hallucinogenic effect on the perceptions?"
Ssss. "I'll agree that Porlock's perceptions are easily troubled. Keep him in his lab, he'll do less harm. Anything else?"
"Not at present," Harfex said, and Osden cut off.
Nobody could credit Porlock's story, and nobody could discredit it He was positive that something something big had tried to attack him by surprise. It was hard to deny this, for they were on an alien world, and everyone who had entered the forest had felt a certain chill and foreboding under the "trees." ("Call them trees, certainly," Harfex had said. "They really are the same thing only, of course, altogether different") They agreed that they had felt uneasy, or had had the sense that something was watching them from behind.
"We've got to clear this up," Porlock said, and he asked to be sent as a temporary Biologist's Aide, like Osden, into the forest to explore and observe. Olleroo and Jenny Chong volunteered if they could go as a pair. Harfex sent them all off into the forest near which they were encamped, a vast tract covering four-fifths of Continent D. He forbade side-arms. They were not to go outside a fifty-mile half-circle, which included Osden's current site. They all reported in twice daily, for three days. Porlock reported a glimpse of what seemed to be a large semi-erect shape moving through the trees across the river; Olleroo was sure she had heard something moving near the tent, the second night
"There are no animals on this planet," Harfex said,
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow a-107
Then Osden missed his morning call.
Tomiko waited less than an hour, then flew with Harfex to the area where Osden had reported himself the night before. But as the helijet hovered over the sea of purplish leaves, illimitable, impenetrable, she felt a panic despair. "How can we find him in this?"
"He reported landing on the riverbank. Find the aircar; he'll be camped near it, and he can't have gone far from his camp. Species-counting is slow work. There's the river."
"There's his car," Tomiko said, catching the bright foreign glint among the vegetable colors and shadows. "Here goes, then."
She put the ship in hover and pitched out the ladder. She and Harfex descended. The sea of life closed over their heads.
As her feet touched the forest floor, she unsnapped the flap of her holster; then glancing at Harfex, who was unarmed, she left the gun untouched. But her hand kept coming back to it. There was no sound at all, as soon as they were a few meters away from the slow, brown river, and the light was dim. Great boles stood well apart, almost regularly, almost alike; they were soft-skinned, some appearing smooth and others spongy, grey or greenish-brown or brown, twined with cable-like creepers and festooned with epiphytes, extending rigid, entangled armfuls of big saucer-shaped, dark leaves that formed a roof-layer twenty to thirty meters thick. The ground underfoot was springy as a mattress, every inch of it knotted with roots and peppered with small, fleshy-leafed growths.
"Here's his tent," Tomiko said, cowed at the sound of her voice in that huge community of the voiceless. In the tent was Osden's sleeping bag, a couple of books, a box of rations. We should be calling shouting for him, she thought, but did not even suggest it; nor did Harfex They circled out from the tent, careful to keep each other in
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sight through the thick-standing presences, the crowding gloom. She stumbled over Osden's body, not thirty meters from the tent, led to it by the whitish gleam of a dropped notebook. He lay face down between two huge-rooted trees. His head and hands were covered with blood, some dried, some still oozing red.
Harfex appeared beside her, his pale Hainish complexion quite green in the dusk. "Dead?"
"No. He's been struck. Beaten. From behind." Tomiko's fingers felt over the bloody skull and temples and nape. "A weapon or a tool... I don't find a fracture."
As she turned Osden's body over so they could lift him, his eyes opened. She was holding him, bending close to his face. His pale lips writhed. A deathly fear came into her. She screamed aloud two or three times and tried to run away, shambling and stumbling into the terrible dusk. Harfex caught her, and at his touch and the sound of his voice, her panic decreased. "What is it? What is it?" he was saying
"I don't know," she sobbed. Her heartbeat still shook her, and she could not see clearly. "The fear -- the... I panicked. When I saw his eyes."
"We're both nervous. I don't understand this -- "
"I'm all right now, come on, we've got to get him under care."
Both working with senseless haste, they lugged Osden to the riverside and hauled him up on a rope under his armpits; he dangled like a sack, twisting a little, over the glutinous dark sea of leaves. They pulled him into the helijet and took off. Within a minute they were over open prairie. Tomiko locked onto the homing beam. She drew a deep breath, and her eyes met Harfex's. "I was so terrified I almost fainted. I have never done that"
"I was... unreasonably frightened also," said the Hain-ishman, and indeed he looked aged and shaken. "Not so badly as you. But as unreasonably."
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow "A-109 "It was when I was in contact with him, holding him. He seemed to be conscious for a moment"
"Empathy?... I hope he can tell us what attacked him."
Osden, like a broken dummy covered with blood and mud, half lay as they had bundled him into the rear seats in their frantic urgency to get out of the forest
More panic met their arrival at base. The ineffective brutality of the assault was sinister and bewildering. Since Harfex stubbornly denied any possibility of animal life they began speculating about sentient plants, vegetable monsters, psychic projections. Jenny Chong's latent phobia reasserted itself and she could talk about nothing except the Dark Egos which followed people around behind their backs. She and Olleroo and Porlock had been summoned back to base; and nobody was much inclined to go outside.
Osden had lost a good deal of blood during the three or four hours he had lain alone, and concussion and severe contusions had put him in shock and semi-coma. As he came out of this and began running a low fever he called several times for "Doctor," in a plaintive voice: "Doctor Hammergeld..." When he regained full consciousness, two of those long days later, Tomiko called Harfex into his cubicle.
"Osden: can you tell us what attacked you?"
The pale eyes flickered past Harfex's face.
"You were attacked," Tomiko said gently. The shifty gaze was hatefully familiar, but she was a physician, protective of the hurt. "You may not remember it yet Something attacked you. You were in the forest -- "
"Ah!" he cried out, his eyes growing bright and his features contorting. "The forest -- in the forest -- "
"What's in the forest?"
He grasped for breath. A look of clearer consciousness came into his face. After a while he said, "I don't know."
"Did you see what attacked you?" Harfex asked.
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"I don't know." '..
"You remember it now."
"I don't know."
"All our lives may depend on this. You must tell us what you saw!"
"I don't know," Osden said, sobbing with weakness. He was too weak to hide the fact that he was hiding the answer, yet he would not say it. Porlock, nearby, was chewing his pepper-colored mustache as he tried to hear what was going on in the cubicle. Harfex leaned over Osden and said, "You will tell us -- " Tomiko had to interfere bodily.
Harfex controlled himself with an effort that was painful to see. He went off silently to his cubicle, where no doubt he took a double or triple dose of tranquilizers. The other men and women scattered about the big frail
