running humans. And still, and clearer, stronger, Farris’ reeling mind caught the dim impact of unguessable telepathic impulses.
Then, drowning all those dim and raging thoughts, came vast and dominating impulses of greater majesty, thought-voices deep and strong and alien as the voice of primal Earth.
“Stop them!” they seemed to echo in Farris’ mind. “Stop them! Slay them! For they are our enemies!”
Lys uttered a trembling cry. “Andre!”
Farris saw him, then. Saw Berreau ahead, standing in the shadow of the monster banyans there. His arms were upraised toward those looming colossi, as though in worship. Over him towered the leafy giants, dominating all the forest.
“Stop them! Slay them!”
They thundered, now, those majestic thought-voices that Farris’ mind could barely hear. He was closer to them — closer—
He knew, then, even though his mind refused to admit the knowledge Knew whence those mighty voices came, and why Berreau worshipped the banyans.
And surely they were godlike, these green colossi who had lived for ages, whose arms reached skyward and whose aerial roots drooped and stirred and groped like hundreds of hands!
Farris forced that thought violently away. He was a man, of the world of men, and he must not worship alien lords.
Berreau had turned toward them. The man’s eyes were hot and raging, and Farris knew even before Berreau spoke that he was no longer altogether sane.
“Go, both of you!” he ordered. “You were fools, to come here after me! You killed as you came through the forest, and the forest knows!”
“Berreau, listen!” Farris appealed. “You’ve got to go back with us, forget this madness!”
Berreau laughed shrilly. “Is it madness that the Lords even now voice their wrath against you? You hear it in your mind, but you are afraid to listen! Be afraid, Farris! There is reason! You have slain trees, for many years, as you have just slain here— and the forest knows you for a foe.”
“Andre!” Lys was sobbing, her face half-buried in her hands.
Farris felt his mind cracking under the impact of the crazy scene. The ceaseless, rushing pulse of light and darkness, the rustling uproar of the seething forest around them, the vines creeping snakelike and branches whipping at them and giant banyans rocking angrily overhead.
“
“The oldest and mightiest creatures on our planet! Long ago, men knew that and worshipped them for the wisdom they could teach. Yes, worshipped them as Ygdrasil and the Druid Oak and the Sacred Tree! But modern men have forgotten this other Earth. Except me, Farris — except me! I’ve found wisdom in this world such as you never dreamed. And your stupid blindness is not going to drag me out of it!”
Farris realized then that it was too late to reason with Berreau. The man had come too often and too far into this other Earth that was as alien to humanity as thought it lay across the universe.
It was because he had feared that, that he had brought the little thing in his jacket pocket. The one thing with which he might force Berreau to obey.
Farris took it out of his pocket. He held it up so that the other could see it.
“You know what it is, Berreau! And you know what I can do with it, if you force me to!”
Wild dread leaped into Berreau’s eyes as he recognized that glittering little vial from his own laboratory.
“The Burmese Blight! You wouldn’t, Farris! You wouldn’t turn that loose
“I will!” Farris said hoarsely. “I will, unless you come out of here with us, now!”
Raging hate and fear were in Berreau’s eyes as he stared at that innocent corked glass vial of gray-green dust.
He said thickly, “For this, I will kill!”
Lys screamed. Black lianas had crept upon her as she stood with her face hidden in her hands. They had writhed around her legs like twining serpents, they were pulling her down.
The forest seemed to roar with triumph. Vine and branch and bramble and creeper surged toward them. Dimly thunderous throbbed the strange telepathic voices.
“Slay them!” said the trees.
Farris leaped into that coiling mass of vines, his bolo slashing. He cut loose the twining lianas that held the girl, sliced fiercely at the branches that whipped wildly at them.
Then, from behind, Berreau’s savage blow on his elbow knocked the bolo from his hand.
“I told you not to kill, Farris! I told you!”
“Slay them!” pulsed the alien thought.
Berreau spoke, his eyes not leaving Farris. “Run, Lys. Leave the forest. This — murderer must die.”
He lunged as he spoke, and there was death in his white face and clutching hands.
Farris Was knocked back, against one of the giant banyan trunks. They rolled, grappling. And already the vines were sliding around them — looping and enmeshing them, tightening upon them!
It was then that the forest shrieked.
A cry telepathic and auditory at the same time — and dreadful. An utterance of alien agony beyond anything human.
Berreau’s hands fell away from Farris. The Frenchman, enmeshed with him by the coiling vines, looked up in horror.
Then Farris saw what had happened. The little vial, the vial of the blight, had smashed against the banyan trunk as Berreau charged.
And that little splash of gray-green mould was rushing through the forest faster than flame! The blight, the gray-green killer from far away, propagating itself with appalling rapidity!
Even normally, a blight seems to spread swiftly. And to Farris and the other two, slowed down as they were, this blight was a raging cold fire of death.
It flashed up trunks and limbs and aerial roots of the majestic banyans, eating leaf and spore and bud. It ran triumphantly across the ground, over vine and grass and shrub, bursting up other trees, leaping along the airy bridges of lianas.
And it leaped among the vines that enmeshed the two men! In mad death-agonies the creepers writhed and tightened.
Farris felt the musty mould in his mouth and nostrils, felt the construction as of steel cables crushing the life from him. The world seemed to darken—
Then a steel blade hissed and flashed, and the pressure loosened. Lys’ voice was in his ears, Lys’ hand trying to drag him from the dying, tightening creepers that she had partly slashed through. He wrenched free. “My brother!” she gasped.
With the bolo he sliced clumsily through the mass of dying writhing snake-vines that still enmeshed Berreau.
Berreau’s face appeared, as he tore away the slashed creepers. It was dark purple, rigid, his eyes staring and dead. The tightening vines had caught him around the throat, strangling him.
Lys knelt beside him, crying wildly. But Farris dragged her to her feet.
“We have to get out of here! He’s dead — but I’ll carry his body!”
“No, leave it,” she sobbed. “Leave it here, in the forest.”
Dead eyes, looking up at the death of the alien world of life into which he had now crossed, forever! Yes, it was fitting.
Farris’ heart quailed as he stumbled away with Lys through the forest that was rocking and raging in its death-throes.
