And there was terror in her face.
“What’s happened?” she cried. “The light—”
He took her by the shoulders. “Lys, don’t lose your nerve. What’s happened is that we’re
“But why?” she cried.
“Don’t you see? He was going
Farris went into Berreau’s room. It was as he had expected. The Frenchman was gone.
“I’ll go after him,” he said tightly. “He’s got to come back, for he may have an antidote to that hellish stuff. You wait here.”
Lys clung to him. “No! I’d go mad, here by myself, like this.”
She was, he saw, on the brink of hysterics. He didn’t wonder. The slow, pulsing beat of day and night alone was enough to unseat one’s reason.
He acceded. “All right. But wait till I get something.”
He went back to Berreau’s room and took a big bolo-knife he had seen leaning in a corner. Then he saw something else, something glittering in the pulsing light, on the botanist’s laboratory-table.
Farris stuffed that into his pocket. If force couldn’t bring Berreau back, the threat of this other thing might influence him.
He and Lys hurried out onto the veranda and down the steps. And then they stopped, appalled.
The great forest that loomed before them was now a nightmare sight. It seethed and stirred with unearthly life great branches clawing and whipping at each other as they fought for the light, vines writhing through them at incredible speed, a rustling uproar of tossing, living plant-life.
Lys shrank back. “The forest is
“It’s just the same as always,” Farris reassured. “It’s we who have changed — who are living so slowly now that the plants seem to live faster.”
“And Andre is out in that!” Lys shuddered. Then courage came back into her pale face. “But I’m not afraid.”
They started up through the forest toward the plateau of giant trees. And now there was an awful unreality about this incredible world.
Farris felt no difference in himself. There was no sensation of slowing down. His own motions and perceptions appeared normal. It was simply that all around him the vegetation had now a savage motility that was animal in its swiftness.
Grasses sprang up beneath his feet, tiny green spears climbing toward the light. Buds swelled, burst, spread their bright petals on the air, breathed out their fragrance — and died.
New leaves leaped joyously up from every twig, lived out their brief and vital moment, withered and fell. The forest was a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of colors, from pale green to yellowed brown, that rippled as the swift tides of growth and death washed over it.
But it was not peaceful nor serene, that life of the forest. Before, it had seemed to Farris that the plants of the earth existed in a placid inertia utterly different from the beasts, who must constantly hunt or be hunted. Now he saw how mistaken he had been.
Close by, a tropical nettle crawled up beside a giant fern. Octopus-like, its tendrils flashed around and through the plant. The fern writhed. Its fronds tossed wildly, its stalks strove to be free. But the stinging death conquered it.
Lianas crawled like great serpents among the trees, encircling the trunks, twining themselves swiftly along the branches, striking their hungry parasitic roots into the living bark.
And the trees fought them. Farris could see how the branches lashed and struck against the killer vines. It was like watching a man struggle against the crushing coils of the python.
Very likely. Because the trees, the plants, knew. In their own strange, alien fashion, they were as sentient as their swifter brothers.
Hunter and hunted. The strangling lianas, the deadly, beautiful orchid that was like a cancer eating a healthy trunk, the leprous, crawling fungi — they were the wolves and the jackals of this leafy world.
Even among the trees, Farris saw, existence was a grim and never-ending struggle. Silk-cotton and bamboo and ficus trees— they too knew pain and fear and the dread of death.
He could hear them. Now, with his aural nerves slowed to an incredible receptivity, he heard the voice of the forest, the true voice that had nothing to do with the familiar sounds of wind in the branches.
The primal voice of birth and death that spoke before ever man appeared on Earth, and would continue to speak after he was gone.
At first he had been conscious only of that vast, rustling uproar. Now he could distinguish separate sounds — the thin screams of grass blades and bamboo-shoots thrusting and surging out of the earth, the lash and groan of enmeshed and dying branches, the laughter of young leaves high in the sky, the stealthy whisper of the coiling vines.
And almost, he could hear thoughts, speaking in his mind. The age-old thoughts of the trees.
Farris felt a freezing dread. He did not want to listen to the thoughts of the trees.
And the slow, steady pulsing of darkness and light went on. Days and nights, rushing with terrible speed over the
Lys, stumbling along the trail beside him, uttered a little cry of terror. A snaky black vine had darted out of the bush at her with cobra swiftness, looping swiftly to encircle her body.
Farris swung his bolo, slashed through the vine. But it struck out again, growing with that appalling speed, its tip groping for him.
He slashed again with sick horror, and pulled the girl onward, on up the side of the plateau.
“I am afraid!” she gasped. “I can hear the thoughts — the thoughts of the forest!”
“It’s your own imagination!” he told her. “Don’t listen!”
But he too could hear them! Very faintly, like sounds just below the threshold of hearing. It seemed to him that every minute — or every minute-long day — he was able to get more clearly the telepathic impulses of these organisms that lived an undreamed-of life of their own, side by side with man, yet forever barred from him, except when man was
It seemed to him that the temper of the forest had changed, that his slaying of the vine had made it aware of them. Like a crowd aroused to anger, the massed trees around them grew wrathful. A tossing and moaning rose among them.
Branches struck at Farris and the girl, lianas groped with blind heads and snakelike grace toward them. Brush and bramble clawed them spitefully, reaching out thorny arms to rake their flesh. The slender saplings lashed them like leafy whips, the swift-growing bamboo spears sought to block their path, canes clattering together as if in rage.
“It’s only in our own minds!” he said to the girl. “Because the forest is living at the same rate as we, we imagine it’s aware of us.”
He had to believe that, he knew. He had to, because when he quit believing it there was only black madness.
“No!” cried Lys. “No! The forest knows we are here.”
Panic fear threatened Farris’ self-control, as the mad uproar of the forest increased. He ran, dragging the girl with him, sheltering her with his body from the lashing of the raging forest.
They ran on, deeper into the mighty grove upon the plateau, under the pulsing rush of day and darkness. And now the trees about them were brawling giants, great silk-cotton and ficus that struck crashing blows at each other as their branches fought for clear sky — contending and terrible leafy giants beneath which the two humans were pigmies.
But the lesser forest beneath them still tossed and surged with wrath, still plucked and tore at the two
