The slack in the “new” cable caused the lift to drop several feet. He waited till the swing diminished sufficiently, then told Wright to start the winch again. The infinitesimal Timkens coating the thread-thin cable began rolling over the “new” limb, and the lift resumed its upward journey. Strong leaned back in his safety belt and lit a cigarette.
That was when he saw the dryad.
Or thought he did.
The trouble was, the dryad talk had been a big joke. The kind of a joke that springs up among men whose relationships with real women are confined to the brief intervals between assignments.
You didn’t believe it, you told yourself; you knew damned well that no matter what tree you climbed on whatever planet, no lovely lady elf was going to come skipping down some leaf-trellised path and throw herself into your yearning arms. And yet all the while you were telling yourself that such a thing was never going to happen, you kept wondering in the dark outlands of your mind where common sense had never dared set foot, whether some day it might happen.
All during the voyage in from Earth and all during the ride from the spaceport to the village, they had tossed the joke back and forth. There was—if you took credence in Suhre’s and Blueskies’ and Wright’s talk… and in his own talk too —at least one dryad living in the last giant tree on Omicron Ceti 18, and what a time they were going to have catching her!
All right, Strong thought. You saw her. Now let’s see you catch her.
It had been the merest glimpse—no more than a suggestion of curves and color and fairy-face—and as the image faded from his retina, his conviction faded too. By the time the lift pulled him up into the bower where he’d thought she’d been, he was positive she would not be there. She was not.
He noticed that his hands were trembling. With an effort he steadied them. It was ridiculous to become upset over a prankish play of sunlight on leaf and limb, he told himself.
Then, at 475 feet, he thought he saw her again.
He had just checked his elevation with Wright when he happened to glance toward the trunk. She appeared to be leaning against the bark, her long leg braced on the limb he had just come abreast of. Tenuous of figure, pixyish of features, golden of hair. She couldn’t have been over twenty feet away.
“Hold it,” he told Wright in a low voice. When the lift stopped rising, he unfastened his safety belt and stepped out upon the limb. The dryad did not move.
He walked toward her slowly. Still she did not move. He rubbed his eyes to clear them, half-hoping she would not. She went on standing where she was, back propped against the trunk, long legs braced on the limb; immobile, statuesque. She wore a short tunic woven of leaves, held in place by a strap looped over her shoulder; delicate sandals, also woven of leaves, interlaced halfway to her calves. He began to think she was real. Then, without warning, she twinkled out of sight.
There was no other phrase for it. She did not walk away or run away or fly away. In the strict sense of the word, she did not even disappear. She was simply there one second and not there the next second.
Strong stood still. The exertion he had expended to gain the limb and walk along it had been negligible, and yet he was sweating. He could feel sweat on his cheeks and forehead and neck; he could feel it on his chest and back, and he could feel the sweated dampness of his tree-shirt.
He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his face. He took one step backward. Another. The dryad did not re-materialize. There was a cluster of leaves where she had been, a patch of sunlight.
Wright’s voice sounded in his eareceiver: “Everything all right?”
Strong hesitated a moment. “Everything’s fine,” he said presently. “Just doing a little reconnaissance.”
“How’s she look?”
“She—” He realized just in time that Wright was referring to the tree. He wiped his face again, wadded up the handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket. “She’s big,” he said, when he could trust his voice. “Real big.”
“We’ll take her all right. We’ve had big ones before.”
“Not this big we haven’t.”
“We’ll take her anyway.”
“I’ll take her,” Strong said.
Wright laughed. “Sure you will. But we’ll be here to help you, just in case… Ready to ‘climb’ again?”
“In a minute.”
Strong hurried back to the lift. “Let her go,” he said.
He had to cable-cast again at around 500 feet, and again at around 590. At about 650 the foliage thinned out temporarily and he was able to make a cast of better than one hundred and fifty feet. He sat back to enjoy the ride.
In the neighborhood of 700 feet, he dropped off his tree-tent, blankets and heating unit on a wide limb, and tied them down. The sleeping was always better in the big branches. As his height increased, he caught occasional glimpses of the village. Foliage below, but he could see the outermost ones, and beyond them the chemically enriched fields that stretched away to the horizon. The fields were at low ebb now—gold-stubbled with the tiny shoots of recently sown wheat, an endemic variety unequalled elsewhere in the galaxy. But by mid-summer the tide would be full and the colonists would reap another of the fabulous harvests that were turning them into first-generation millionaires.
He could see the specks of housewives puttering in backyards, and gyro-cars crawling like beetles through the streets. He could see children the apparent size of tad-poles swimming in one of the artificial lakes that were a feature of each block. All that was missing from the scene was a painter painting a house or a roofer repairing a roof. And for a good reason: these houses never ran down.
Or hadn’t, up till now.
The wood and the carpentry that had gone into their construction was without parallel. Strong had been inside only one building—the native church that the colonists had converted into a hotel—but the owner, who was also mayor of the village, had assured him that the hotel, basically, was no more than a larger and more ornate counterpart of the other buildings. Strong had never seen such flawless woodwork before, such perfect paneling. Everything was in perfect balance, unified to a degree where it was impossible to tell where foundation and underpinning left off and floor and wall began.
Walls blended into windows and windows blended into walls. Stairways didn’t simply descend: they rippled down like wood-grained rapids. As for artificial lighting, it emanated from the very wood itself.
The Advance Team, in classifying the natives as primitive, had based its conclusion largely—and perhaps stupidly, Strong thought—on the fact that they had not learned how to use metals till late in their ethnological tenure. But, the eagerness of the colonists to preserve the one remaining village (which the Department of Galactic Lands had permitted) indicated that the miracles the natives had been able to perform with wood more than compensated for the miracles they had been unable to perform with iron and bronze.
He made three more cable-casts before abandoning the lift, then, standing on the limb beneath the one over which he had made the final cast, he buckled on his climber’s belt and attached the articles he would need to its snap-locks. Finally he transferred the end of the limbline from the base-bar to the snap-lock nearest his right hip.