“Look, fellows,” said Nellie. “I wish you wouldn’t do it.”
Mackenzie puckered his brow. “What’s the matter with you, Nellie? Why did you make that uproar about the law down there? There’s a rule, sure, but in a thing like this it’s different. The company can afford to have a rule or two broken for seven music trees. You know what will happen, don’t you, when we get those trees back home. We can charge a thousand bucks a throw to hear them and have to use a club to keep the crowds away.”
“And the best of it is,” Smith pointed out, “that once they hear them, they’ll have to come again. They’ll never get tired of them. Instead of that, every time they hear them, they’ll want to hear them all the more. It’ll get to be an obsession, a part of the people’s life. They’ll steal, murder, do anything so they can hear the trees.”
“That,” said Mackenzie, soberly, “is the one thing I’m afraid of.”
“I only tried to stop you,” Nellie said. “I know as well as you do that the law won’t hold in a thing like this. But there was something else. The way the conductors sounded. Almost as if they were jeering at us. Like a gang of boys out in the street hooting at someone they just pulled a fast one on.”
“You’re batty,” Smith declared.
“We have to go through with it,” Mackenzie announced, flatly. “If anyone ever found we’d let a chance like this slip through our fingers, they’d crucify us for it.”
“You’re going to get in touch with Harper?” Smith asked.
Mackenzie nodded. “He’ll have to get hold of Earth, have them send out a ship right away to take back the trees.”
“I still think,” said Nellie, “there’s a nigger in the woodpile.”
Mackenzie flipped the toggle and the visiphone went dead.
Harper had been hard to convince. Mackenzie, thinking about it, couldn’t blame him much. After all, it did sound incredible. But then, this whole planet was incredible.
Mackenzie reached into his pocket and hauled forth his pipe and pouch. Nellie probably would raise hell about helping to dig up those other six trees, but she’d have to get over it. They’d have to work as fast as they could. They couldn’t spend more than one night up here on the rim. There wasn’t enough serum for longer than that. One jug of the stuff wouldn’t go too far.
Suddenly excited shouts came from outside the car, shouts of consternation.
With a single leap, Mackenzie left the chair and jumped for the door. Outside, he almost bumped into Smith, who came running around the corner of the tractor. Wade, who had been down at the cliff’s edge, was racing toward them.
“It’s Nellie,” shouted Smith. “Look at that robot!”
Nellie was marching toward them, dragging in her wake a thing that bounced and struggled. A rifle-tree grove fired a volley and one of the pellets caught Nellie in the shoulder, puffing into dust, staggering her a little.
The bouncing thing was the Encyclopedia. Nellie had hold of his taproot, was hauling him unceremoniously across the bumpy ground.
“Put him down!” Mackenzie yelled at her. “Let him go!”
“He stole the serum,” howled Nellie. “He stole the serum and broke it on a rock!”
She swung the Encyclopedia toward them in a looping heave. The intelligent vegetable bounced a couple of times, struggled to get right side up, then scurried off a few feet, root coiled tightly against its underside.
Smith moved toward it threateningly. “I ought to kick the living innards out of you,” he yelled. “We need that serum. You knew why we needed it.”
“You threaten me with force,” said the Encyclopedia. “The most primitive method of compulsion.”
“It works,” Smith told him shortly.
The Encyclopedia’s thoughts were unruffled, almost serene, as clear and concise as ever. “You have a law that forbids your threatening or harming any alien thing.”
“Chum,” declared Smith, “you better get wised up on laws. There are times when certain laws don’t hold. And this is one of them.”
“Just a minute,” said Mackenzie. He spoke to the Encyclopedia. “What is your understanding of a law?”
“It is a rule you live by,” the Encyclopedia said. “It is something that is necessary. You cannot violate it.”
“He got that from Nellie,” said Smith.
“You think because there is a law against it, we won’t take the trees?”
“There is a law against it,” said the Encyclopedia. “You cannot take the trees.”
“So as soon as you found that out, you lammed up here and stole the serum, eh?”
“He’s figuring on indoctrinating us,” Nellie explained. “Maybe that word ain’t so good. Maybe conditioning is better. It’s sort of mixed up. I don’t know if I’ve got it straight. He took the serum so we would hear the trees without being able to defend ourselves against them. He figured when we heard the music, we’d go ahead and take the trees.”
“Law or no law?”
“That’s it,” Nellie said. “Law or no law.”
Smith whirled on the robot. “What kind of jabber is this? How do you know what he was planning?”
“I read his mind,” said Nellie. “Hard to get at, the thing that he was planning, because he kept it deep. But some of it jarred up where I could reach it when you threatened him.”
“You can’t do that!” shrieked the Encyclopedia. “Not you! Not a machine!”
Mackenzie laughed shortly. “Too bad, big boy, but she can. She’s been doing it.”
Smith stared at Mackenzie.
“It’s all right,” Mackenzie said. “It isn’t any bluff. She told me about it last night.”
“You are unduly alarmed,” the Encyclopedia said. “You are putting a wrong interpretation—”
A quiet voice spoke, almost as if it were a voice inside Mackenzie’s mind.
“Don’t believe a thing he tells you, pal. Don’t fall for any of his lies.”
“Nicodemus! You know something about this?”
“It’s the trees,” said Nicodemus. “The music does something to you. It changes you. Makes you different than you were before. Wade is different. He doesn’t know it, but he is.”
“If you mean the music chains one to it, that is true,” said Wade. “I may as well admit it. I could not live without the music. I could not leave the Bowl. Perhaps you gentlemen have thought that I would go back with you. But I cannot go. I cannot leave. It will work the same with anyone. Alexander was here for a while when he ran short of serum. Doctors treated him and he was all right, but he came back. He had to come back. He couldn’t stay away.”
“It isn’t only that,” declared Nicodemus. “It changes you, too, in other ways. It can change you any way it wants to. Change your way of thinking. Change your viewpoints.”
Wade strode forward. “It isn’t true,” he yelled. “I’m the same as when I came here.”
“You heard things,” said Nicodemus, “felt things in the music you couldn’t understand. Things you wanted to understand, but couldn’t. Strange emotions that you yearned to share, but could never reach. Strange thoughts that tantalized you for days.”
Wade sobered, stared at them with haunted eyes.
“That was the way it was,” he whispered. “That was just the way it was.”
He glanced around, like a trapped animal seeking escape.
“But I don’t feel any different,” he mumbled. “I still am human. I think like a man, act like a man.”
“Of course you do,” said Nicodemus. “Otherwise you would have been scared away. If you had known what was happening to you, you wouldn’t let it happen. And you have had less than a year of it. Less than a year of this conditioning. Five years and you would be less human. Ten years and you would be beginning to be the kind of thing the trees want you to be.”