was living, breathing — and yet his retarded life-tempo cut him off from Farris as effectually as death would.
No, not quite. Slowly, so slowly that he could hardly detect the movement, Berreau’s eyes turned toward Farris’ figure.
Lys came back into the room. She was quiet, but he was getting to know her better, and he knew by her face that she was startled.
“The servants are gone! Ahra, and the girls — and your guide. They must have seen us bring Andre in.”
Farris understood. “They left because we brought back a man who’s
She nodded. “All the tribespeople fear the rite. It’s said there’s only a few who belong to it, but they’re dreaded.”
Farris spared a moment to curse softly the vanished Annamese. “Piang would bolt like a scared rabbit, from something like this. A sweet beginning for my job here.”
“Perhaps you had better leave,” Lys said uncertainly. Then she added contradictorily, “No, I can’t be heroic about it! Please stay!”
“That’s for sure,” he told her. “I can’t go back down river and report that I shirked my job because of—’’
He stopped, for she wasn’t listening to him. She was looking past him, toward the bed.
Farris swung around. While they two had been talking, Berreau had been moving. Infinitely slowly — but moving.
His feet were on the floor now. He was getting up. His body straightened with a painful, dragging slowness, for many minutes.
Then his right foot began to rise almost imperceptibly from the floor. He was starting to walk, only a hundred times slower than normal.
He was starting to walk toward the door.
Lys’ eyes had a yearning pity in them. “He is trying to go back up to the forest. He will try so long as he is
Farris gently lifted Berreau back to the bed. He felt a cold dampness on his forehead.
What was there up there that drew worshippers in a strange trance of slowed-down life?
CHAPTER 3
Unholy Lure
He turned to the girl and asked, “How long will he stay in this condition?”
“A long time,” she answered heavily. “It may take weeks for the
Farris didn’t like the prospect, but there was nothing he could do about it.
“All right, we’ll take care of him. You and I.”
Lys said, “One of us will have to watch him, all the time. He will keep trying to go back to the forest.”
“You’ve had enough for a while,” Farris told her. “I’ll watch him tonight.”
Farris watched. Not only that night but for many nights. The days went into weeks, and the natives still shunned the house, and he saw nobody except the pale girl and the man who was living in a different way than other humans lived.
Berreau didn’t change. He didn’t scan to sleep, nor did he seem to need food or drink. His eyes never closed, except in that infinitely slow blinking.
He didn’t sleep, and he did not quit moving. He was always moving, only it was in that weird, utterly slow- motion tempo that one could hardly see.
Lys had been right. Berreau wanted to go back to the forest. He might be living a hundred times slower than normal, but he was obviously still conscious in some weird way, and still trying to go back to the hushed, forbidden forest up there where they had found him.
Farris wearied of lifting the statue-like figure back into bed, and with the girl’s permission tied Berreau’s ankles. It did not make things much better. It was even more upsetting, in a way, to sit in the lamplit bedroom and watch Berreau’s slow struggles for freedom.
The dragging slowness of each tiny movement made Farris’ nerves twitch to see. He wished he could give Berreau some sedative to keep him asleep, but he did not dare to do that.
He had found, on Berreau’s forearm, a tiny incision stained with sticky green. There were scars of other, old incisions near it. Whatever crazy drug had been injected into the man to make him
Finally, Farris glanced up one night from his bored perusal of an old
Berreau still lay on the bed, but he had just winked. Had winked with normal quickness, and not that slow, dragging blink.
“Berreau!” Farris said quickly. “Are you all right now? Can you hear me?”
Berreau looked up at him with a level, unfriendly gaze. “I can hear you. May I ask why you meddled?”
It took Farris aback. He had been playing nurse so long that he had unconsciously come to think of the other as a sick man who would be grateful to him. He realized now that Berreau was coldly angry, not grateful.
The Frenchman was untying his ankles. His movements were shaky, his hands trembling, but he stood up normally.
“Well?” he asked.
Farris shrugged. “Your sister was going up there after you. I helped her bring you back. That’s all.”
Berreau looked a little startled. “Lys did that? But it’s a breaking of the Rite! It can mean trouble for her!”
Resentment and raw nerves made Farris suddenly brutal. “Why should you worry about Lys now, when you’ve made her wretched for months by your dabbing in native wizardries?”
Berreau didn’t retort angrily, as he had expected. The young Frenchman answered heavily.
“It’s true. I’ve done that to Lys.”
Farris exclaimed, “Berreau, why do you do it? Why this unholy business of going
The other man looked at him with haggard eyes. “By doing it, I’ve entered an alien world. A world that exists around us all our lives, but that we never live in or understand at all.”
“What world?”
“The world of green leaf and root and branch,” Berreau answered. “The world of plant life, which we can never comprehend because of the difference between its life-tempo and our life-tempo.”
Farris began dimly to understand. “You mean, this
Berreau nodded. “Yes. And that simple difference in life-tempo is the doorway into an unknown, incredible world.”
“But how?”
The Frenchman pointed to the half-healed incision on his bare arm. “The drug does it. A native drug, that slows down metabolism, heart-action, respiration, nerve-messages, everything.
“Chlorophyll is its basis. The green blood of plant-life, the complex chemical that enables plants to take their energy direct from sunlight. The natives prepare it directly from grasses, by some method of their own.”
“I shouldn’t think,” Farris said incredulously, “that chlorophyll could have any effect on an animal organism.”
“Your saying that,” Berreau retorted, “shows that your biochemical knowledge is out of date. Back in March of Nineteen Forty-Eight, two Chicago chemists engaged in mass production or extraction of chlorophyll, announced that their injection of it into dogs and rats seemed to prolong life greatly by altering the oxidation capacity of the cells.
“Prolong life greatly — yes! But it prolongs it, by slowing it down! A tree lives longer than a man, because it
