Between the Strokes of Night

They were beyond the developed agricultural region, and he had finally spotted an area of rocky hillside clear of bushes. He had been watching for one like it for the past hour, and now he walked to its center. He watched the youngsters as they edged forward. Tired as they must be, everyone moved easily, without stumbling or favoring one foot over the other. A tough bunch. Within seconds they formed a silent ring with Wolfgang at the center. In front of him a purple-brown cylinder about a meter tall and thirty centimeters across jutted up from the ground in the middle of the clearing.

He crouched down next to it. “If we had come by early this morning, this stalk wouldn’t have been there. If you look closely you will see that it’s growing, a few centimeters a minute. What you can’t see is the rest of it. Underground, where you’re standing and where I am standing, there is a big sphere almost five meters across.”

The group stared down at the ground, as though trying to see beneath their own feet. One of them asked, “Is it a plant or an animal?”

“Strictly speaking, it’s neither one. It’s called a grape-plant, but it’s more like a cross between a plant and a fungus. And almost all the time it’s perfectly harmless. It just sits underground, sucking in nutrients and growing steadily, and on one day of the year — today, for this one — it puts up a thick stem. Still harmless. You are perfectly safe.”

Wolfgang was watching very closely as he spoke, noting the delicate change of hue as the stem grew taller.

“Now, you’ve had time for a good look. So we’re all going to move. Back up, away from here, and I’ll tell you when to stop.”

The ring expanded. Wolfgang walked around it, moving a couple of the taller people a little farther from the center.

“That’s good. All of you remain exactly where you are. I want you to take careful note of how far away the stem is from you. How far would you say?” Some voices muttered, “Six meters,” a few, “Six and a half meters.” “Close enough. Now.”

Wolfgang deliberately said nothing more. The group stood quiet for four minutes. He had timed it with care, so that they were beginning to fidget and glance at each other when it happened.

A roar, too high-pitched to be thunder, shattered the silence. At the same time the air filled with a thousand whistling shrieks. Everyone except Wolfgang reflexively ducked and flinched.

“Look at it now,” he said. The purple stem had split open into a dozen sections which lay flat on the ground around it. “Seed dispersal mechanism. No, it’s no good looking around for them. The nearest ones will be kilometers away. The seeds or spores — call them what you like — are aerodynamically shaped, and they blow out of there at better than three kilometers a second. They mass thirty to forty grams. If one hit you when it was on the way down it might draw blood. Hit you close up, like now, and it would pass right through you and keep going. They always emerge at an angle of at least thirty degrees to the horizontal, so unless you’re more than three meters tall you’re safe at the distance we were at. But you can imagine what happens if somebody is careless and stands right next to one when it pops. Grape-plant doesn’t refer to grapes, or grapefruit. It refers to grapeshot, which was fired at people with the idea of riddling them as full of holes as a colander.”

Wolfgang stared with satisfaction at the circle of shocked faces. Their natural sass would be back in a few minutes, but for the moment he had them completely. “Right. This seems like a good place and time to stop and eat. After what you just saw, let me give you some good news. All running water on Kallen’s World is fit to drink. I recommend that you use a container rather than drinking direct from any sizeable stream, because there’s a couple of lobster look-alikes that wouldn’t mind a taste of your nose. Do it like this.”

He illustrated, scooping water into his canteen from a little rivulet that ran down the hill, then sat down on the hillside with his back against a rock. The tall girl who usually hung at the back of the group came to sit cross-legged next to him. He knew her name — Demmy Zeiss — and that she had scored fourth in the last Planetfest. That was about all.

She smiled at him. “You must have shown a hundred groups like us how to look after ourselves on Kallen’s World. Don’t you ever get tired of it?” “No. I never do.” Wolfgang opened his lunch pack and began to eat. He didn’t intend to say more. If Demmy was trying to suck up to him for some reason, it wouldn’t work. To give preferential treatment to any one of the new arrivals would diminish him in the eyes of the others, and they would then discount the advice he had to offer.