The Star Fox

“No!” Heim said. “We’ll all get out, or none.”

“Let me try,” Jocelyn said. She gave Vadász into the care of Bragdon, who had recovered a little, and took his knife herself. Her blows were weak, but they found she could use the tool as a crowbar to lever a path for herself.

And … sunlight, open sky, turf under Lochan’s holy peak. They went a few meters farther before they toppled.

Heim woke a couple of hours afterward. For a while he blinked at heaven and found curious shapes in the clouds, as if again he were a boy on Gea. When memory came back, he sat upright with a choked oath.

The trees were still moving past. He thought, though, they had slowed down. Northwestward, opposite to their direction, he saw their trail of crumbled earth. The most distant part that he could spy was overlaid with pale yellow, the first new growth.

Uthg-a-K’thaq was the only other one awake. The Naqsan flopped down beside him. “Well, skiwwer, now we know what the Walking Worest is.”

“I’d like to know how it works,” Heim said.

Rest had temporarily cleared his mind. An answer grew. “I’m only guessing, of course,” he said after a minute, “but it could be something like this. The ultraviolet sunlight makes plant chemistry hellish energetic. That particular species there needs something, some mineral maybe. Where faulting exposes a vein of it, a woods appears.”

“Not likely mineral,” Uthg-a-K’thaq corrected. “You cannot hawe liwe dewendent on sheer geological accident.”

“Geology operates faster on a big planet than a terrestrial one, C.E.,” Heim argued. “Still, I’ll agree it makes poor ecology. Let me think … Okay, let’s say you get bacteria laying down organic stuff of a particular kind, wherever conditions are right. Such deposits would be fairly common, exposed fairly often. Those trees could broadcast spores that can lie dormant for centuries, waiting for a chance to sprout. All right, then, they consume the deposit at a tremendous rate. Once mature, such a forest has to keep moving because the soil gets exhausted where it stands. Reproduction is too slow; the trees themselves have to move. Evidently sunlight starts them on their way, because you remember they didn’t begin till mid-morning and now in the afternoon they’re coming to a halt.”

“What hawwens when they hawe eaten out the whole wein?”

“They die. Their remains go, back to the soil. Eventually everything gets reprocessed into the material they need, and the spores they’ve left wake to life.” Heim grimaced. “Why am I trying to play scientist? Defense mechanism? I’ve got to believe that thing is natural.”

“We came through it aliwe,” Uthg-a-K’thaq said calmly. “Is that not suwwicient?”

Heim didn’t reply. His gaze drifted west, whither he had yet to go. Did he see a vague plume of mist on the lower steeps of Lochan? It was too distant for him to be sure. But—Thundersmoke? Whatever that is. No need to worry about it now. First we’ve got to get past the Slaughter Machines.

VI

Two more days—twenty kilometers? They could not have done that much were they not crossing a flat space, a plateau on the lap of Lochan.

It was dreary country, treeless, rock-strewn, sparsely covered with low yellowish scrub. Many streams ran down toward the Morh, their tinkle the only sound except for an endless whittering wind; but the banks held no more life than the dusty stretches beyond. Alone the ranges that hemmed in the world on three sides, and the splendid upward leap of the snowcone ahead, redeemed this landscape.

The first evening they camped in sight of a crater. Its vitrified walls gleamed reddish black, like clotted blood, in the last sunlight. Vadász pointed and remarked, “I thought this region is barren because runoff from above leached the soil. Now I find otherwise.”

“How so?” Heim asked, incurious in his fatigue.

“Why, yonder is plain to see as bombwork. There must have been an industrial center here once, that was destroyed in the war.”

“And you’d let the same happen to Earth!” Bragdon’s accusation was the first word he had spoken in more than a day.

Heim sighed. “How often must I explain?” he said, more to Jocelyn than to the Peaceman. “Earth has space defenses. She can’t be attacked—unless we drift on from crisis to crisis till matters get so bad that both sides have to build fleets “big enough to take the losses in breaking through. All I want is to head off that day by settling with Alerion now. Unfortunately, Alerion isn’t interested in a reasonable settlement. We’ve got to prove to them that they haven’t any alternative.”

“Womwardment does not account wor the inwertility here,” said Uthg-a-K’thaq. “The war was three or wour Earth centuries ago. Radioactiwity disawweared long since. Something else has kewt nature ’rom recowering.”

“Oh, to hell with it,” Jocelyn moaned. “Let me sleep.”