“This is the world that man lives in all his life, and never sees or senses!” Berreau was shouting. “I’ve come into it, again and again. And each time, I’ve heard more clearly the voices of the Great Ones!
“The oldest and mightiest creatures on our planet! Long ago, men knew that and worshipped them for the wisdom they could teach. Yes, worshipped them as Ygdrasil and the Druid Oak and the Sacred Tree! But modern men have forgotten this other Earth. Except me, Farris — except me! I’ve found wisdom in this world such as you never dreamed. And your stupid blindness is not going to drag me out of it!”
Farris realized then that it was too late to reason with Berreau. The man had come too often and too far into this other Earth that was as alien to humanity as thought it lay across the universe.
It was because he had feared that, that he had brought the little thing in his jacket pocket. The one thing with which he might force Berreau to obey.
Farris took it out of his pocket. He held it up so that the other could see it.
“You know what it is, Berreau! And you know what I can do with it, if you force me to!”
Wild dread leaped into Berreau’s eyes as he recognized that glittering little vial from his own laboratory.
“The Burmese Blight! You wouldn’t, Farris! You wouldn’t turn that loose here!’’
“I will!” Farris said hoarsely. “I will, unless you come out of here with us, now!”
Raging hate and fear were in Berreau’s eyes as he stared at that innocent corked glass vial of gray-green dust.
He said thickly, “For this, I will kill!”
Lys screamed. Black lianas had crept upon her as she stood with her face hidden in her hands. They had writhed around her legs like twining serpents, they were pulling her down.
The forest seemed to roar with triumph. Vine and branch and bramble and creeper surged toward them. Dimly thunderous throbbed the strange telepathic voices.
“Slay them!” said the trees.
Farris leaped into that coiling mass of vines, his bolo slashing. He cut loose the twining lianas that held the girl, sliced fiercely at the branches that whipped wildly at them.
Then, from behind, Berreau’s savage blow on his elbow knocked the bolo from his hand.
“I told you not to kill, Farris! I told you!”
“Slay them!” pulsed the alien thought.
Berreau spoke, his eyes not leaving Farris. “Run, Lys. Leave the forest. This — murderer must die.”
He lunged as he spoke, and there was death in his white face and clutching hands.
Farris Was knocked back, against one of the giant banyan trunks. They rolled, grappling. And already the vines were sliding around them — looping and enmeshing them, tightening upon them!
It was then that the forest shrieked.
A cry telepathic and auditory at the same time — and dreadful. An utterance of alien agony beyond anything human.
Berreau’s hands fell away from Farris. The Frenchman, enmeshed with him by the coiling vines, looked up in horror.
Then Farris saw what had happened. The little vial, the vial of the blight, had smashed against the banyan trunk as Berreau charged.
And that little splash of gray-green mould was rushing through the forest faster than flame! The blight, the gray-green killer from far away, propagating itself with appalling rapidity! “Dieu!” screamed Berreau. “Non — non—”
Even normally, a blight seems to spread swiftly. And to Farris and the other two, slowed down as they were, this blight was a raging cold fire of death.
It flashed up trunks and limbs and aerial roots of the majestic banyans, eating leaf and spore and bud. It ran triumphantly across the ground, over vine and grass and shrub, bursting up other trees, leaping along the airy bridges of lianas.
And it leaped among the vines that enmeshed the two men! In mad death-agonies the creepers writhed and tightened.
Farris felt the musty mould in his mouth and nostrils, felt the construction as of steel cables crushing the life from him. The world seemed to darken—
Then a steel blade hissed and flashed, and the pressure loosened. Lys’ voice was in his ears, Lys’ hand trying to drag him from the dying, tightening creepers that she had partly slashed through. He wrenched free. “My brother!” she gasped.
With the bolo he sliced clumsily through the mass of dying writhing snake-vines that still enmeshed Berreau.
Berreau’s face appeared, as he tore away the slashed creepers. It was dark purple, rigid, his eyes staring and dead. The tightening vines had caught him around the throat, strangling him.
Lys knelt beside him, crying wildly. But Farris dragged her to her feet.
“We have to get out of here! He’s dead — but I’ll carry his body!”
“No, leave it,” she sobbed. “Leave it here, in the forest.”
Dead eyes, looking up at the death of the alien world of life into which he had now crossed, forever! Yes, it was fitting.
Farris’ heart quailed as he stumbled away with Lys through the forest that was rocking and raging in its death-throes.
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 hunati.
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 them, that fierce struggle is raging on even now.”
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.