Far away around them, the gray-green death was leaping on. And fainter, fainter, came the strange telepathic cries that he would never be sure he had really heard.
“We die, brothers! We die!”
And then, when it seemed to Farris that sanity must give way beneath the weight of alien agony, there came a sudden change.
The pulsing rush of alternate day and night lengthened in tempo. Each period of light and darkness was longer now, and longer—
Out of a period of dizzying semi-consciousness, Farris came back to awareness. They were standing unsteadily in the blighted forest, in bright sunlight.
And they were no longer
The chlorophyll drug had spent its force in their bodies, and they had come back to the normal tempo of human life.
Lys looked up dazedly, at the forest that now seemed static, peaceful, immobile — and in which the gray- green blight now crept so slowly they could not see it move.
“The same forest, and it’s still writhing in death!” Farris said huskily. “But now that we’re living at normal speed again, we can’t see it!”
“Please, let us go!” choked the girl. “Away from here, at once!”
It took but an hour to return to the bungalow and pack what they could carry, before they took the trail toward the Mekong.
Sunset saw them out of the blighted area of the forest, well on their way toward the river.
“Will it kill all the forest?” whispered the girl.
“No. The forest will fight back, come back, conquer the blight, in time. A long time, by our reckoning — years, decades. But to
And as they walked on, it seemed to Farris that still in his mind there pulsed faintly from far behind that alien, throbbing cry.
“We die, brothers!”
He did not look back. But he knew that he would not come back to this or any other forest, and that his profession was ended, and that he would never kill a tree again.
