Her face grew suddenly strained. She stared about her as if seeking an answer for something intangible that was pressing in upon her thoughts and undermining her confidence in herself.
I was feeling it too. A kind of cold unpleasantness with underpinnings of loneliness and dread. When you’re thousands of light years from Earth you’ve got to hold tight to your anchorage in the past, your primal birthright of friendship and trust.
There were a thousand ties linking me to Earth, and that distant jungle world was just a stopping off point to me in a web of heartwarming memories that sustained me night and day. No matter how lonely I became I could always tell myself that I’d soon be going back to the people and places I’d known all my life. I was far away, sure. But there would always be friends awaiting my return.
Freeze that memory chain, shatter the brittle links, and the human mind has no refuge left anywhere in time or space. I had only to substitute Tragor for Earth to know how Kallatah must have felt. But before I could move to her side all of the links snapped, and we were caught up in a jungle new and terrible and strange, with all points of reference stripped away.
I’d experienced that horror before and I knew exactly what to expect.
It began with a dull flickering, a faint shifting of light and shadow at the edge of the clearing. Leaves swirled up from the forest floor, and a solid wall of vegetation began to sway, to tremble and twist about. As Kallatah cried out in alarm a tangled mass of bright, toadstool-like growths split up into dozens of spinning fragments, the air about them crackling and bursting into flame.
With a sudden, roaring sound a tree collapsed, dislodging a screaming shrewlike beast that scampered into the clearing with its tail between its legs. There was a moment of awful silence while the jungle built up tensions past all sanity. The clearing became a trap brimming with a malevolence as unnerving as the ticking of some hidden detonating device.
A black blur of panic rose to encompass me as a concentration of hatred almost palpable plucked agonizingly at my mind. I was following the motion of the foliage with sick horror when out of the jungle came another beast, web-footed, walking upright.
In utter silence it stumbled to and fro, its froglike body glistening with swamp water, its stalked eyes luminous with fright. It advanced and retreated, bent double, and went into a kind of frantic waltz.
What happened then was as unexpected as it was terrifying. The light grew dazzling again, as if a cloak of fire had descended on the clearing. With a harsh screeching the frog leapt high into the air and was slammed back against a tree by a force that ploughed a furrow in the ground clear across the clearing.
I watched it sink to the ground with a broken back, shaken both by the violence which had been done to it, and an unnerving glimpse of Kallatah’s white face staring at me from the shadows. So terrible was the wrath unleashed that it had taken on a blind purposelessness. I knew that everything in the clearing was marked for destruction unless—
I crossed to where Kallatah was standing, and gripped her by the shoulders.
I spoke urgently, almost harshly. “The natives are watching us!” I warned. “When they saw you capture that lizard their anger got out of hand. Do you understand? They’re trying to kill us with their minds.”
“What can it mean?”
She swayed against me and I caught the faint fragrance of her hair. She was trembling so I wondered if she had really heard me, or if the fear in her voice was no more than an echo of the dread she must have felt on seeing the frog-creature go hurtling through the air.
I started shaking her, forcing her to look at me. “They’re poltergeists,” I told her. “They can set fires and move objects from a distance. The power resides in an area of the brain which civilization seems to blunt. It’s an E.S.P. faculty which was part of man’s original survival equipment. Our cavemen ancestors could reach out with their minds in that way too.”
She still seemed not to hear me. In desperation I raised my voice, continuing to shake her. “They get to our minds first—in a horrible, primitive sort of way. They strip our minds bare so that we’ll feel isolated—lost. Primitive man could kill off his enemies in the same way—by paralyzing them with a mental projection of the jungle as a kind of trap. Paralyzing them with fright, then closing the jaws of the trap.”
“I don’t believe it!” she almost sobbed.
“You’ll be convinced if you don’t do as I say!” I warned.
She drew back from me, as if firmly determined not to be convinced.
“You find out these things by studying primitives in different stages of development,” I went on urgently. “Don’t forget—I’m an Earthborn trader. You of Tragor may scoff, but I’ve studied dozens of primitive humanoid groups. I know that they can be won over if you handle them just right.”
“What’s just right?”
“Play along with me,” I urged. “Follow my cue.”
“Play along—”
“An old Earth expression. We’ve got to play up to them, put on an act.”
Before she could protest or cry out I swept her into my arms. I ran my hands through her hair, raised her chin, and kissed her—very firmly and determinedly for an instant.
“This is part of the act,” I whispered.
Being a woman of Tragor, she could hardly have believed that my impulsiveness had been prompted solely by a desperate human need for companionship in a moment of shared danger. She must have known it went deeper than that, and she would have been right. A giddiness swept me like a gusty hurricane wind on a tidal estuary bright with a thousand pulsating tropical
