactly having the time of his life bucking the storm above the trees, but he wasn’t in any serious trouble. Monte carefully dictated a report of what had happened, and arranged a rendezvous point at the edge of the forest.

“Come on,” he said, and stepped back into the rain.

It was quite dark now, and the forest was hushed and gloomy. The rain had settled down into a gentle patter and the thunder seemed lonely and remote, as though it came from another world. They brushed their way through wet leaves and found the trail. The beams of their flashlights were small and lost in the wilderness of night.

Monte walked wearily along the path, his damp clothes sticking to his body. He was bone-tired—not so much from physical exertion, he realized, as from the strain of failure. Still, the night air was fresh and cool after the muggy heat of the day, and that was something.

All forests, he supposed, were pretty much the same at night. He knew that this one, at any rate, was less alien in the darkness. The trees were only trees, flat black shadows that dripped and stirred around him. Occasionally, he could even catch a glimpse of a cloud-streaked sky above him, and once he even saw a star. With only a slight effort of the imagination, he could feel that he was walking through the night-shrouded woods of Earth, perhaps coming home from a fishing trip, and soon he would walk into a village, where lights twinkled along the streets and magic music drifted out of a bar…

He blinked his eyes and shifted the rifle on his shoulder.

Steady boy. You’re a helluva long way from Earth.

It was hard for him to get used to this world. Sirius Nine was just a name, and less than that; it seemed singularly inappropriate. He wondered what the natives called their world. He wished that he knew the
names
of things. A world was terribly alien, incredibly strange, until it was transformed with names. Names had the power of sorcery; they could change the unknown into the known.