Delbert shrieked at him in sudden terror and anger. “It’s my tree! You’re building a fire with my tree!”
Mackenzie sat in silence.
“When you burn my tree, it’s gone,” yelled Delbert. “Isn’t that right? When you burn my tree, it’s gone?”
Mackenzie nodded.
“But why do you do it?” shrilled Delbert.
“I need heat,” said Mackenzie, doggedly. “If I don’t have heat, my friend will die. It’s the only way I can get heat.”
“But my tree!”
Mackenzie shrugged. “I need a fire, see? And I’m getting it any way I can.”
He flipped his thumb again and the lighter flared.
“But I never did anything to you,” Delbert howled, rocking on the metal door sill. “I’m your friend, I am. I never did a thing to hurt you.”
“No?” asked Mackenzie.
“No,” yelled Delbert.
“What about that scheme of yours?” asked Mackenzie. “Trying to trick me into taking trees to Earth?”
“That wasn’t my idea,” yipped Delbert. “It wasn’t any of the trees’ ideas. The Encyclopedia thought it up.”
A bulky form loomed outside the door. “Someone talking about me?” it asked.
The Encyclopedia was back again.
Arrogantly, he shouldered Delbert aside, stepped into the tractor.
“I saw Wade,” he said.
Mackenzie glared at him. “So you figured it would be safe to come.”
“Certainly,” said the Encyclopedia. “Your formula of force counts for nothing now. You have no means to enforce it.”
Mackenzie’s hand shot out and grasped the Encyclopedia with a vicious grip, hurled him into the interior of the tractor.
“Just try to get out this door,” he snarled. “You’ll soon find out if the formula of force amounts to anything.”
The Encyclopedia picked himself up, shook himself like a ruffled hen. But his thought was cool and calm.
“I can’t see what this avails you.”
“It gives us soup,” Mackenzie snapped.
He sized the Encyclopedia up. “Good vegetable soup. Something like cabbage. Never cared much for cabbage soup, myself, but—”
“Soup?”
“Yeah, soup. Stuff to eat. Food.”
“Food!” The Encyclopedia’s thought held a tremor of anxiety. “You would use me as food.”
“Why not?” Mackenzie asked him. “You’re nothing but a vegetable. An intelligent vegetable, granted, but still a vegetable.”
He felt the Encyclopedia’s groping thought-fingers prying into his mind.
“Go ahead,” he told him, “but you won’t like what you find.”
The Encyclopedia’s thoughts almost gasped. “You withheld this from me!” he charged.
“We withheld nothing from you,” Mackenzie declared. “We never had occasion to think of it … to remember to what use Men at one time put plants, to what use we still put plants in certain cases. The only reason we don’t use them so extensively now is that we have advanced beyond the need of them. Let that need exist again and—”
“You ate us,” strummed the Encyclopedia. “You used us to build your shelters! You destroyed us to create heat for your selfish purposes!”
“Pipe down,” Mackenzie told him. “It’s the way we did it that gets you. The idea that we thought we had a right to. That we went out and took, without even asking, never wondering what the plant might think about it. That hurts your racial dignity.”
He stopped, then moved closer to the doorway. From the Bowl below came the first strains of the music. The tuning up, the preliminary to the concert, was over.
“O.K.,” Mackenzie said, “I’ll hurt it some more. Even you are nothing but a plant to me. Just because you’ve learned some civilized tricks doesn’t make you my equal. It never did. We humans can’t slur off the experiences of the past so easily. It would take thousands of years of association with things like you before we even began to regard you as anything other than a plant, a thing that we used in the past and might use again.”
“Still cabbage soup,” said the Encyclopedia.
“Still cabbage soup,” Mackenzie told him.
The music stopped. Stopped dead still, in the middle of a note.
“See,” said Mackenzie, “even the music fails you.”
Silence rolled at them in engulfing waves and through the stillness came another sound, the clop, clop of heavy, plodding feet.
“Nellie!” yelled Mackenzie.
A bulky shadow loomed in the darkness.
“Yeah, chief, it’s me,” said Nellie. “I brung you something.”
She dumped Wade across the doorway.
Wade rolled over and groaned. There were skittering, flapping sounds as two fluttering shapes detached themselves from Wade’s shoulders.
“Nellie,” said Mackenzie, harshly, “there was no need to beat him up. You should have brought him back just as he was and let me take care of him.”
“Gee, boss,” protested Nellie. “I didn’t beat him up. He was like that when I found him.”
Nicodemus was clawing his way to Mackenzie’s shoulder, while Smith’s life blanket scuttled for the corner where his master lay.
“It was us, boss,” piped Nicodemus. “We laid him out.”
“You laid him out?”
“Sure, there was two of us and only one of him. We fed him poison.”
Nicodemus settled into place on Mackenzie’s shoulders.
“I didn’t like him,” he declared. “He wasn’t nothing like you, boss. I didn’t want to change like him. I wanted to stay like you.”
“This poison?” asked Mackenzie. “Nothing fatal, I hope.”
“Sure not, pal,” Nicodemus told him. “We only made him sick. He didn’t know what was happening until it was too late to do anything about it. We bargained with him, we did. We told him we’d quit feeding it to him if he took us back. He was on his way here, too, but he’d never have made it if it hadn’t been for Nellie.”
“Chief,” pleaded Nellie, “when he gets so he knows what it’s all about, won’t you let me have him for about five minutes?”
“No,” said Mackenzie.
“He strung me up,” wailed Nellie. “He hid in the cliff and lassoed me and left me hanging there. It took me hours to get loose. Honest, I wouldn’t hurt him much. I’d just kick him around a little, gentle-like.”
From the cliff top came the rustling of grass as if hundreds of little feet were advancing upon them.
“We got visitors,” said Nicodemus.
The visitors, Mackenzie saw, were the conductors, dozens of little gnomelike figures that moved up and squatted on their haunches, faintly luminous eyes blinking at them.
One of them shambled forward. As he came closer, Mackenzie saw that it was Alder.
“Well?” Mackenzie demanded.
“We came to tell you the deal is off,” Alder squeaked. “Delbert came and told us.”
“Told you what?”
“About what you do to trees.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that.”
“But you made the deal,” Mackenzie told him. “You can’t back out now. Why, Earth is waiting breathless—”
“Don’t try to kid me,” snapped Alder. “You don’t want us any more than we want you. It was a dirty trick to start with, but it wasn’t any of our doing. The Encyclopedia talked us into it. He told us we had a duty. A duty to our race. To act as missionaries to the inferior races of the Galaxy.
“We didn’t take to it at first. Music, you see, is our life. We have been creating music for so long that our origin is lost in the dim antiquity of a planet that long ago has passed its zenith of existence. We will be creating music in that far day when the planet falls apart beneath our feet. You live by a code of accomplishment by action. We live by a code of accomplishment by music. Kadmar’s Red Sun symphony was a greater triumph for us than the discovery of a new planetary system is for you. It pleased us when you liked our music. It will please us if you still like our music, even after what has happened. But we will not allow you to take any of us to Earth.”