“I know all that,” agreed Mackenzie, “but honest, chief, this place gets in my hair at times. Trees that shoot at you, moss that talks, vines that heave thunderbolts at you—and now the Encyclopedia.”
“The Encyclopedia is logical,” insisted Harper. “He’s a repository for knowledge. We have parallels on Earth. Men who study merely for the sake of learning, never expect to use the knowledge they amass. Derive a strange, smug satisfaction from being well informed. Combine that yearning for knowledge with a phenomenal ability to memorize and co-ordinate that knowledge and you have the Encyclopedia.”
“But there must be a purpose to him,” insisted Mackenzie. “There must be some reason at the back of this thirst for knowledge. Just soaking up facts doesn’t add up to anything unless you use those facts.”
Harper puffed stolidly at his pipe. “There may be a purpose in it, but a purpose so deep, so different, we could not recognize it. This planet is a vegetable world and a vegetable civilization. Back on earth the animals got the head start and plants never had a chance to learn or to evolve. But here it’s a different story. The plants were the ones that evolved, became masters of the situation.”
“If there is a purpose, we should know it,” Mackenzie declared, stubbornly. “We can’t afford to go blind on a thing like this. If the Encyclopedia has a game, we should know it. Is he acting on his own, a free lance? Or is he the representative of the world, a sort of prime minister, a state department? Or is he something that was left over by another civilization, a civilization that is gone? A kind of living archive of knowledge, still working at his old trade even if the need of it is gone?”
“You worry too much,” Harper told him.
“We have to worry, chief. We can’t afford to let anything get ahead of us. We have taken the attitude we’re superior to this vegetable civilization, if you can call it a civilization, that has developed here. It’s the logical attitude to take because nettles and dandelions and trees aren’t anything to be afraid of back home. But what holds on Earth, doesn’t hold here. We have to ask ourselves what a vegetable civilization would be like. What would it want? What would be its aspirations and how would it go about realizing them?”
“We’re getting off the subject,” said Harper, curtly. “You came in here to tell me about some new symphony.”
Mackenzie flipped his hands. “O.K., if that’s the way you feel about it.”
“Maybe we better figure on grabbing up this symphony soon as we can,” said Harper. “We haven’t had a really good one since the Red Sun. And if we mess around, the Groomies will beat us to it.”
“Maybe they have already,” said Mackenzie.
Harper puffed complacently at his pipe. “They haven’t done it yet. Grant keeps me posted on every move they make. He doesn’t miss a thing that happens at the Groombridge post.”
“Just the same,” declared Mackenzie, “we can’t go rushing off and tip our hand. The Groomie spy isn’t asleep, either.”
“Got any ideas?” asked the factor.
“We could take the ground car,” suggested Mackenzie. “It’s slower than the flier, but if we took the flier the Groomie would know there was something up. We use the car a dozen times a day. He’d think nothing of it.”
Harper considered. “The idea has merit, lad. Who would you take?”
“Let me have Brad Smith,” said Mackenzie. “We’ll get along all right, just the two of us. He’s an old-timer out here. Knows his way around.”
Harper nodded. “Better take Nellie, too.”
“Not on your life!” yelped Mackenzie. “What do you want to do? Get rid of her so you can make a cleaning?”
Harper wagged his grizzled head sadly. “Good idea, but it can’t be did. One cent off and she’s on your trail. Used to be a little graft a fellow could pick up here and there, but not any more. Not since they got these robot bookkeepers indoctrinated with truth and honesty.”
“I won’t take her,” Mackenzie declared, flatly. “So help me, I won’t. She’ll spout company law all the way there and back. With the crush she has on this Encyclopedia, she’ll probably want to drag him along, too. We’ll have trouble enough with rifle trees and electro vines and all the other crazy vegetables without having an educated cabbage and a tin-can lawyer underfoot.”
“You’ve got to take her,” insisted Harper, mildly. “New ruling. Got to have one of the things along on every deal you make to prove you did right by the natives. Come right down to it, the ruling probably is your own fault. If you hadn’t been so foxy on that Red Sun deal, the company never would have thought of it.”
“All I did was to save the company some money,” protested Mackenzie.
“You knew,” Harper reminded him crisply, “that the standard price for a symphony is two bushels of fertilizer. Why did you have to chisel half a bushel on Kadmar?”
“Cripes,” said Mackenzie, “Kadmar didn’t know the difference. He practically kissed me for a bushel and a half.”
“That’s not the point,” declared Harper. “The company’s got the idea we got to shoot square with everything we trade with, even if it’s nothing but a tree.”
“I know,” said Mackenzie, drily. “I’ve read the manual.”
“Just the same,” said Harper, “Nellie goes along.”
He studied Mackenzie over the bowl of his pipe.
“Just to be sure you don’t forget again,” he said.
The man, who back on Earth had been known as J. Edgerton Wade, crouched on the low cliff that dropped away into Melody Bowl. The dull red sun was slipping toward the purple horizon and soon, Wade knew, the trees would play their regular evening concert. He hoped that once again it would be the wondrous new symphony Alder had composed. Thinking about it, he shuddered in ecstasy—shuddered again when he thought about the setting sun. The evening chill would be coming soon.
Wade had no life blanket. His food, cached back in the tiny cave in the cliff, was nearly gone. His ship, smashed in his inexpert landing on the planet almost a year before, was a rusty hulk. J. Edgerton Wade was near the end of his rope—and knew it. Strangely, he didn’t care. In that year since he’d come here to the cliffs, he’d lived in a world of beauty. Evening after evening he had listened to the concerts. That was enough, he told himself. After a year of music such as that any man could afford to die.
He swept his eyes up and down the little valley that made up the Bowl, saw the trees set in orderly rows, almost as if someone had planted them. Some intelligence that may at one time, long ago, have squatted on this very cliff edge, even as he squatted now, and listened to the music.
But there was no evidence, he knew, to support such a hypothesis. No ruins of cities had been found upon this world. No evidence that any civilization, in the sense that Earth had built a civilization, ever had existed here. Nothing at all that suggested a civilized race had ever laid eyes upon this valley, had ever had a thing to do with the planning of the Bowl.
Nothing, that was, except the cryptic messages on the face of the cliff above the cave where he cached his food and slept. Scrawlings that bore no resemblance to any other writing Wade had ever seen. Perhaps, he speculated, they might have been made by other aliens who, like himself, had come to listen to the music until death had come for them.
Still crouching, Wade rocked slowly on the balls of his feet. Perhaps he should scrawl his own name there with the other scrawlings. Like one would sign a hotel register. A lonely name scratched upon the face of a lonely rock. A grave name, a brief memorial—and yet it would be the only tombstone he would ever have.
The music would be starting soon and then he would forget about the cave, about the food that was almost gone, about the rusting ship that never could carry him back to Earth again—even had he wanted to go back. And he didn’t—he couldn’t have gone back. The Bowl had trapped him, the music had spun a web about him. Without it, he knew, he co
uld not live. It had become a part of him. Take it from him and he would be a shell, for it was now a part of the life force that surged within his body, part of his brain and blood, a silvery thread of meaning that ran through his thoughts and purpose.
The trees stood in quiet, orderly ranks and beside each tree was a tiny mound, podia for the conductors, and beside each mound the dark mouths of burrows. The conductors, Wade knew, were in those burrows, resting for the concert. Being animals, the conductors had to get their rest.
But the trees never needed rest. They never slept. They never tired, these gray, drab music trees, the trees that sang to the empty sky, sang of forgotten days and days that had not come, of days when Sigma Draco had been a mighty sun and of the later days when it would be a cinder circling in space. And of other things an Earthman could never know, could only sense and strain toward and wish he knew. Things that stirred strange thoughts within one’s brain and choked one with alien emotion an Earthman was never meant to feel. Emotion and thought that one could not even recognize, yet emotion and thought that one yearned toward and knew never could be caught.
Technically, of course, it wasn’t the trees that sang. Wade knew that, but he did not think about it often. He would rather it had been the trees alone. He seldom thought of the music other than belonging to the trees, disregarded the little entities inside the trees that really made the music, using the trees for their sounding boards. Entities? That was all he knew. Insects, perhaps, a colony of insects to each tree—or maybe even nymphs or sprites or some of the other little folk that run on skipping feet through the pages of children’s fairy books. Although that was foolish, he told himself—there were no sprites.
Each insect, each sprite contributing its own small part to the orchestration, compliant to the thought-vibrations of the conductors. The conductors thought the music, held it in their brains and the things in the trees responded.
It did sound so pretty that way, Wade told himself. Thinking it out spoiled the beauty of it. Better to simply accept it and enjoy it without explanation.
Men came at times—not often—men of his own flesh and blood, men from the trading post somewhere on the planet. They came to record the music and then they went away. How anyone could go away once they had heard the music, Wade could not understand. Faintly he remembered there was a way one could immunize one’s self against the music’s spell, condition one’s self so he could leave after he had heard it, dull his senses to a point where it could not hold him. Wade shivered at the thought. That was sacrilege. But still no worse than recording the music so Earth orchestras might play it. For what Earth orchestra could play it as he heard it here, evening after evening? If Earth music lovers only could hear it as it was played here in this ancient bowl!
When the Earthmen came, Wade always hid. It would be just like them to try to take him back with them, away from the music of the trees.
Faintly the evening breeze brought the foreign sound to him, the sound that should not have been heard there in the Bowl—the clank of steel on stone.
Rising from his squatting place, he tried to locate the origin of the sound. It came again, from the far edge of the Bowl. He shielded his eyes with a hand against the setting sun, stared across the Bowl at the moving figures.
There were three of them and one, he saw at once, was an Earthman. The other two were strange creatures that looked remotely like monster bugs, chitinous armor glinting in the last rays of Sigma Draco. Their heads, he saw, resembled grinning skulls and they wore dark harnesses, apparently for the carrying of tools or weapons.
Groombridgians! But what would Groombridgians be doing with an Earthman? The two were deadly trade rivals, were not above waging intermittent warfare when their interests collided.
Something flashed in the sun—a gleaming tool that stabbed and probed, stabbed and lifted.
J. Edgerton Wade froze in horror.
Such a thing, he told himself, simply couldn’t happen!
The three across the Bowl were digging up a music tree!
The vine sneaked through the rustling sea of grass, cautious tendrils raised to keep tab on its prey, the queer, clanking thing that still rolled on unswervingly. Came on without stopping to smell out the ground ahead, without zigzagging to throw off possible attack.
Its action was puzzling; that was no way for anything to travel on this planet. For a moment a sense of doubt trilled along the length of vine, doubt of the wisdom of attacking anything that seemed so sure. But the doubt was short lived, driven out by the slavering anticipation that had sent the vicious vegetable from its lair among the grove of rifle trees. The vine trembled a little—slightly drunk with the vibration that pulsed through its tendrils.
The queer thing rumbled on and the vine tensed itself, every fiber alert for struggle. Just let it get so much as one slight grip upon the thing—
The prey came closer and for one sense-shattering moment it seemed it would be out of reach. Then it lurched slightly to one side as it struck a hump in the ground and the vine’s tip reached out and grasped, secured a hold, wound itself in a maddened grip and hauled, hauled with all the might of almost a quarter mile of trailing power.
Inside the ground car, Don Mackenzie felt the machine lurch sickeningly, kicked up the power and spun the tractor on its churning treads in an effort to break loose.
Back of him Bradford Smith uttered a startled whoop and dived for an energy gun that had broken from its rack and was skidding across the floor. Nellie, upset by the lurch, was flat on her back, jammed into a corner. The Encyclopedia, at the moment of shock, had whipped out its coiled-up taproot and tied up to a pipe. Now, like an anchored turtle, it swayed pendulum-wise across the floor.
Glass tinkled and metal screeched on metal as Nellie thrashed to regain her feet. The ground car reared and seemed to paw the air, slid about and plowed great furrows in the ground.
“It’s a vine!” shrieked Smith.
Mackenzie nodded, grim-lipped, fighting the wheel. As the car slewed around, he saw the arcing loops of the attacker, reaching from the grove of rifle trees. Something pinged against the vision plate, shattered into a puff of dust. The rifle trees were limbering up.
Mackenzie tramped on the power, swung the car in a wide circle, giving the vine some slack, then quartered and charged across the prairie while the vine twisted and flailed the air in looping madness. If only he could build up speed, slap into the stretched-out vine full tilt, Mackenzie was sure he could break its hold. In a straight pull, escape would have been hopeless, for the vine, once fastened on a thing, was no less than a steel cable of strength and determination.
Smith had managed to get a port open, was trying to shoot, the energy gun crackling weirdly. The car rocked from side to side, gaining speed while bulletlike seeds from the rifle trees pinged and whined against it.
Mackenzie braced himself and yelled at Smith. They must be nearing the end of their run. Any minute now would come the jolt as they rammed into the tension of the outstretched vine.
It came with terrifying suddenness, a rending thud. Instinctively, Mackenzie threw up his arms to protect himself, for one startled moment knew he was being hurled into the vision plate. A gigantic burst of flame flared in his head and filled the universe. Then he was floating through darkness that was cool and soft and he found himself thinking that everything would be all right, everything would be … everything—
But everything wasn’t all right. He knew that the moment he opened his eyes and stared up into the mass of tangled wreckage that hung above him. For many seconds he did not move, did not even wonder where he was. Then he stirred and a piece of steel bit into his leg. Carefully he slid his leg upward, clearing it of the steel. Cloth ripped with an angry snarl, but his leg came free.
“Lie still, you lug,” something said, almost as if it were a voice from inside of him.
Mackenzie chuckled. “So you
’re all right,” he said.
“Sure. I’m all right,” said Nicodemus. “But you got some bruises and a scratch or two and you’re liable to have a headache if you—”
The voice trailed off and stopped. Nicodemus was busy. At the moment, he was the medicine cabinet, fashioning from pure energy those things that a man needed when he had a bruise or two and was scratched up some and might have a headache later.
Mackenzie lay on his back and stared up at the mass of tangled wreckage.
“Wonder how we’ll get out of here,” he said.
The wreckage above him stirred. A gadget of some sort fell away from the twisted mass and gashed his cheek. He swore—unenthusiastically.
Someone was calling his name and he answered.
The wreckage was jerked about violently, literally torn apart. Long metal arms reached down, gripped him by the shoulders and yanked him out, none too gently.
“Thanks, Nellie,” he said.
“Shut up,” said Nellie, tartly.
His knees were a bit wabbly and he sat down, staring at the ground car. It didn’t look much like a ground car any more. It had smashed full tilt into a boulder and it was a mess.
To his left Smith also was sitting on the ground and he was chuckling.
“What’s the matter with you,” snapped Mackenzie.
“Jerked her right up by the roots,” exulted Smith. “So help me, right smack out of the ground. That’s one vine that’ll never bother anyone again.”
Mackenzie stared in amazement. The vine lay coiled on the ground, stretching back toward the grove, limp and dead. Its smaller tendrils still were entwined in the tangled wreckage of the car.
“It hung on,” gasped Mackenzie. “We didn’t break its hold!”
“Nope,” agreed Smith, “we didn’t break its hold, but we sure ruined it.”
“Lucky thing it wasn’t an electro,” said Mackenzie, “or it would have fried us.”
Smith nodded glumly. “As it is it’s loused us up enough. That car will never run again. And us a couple of thousand miles from home.”