Mackenzie raised himself off the floor and braced himself with one elbow, while with the other hand he fumbled at his throbbing throat. The interior of the tractor danced with wavy motion and his head thumped and pounded with pain.
Slowly, carefully, he inched himself back so he could lean against the wall. Gradually the room stopped rocking, but the pounding in his head went on.
Someone was standing in the doorway of the tractor and he fought to focus his eyes, trying to make out who it was.
A voice screeched across his nerves.
“I’m taking your blankets. You’ll get them back when you decide to leave the trees alone.”
Mackenzie tried to fashion words, but all he accomplished was a croak. He tried again.
“Wade?” he asked.
It was Wade, he saw.
The man stood within the doorway, one hand clutching a pair of blankets, the other holding a gun.
“You’re crazy, Wade,” he whispered. “We have to burn the trees. The human race never would be safe. Even if they fail this time, they’ll try again. And again—and yet again. And some day they will get us. Even without going to Earth they can get us. They can twist us to their purpose with recordings alone. Long distance propaganda. Take a bit longer, but it will do the job as well.”
“They are beautiful,” said Wade. “The most beautiful things in all the universe. I can’t let you destroy them. You must not destroy them.”
“But can’t you see,” croaked Mackenzie, “that’s the thing that makes them so dangerous. Their beauty, the beauty of their music, is fatal. No one can resist it.”
“It was the thing I lived by,” Wade told him, soberly. “You say it made me something that was not quite human. But what difference does that make. Must racial purity, in thought and action, be a fetish that would chain us to a drab existence when something better, something greater, is offered. And we never would have known. That is the best of it all, we never would have known. They would have changed us, yes, but so slowly, so gradually, that we would not have suspected. Our decisions and our actions and our way of thought would still have seemed to be our own. The trees never would have been anything more than something cultural.”
“They want our mechanization,” said Mackenzie. “Plants can’t develop machines. Given that, they might have taken us along a road we, in our rightful heritage, never would have taken.”
“How can we be sure,” asked Wade, “that our heritage would have guided us aright?”
Mackenzie slid straighter against the wall. His head still throbbed and his throat still ached.
“You’ve been thinking about this?” he asked.
Wade nodded. “At first there was the natural reaction of horror. But, logically, that reaction is erroneous. Our schools teach our children a way of life. Our press strives to formulate our adult opinion and belief. The trees were doing no more to us than we do to ourselves. And perhaps, for a purpose no more selfish.”
Mackenzie shook his head. “We must live our own life. We must follow the path the attributes of humanity decree that we should follow. And anyway, you’re wasting your time.”
“I don’t understand,” said Wade.
“Nellie already is burning the trees,” Mackenzie told him. “I sent her out before I made the call to Harper.”
“No, she’s not,” said Wade.
Mackenzie sat bolt upright. “What do you mean?”
Wade flipped the pistol as Mackenzie moved as if to regain his feet.
“It doesn’t matter what I mean,” he snapped. “Nellie isn’t burning any trees. She isn’t in a position to burn any trees. And neither are you, for I’ve taken both your flamers. And the tractor won’t run, either. I’ve seen to that. So the only thing that you can do is stay right here.”
Mackenzie motioned toward Smith, lying on the floor. “You’re taking his blanket, too?”
Wade nodded.
“But you can’t. Smith will die. Without that blanket he doesn’t have a chance. The blanket could have healed the wound, kept him fed correctly, kept him warm—”
“That,” said Wade, “is all the more reason that you come to terms directly.”
“Your terms,” said Mackenzie, “are that we leave the trees unharmed.”
“Those are my terms.”
Mackenzie shook his head. “I can’t take the chance,” he said.
“When you decide, just step out and shout,” Wade told him. “I’ll stay in calling distance.”
He backed slowly from the door.
Smith needed warmth and food. In the hour since his blanket had been taken from him he had regained consciousness, had mumbled feverishly and tossed about, his hand clawing at his wounded side.
Squatting beside him, Mackenzie had tried to quiet him, had felt a wave of slow terror as he thought of the hours ahead.
There was no food in the tractor, no means for making heat. There was no need for such provision so long as they had had their life blankets—but now the blankets were gone. There was a first-aid cabinet and with the materials that he found there, Mackenzie did his fumbling best, but there was nothing to relieve Smith’s pain, nothing to control his fever. For treatment such as that they had relied upon the blankets.
The atomic motor might have been rigged up to furnish heat, but Wade had taken the firing mechanism control.
Night was falling and that meant the air would grow colder. Not too cold to live, of course, but cold enough to spell doom to a man in Smith’s condition.
Mackenzie squatted on his heels and stared at Smith.
“If I could only find Nellie,” he thought.
He had tried to find her—briefly. He had raced along the rim of the Bowl for a mile or so, but had seen no sign of her. He had been afraid to go farther, afraid to stay too long from the man back in the tractor.
Smith mumbled and Mackenzie bent low to try to catch the words. But there were no words.
Slowly he rose and headed for the door. First of all, he needed heat. Then food. The heat came first. An open fire wasn’t the best way to make heat, of course, but it was better than nothing.
The uprooted music tree, balled roots silhouetted against the sky, loomed before him in the dusk. He found a few dead branches and tore them off. They would do to start the fire. After that he would have to rely on green wood to keep it going. Tomorrow he could forage about for suitable fuel.
In the Bowl below, the music trees were tuning up for the evening concert.
Back in the tractor, he found a knife, carefully slivered several of the branches for easy lighting, piled them ready for his pocket lighter.
The lighter flared and a tiny figure hopped up on the threshold of the tractor, squatting there, blinking at the light.
Startled, Mackenzie held the lighter without touching it to the wood, stared at the thing that perched in the doorway.
Delbert’s squeaky thought drilled into his brain.
“What you doing?”
“Building a fire,” Mackenzie told him.
“What’s a fire?”
“It’s a … it’s a … say, don’t you know what a fire is?”
“Nope,” said Delbert.
“It’s a chemical action,” Mackenzie said. “It breaks up matter and releases energy in the form of heat.”
“What you building a fire with?” asked Delbert, blinking in the flare of the lighter.
“With branches from a tree.”
Delbert’s eyes widened and his thought was jittery.
“A tree?”
“Sure, a tree. Wood. It burns. It gives off heat. I need heat.”
“What tree?”
“Why—” And then Mackenzie stopped with sudden realization. His thumb relaxed and the flame went out.