None of Blade's later encounters with the killer plants taught him quite as much as the first one. On the other hand, none of them were nearly as dangerous.
The more he learned about the plants, the more Blade was certain that they were a unique order of living creatures, with some qualities of both plants and animals. They had trunks and branches and leaves, but no bark. They had leaf tissue and wood, but also fibers of something very like muscle and vessels filled with the yellowish acid that seemed more like blood than sap. They had none of the senses except touch, and that only in the creepers and the pods, but somewhere they had the vocal organs to produce those appalling screams. Only the mature plants screamed, and Blade never got close enough to one to find out how the plant did it. He got close enough to younger specimens to learn a good many other things.
The plants seemed to go through three stages. Freshly sprouted, they were no more than a foot high, with creepers spreading out a yard or so to either side and kill-pods the size of walnuts. In this stage they seemed to get most of their food by photosynthesis and ate nothing larger than insects. They looked harmless, even cute; something to decorate a fashionable greenhouse or the lobby of an expensive hotel.
In their second stage, the plants were still not dangerous to a full-grown human being, but anything smaller was safer staying away from them. The main stalks grew six feet high and as thick as Blade's thigh. The creepers spread out forty or fifty feet in all directions, and the branches, which resembled giant tendrils, developed killpods the size of watermelons. Eventually these tendril-like branches reached upward and outward, growing the large, golden-orange leaves. At this stage also the plant developed a whole new set of pods and creepers to trap and eat birds. The creepers on the ground could be so nearly invisible that Blade walked into them several times and always worked up a sweat getting clear.
In the third stage, the killer plants were perfectly capable of dealing with a man. They still had to get most of their nourishment like normal plants, because Blade couldn't imagine that there were enough large animals in this jungle stupid enough to wander into the creepers. Nonetheless, the killer plants were superbly equipped to feed on any animal available. The creepers could restrain a horse and the pods could very nearly swallow one. If one pod couldn't engulf the whole prey, a second or even a third would descend and go to work.
The mature plants came in two forms. There were those that formed the solid groves like the one Blade had first entered. Some of these groves were a mile or more on a side. Then there were the solitary «rogue» plants-not as spectacular as those in the groves but a good deal more dangerous. They sometimes sent their creepers out as much as a hundred yards. Their climbing branches reached upward and outward for nearly as far, carrying the huge pods with them. One of the rogues could make a patch of jungle the size of a football field deadly, judging from the number of bones Blade saw. Nothing that got within reach of the creepers of a mature plant seemed to get out again, except for the bone-eating green beetles. They crawled around among the creepers as if they were ordinary grass.
Other than the plants, Blade found nothing really dangerous in the jungle as he tramped west. Or at least he found nothing really dangerous to a large, strong man in top physical condition, continuously alert, and ready to eat or drink almost anything that would keep him alive.
Blade suspected that the average backpacker from Home Dimension might have lasted no more than two or three days.
Three times Blade saw the animals that left the long-toed clawed footprints. They were catlike, with long tails, smooth grayish-blue coats, enormous tufted ears, and pale green eyes. The largest of them couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds, but half that weight seemed to be claws and teeth and the rest muscle and sinew. They still weren't ready to attack something the size of a man unless provoked, and Blade was careful to avoid provoking them.
The plants did make Blade's progress much slower than it would have been without them. He didn't dare travel by night, or even on cloudy days when there wasn't enough sunlight to reveal lurking creepers. He also had to zigzag back and forth through the jungle among the groves and the rogues. On some days he covered ten or twelve miles on the ground to make a mile toward the west.
Meanwhile his beard and hair grew, his skin turned black with dirt and plant sap, he collected a dozen insect bites and thorn pricks each day, and he lost enough weight so that his ribs began to show. By the time he saw the plants begin to thin out ahead, he knew he must look more like something escaped from the monkey house at the zoo than a human being. However, he didn't plan to start worrying about how he might look to the people of this Dimension until he was safely out of reach of the killer plants.
Chapter 4
On the morning of his twelfth day in the Dimension of the killer plants, Richard Blade sat on the bank of a river washing his feet.
Yesterday he'd seen what he hoped would be the last of the plants, and also the first signs of intelligent life in this Dimension. One sign was a trail beaten through the last of the jungle by hooves and bare feet. Another sign was a tumbled heap of moss-covered logs, once a fair-sized house. Blade was relieved. By temperament he was a rather solitary man, but there was a such a thing as being too solitary.
Besides, a journey to Dimension X spent wrestling carnivorous plants and climbing hills in his birthday suit would produce nothing likely to increase enthusiasm and support for Project Dimension X. Blade agreed with Lord Leighton that politicians tended to be shortsighted about the need for basic research. He also agreed with the politicians that scientists like Lord Leighton often expected the ultimate value of their projects to be taken on faith.
Blade stood up, stretched, and waded farther out into the river. It was too beautiful a day for worrying about Lord Leighton's running battle with the politicians. The sky was clear, with only a few puffs of cloud, and the sun was almost hot. The river was washing away the filth of his days in the jungle, and the hills on both banks of the river were a healthy green, with none of the man-eating plants anywhere in sight.
Blade had to wade nearly out to the middle of the river before it reached his waist. He dove and rose several times, splashing happily like a porpoise, then started scrubbing off the jungle filth with handfuls of sand from the bottom of the river. By the time he'd scrubbed off all the filth, he felt as if he'd also taken off the top layer of skin, but he didn't care.
From a hilltop on the bank behind him he'd seen that the river flowed from south to north. To the north it joined a larger river about a day's march farther on. To the south Blade had seen what looked very much like the ruins of a bridge and a town or at least some collection of structures far too regular to be natural. Whichever way he went, he'd have plenty of water, and there were probably fish in the river.
He decided to take another look, now that it was full daylight. He climbed out of the water, shook himself like a dog, picked up his club, and walked toward the hill. He'd covered about half the distance when three of the gray cats seemed to spring out of the ground almost at his feet. A single glance told Blade they weren't wild. Each wore a leather collar decorated with brass and soft leather protectors on their legs.