How do you know I couldn’t be?
Because—Because—
Because I don’t think you’re real?
You don’t, do you? she said.
I don’t know what to think, he said. Sometimes I think you are, some times I think you aren’t.
I’m as real as you are, she said. Though in a different way.
He reached up abruptly, and touched her face. Her skin was soft and cold. As cold as moonlight, as soft as a flower. It wavered before his eyes; her whole body wavered. He sat up, turned towards her. She was light and shadow, leaf and flower; the scent of summer, the breath of night. He heard her voice. It was so faint he could hardly make out her words: You shouldn’t have done that. You should have accepted me for what I was. Now you’ve spoiled it. Now we must spend our last night together, alone.
So you weren’t real after all, he said. You were never real. No answer.
But if you weren’t real, I must have imagined you, he said. And if I imagined you, how could you tell me things I didn’t know?
No answer.
He said: You make what I’m doing seem like a crime. But it isn’t a crime. When a tree becomes a menace to a community, it should be removed.
No answer.
Just the same, I’d give anything if it didn’t have to be this way, he said.
Silence.
Anything at all.
The space beside him remained empty. He turned, finally, and crawled into his tent and drew his campfire in after him. His tiredness had turned him numb. He fumbled with his blankets with numb fingers, wrapped them around his numb body. He drew up his numb knees and hugged them with his numb arms.
“Anything at all,” he murmured. “Anything at all…”
The Fourth Day
Sunlight seeping through the tent-wall awoke him. He kicked free of his blankets and crawled out into the morning. He saw no scarlet winging of hahaha birds; he heard no morning birdsong. The tree was silent in the sunlight. Empty. Dead.
No, not quite dead. A cluster of leaves and flowers grew green and white and lovely by the entrance of the tent. He could not beat to look at them.
He stood up on the stub and breathed deeply of the morning air. It was a gentle morning. Mist was rising from the Great Wheat Sea and a scattering of cirrus clouds hung in the bright blue sky like new-washed laundry. He walked to the end of the stub and looked down. Wright was oiling the winch. Suhre was cutting up the last fifty-footer. Blueskies was nowhere in sight.
“Why didn’t you wake me, Mr. Wright?”
Wright looked up, located his face. “Thought you could stand a few extra winks, Mr. Strong.”
“You thought correctly… Where’s the Amerind?”
“The buffalo caught up to him again. He’s drowning them at the hotel bar.”
A two-wheeled gyro-car pulled into the square and a plump man carrying a basket got out. The mayor, Strong thought. Breakfast. He waved, and the mayor waved back.
The contents of the basket proved to be ham and eggs and coffee. Strong ate hurriedly, then collapsed his tent, folded it, and sent it down on the lift along with his blankets and campfire. He got ready for the first cut. It would be considerably less than one hundred feet because the stub was centered on the three hundred foot mark. It came off perfectly, and he “burned” down in his saddle for the second. This one would have to go at least one hundred and twenty feet in order to leave the maximum of two hundred for the base-cut. He estimated the distance carefully.
After notching the section on the side Wright wanted the fall, he worked his way around toward the opposite side of the trunk, playing out his saddle-rope as he went. The bark-prominences and the fissures made the operation relatively simple, and he even paused now and then to look down into the square. The square was closer now than it had been for days, and it and the houses and the streets looked strange from his new perspective, as did the hordes of colonists watching from beyond the vacated area.
Wright informed him when he was directly opposite the center of the notch, and he drove a tree-peg. It took but a moment to transfer his saddle from the overhead stub-crotch to the peg-slot. He leaned back in the seat, braced his feet against one of the bark-prominences, and began the cut.
He began it gingerly. He was working with thousands of tons and the least miscalculation could bring those thousands of tons down upon him. The trouble was, he had to cut above the tree-peg, and to do so he had to hold the cutter at arm’s length above his head, at the same time keeping the line of the beam at right angles to the trunk.
It was a tricky operation and demanded good eyesight and excellent judgment. Ordinarily Strong possessed both, but today he was tired. He didn’t have any idea quite how tired till he heard Wright shout.
It was the bark-prominences that had thrown him off. He realized that instantly. Instead of using the whole of the visible trunk in estimating his beam-angle, he had used only a limited area and the prominences in that area weren’t true. However, the realization did him no good: the one hundred and twenty foot section was already toppling towards him, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
It was like clinging to the face of a cliff and seeing the entire top section start falling outward in a slow but inevitable arc that would eventually enclose him between earthen jaws. The jaws were wood in this case, but the analogy was basically accurate: the fate of a gnat squeezed between two handfuls of earth differs but little from the fate of a gnat squeezed between two sticks.
He felt nothing; terror had not yet had time to take root. He watched wonderingly while the falling section blotted out the sun and turned the fissures between the bark-prominences into dark caves. He listened wonderingly to a voice that he was sure was emanating from his own brain, but which could not be emanating from his own brain because it was too sweet and poignant to have his mind as a source-place.
Into the fissure. Hurry!
He could not see her; he wasn’t even sure it was her voice. But his body responded, squeezing itself into the nearest fissure, squirming back as far as it could go. Another second and the effort would have been wasted, for the moment his shoulder touched the backwall of the fissure, the upended butt of the section came thundering down tearing his tree-peg out by the steel roots; roaring, crashing, splintering, finally passing from sight.
The fissure filled with sunlight. Except for himself, it was empty.
Presently he heard the heavy thud as the section struck the ground. Another, more prolonged, thud followed, and he knew that it had landed head-on and then fallen lengthwise into the square. He waited almost hopefully for the sounds of splintering wood and breaking glass and the other sundry sounds houses make when a heavy object drops upon them, but he heard nothing.
The fissure had no floor. He was holding himself in position by pressing his knees against one wall while pressing his back against the other. Now he inched his way to the mouth and peered down into the square.
The section had landed on an angle, plowing a huge furrow in the earth, gouging out ancient burial artifacts and bits of human bones. Afterwards it had toppled back away from the nearer houses. Wright and Suhre were running up and down its length, looking for his mangled body. He heard himself laughing. He knew it was himself; not because he recognized his voice, but because there was no one else in the fissure. He laughed till his chest hurt and he could barely breathe, till there was no more hysteria left in him. Then, when his breath came back, he tongued on his transmitter and said: “Are you looking for me, Mr. Wright?”