“Follow me!” Ulysses shouted, and walked swiftly into the cavern. It was dark at first, but after the second turn in a tunnel wide enough for two men abreast, he came to the first of the internal chambers. This was lit with hundreds of clusters of some vegetable growths that gave a cold light. The light shone on the bloody and dismembered pieces of females, children and old men. There were also a few bodies the heads of which had been smashed by the stone axes or clubs of the Neshgai.
After this chamber, they entered a large one consisting of a twenty-foot-wide street with four levels of open chambers on each side. Apparently, the chambers were occupied by families. Light was provided by the same vegetable growth, which had spread out vine fashion everywhere. There were more dead and mangled females and children on the street, and some frightened faces peering out of the open doorways of the chambers above.
So far, the evidence indicated that the entire adult male population had swarmed out to attack the invaders.
Ulysses made a quick decision. He split his forces into half and left one party at the first turn in the wall. They would hold this if the males tried to reenter while a messenger came after the other half. All the rockets except three were left with the holding party.
If it had not been for the directions of the Dhulhulikh prisoners, they would have been lost. Corridor after corridor, many of them as wide and high as the one they were on, branched out. Looking down these, Ulysses could see other corridors. The trunk—and the branches radiating from it—was honeycombed. There was room for far more than the thirty-five thousand the prisoners had estimated as the population.
They passed chambers where animals were penned up, and others where strange plants grew in the cold light of the vegetable lamps. They saw many more tiny faces of women and children looking from the open doorways. Infrequently, Ulysses halted the party and sent a scout up to inspect the rooms above them. He did not want to be ambushed. Each time, the scout reported that the majority of the rooms were empty.
The party pushed on, and then they came to the section which Ulysses had hoped they would find. There were about forty mangled corpses of Dhulhulikh males here. They had fought bravely but futilely against the giants. Two of these lay dead, their once-gray skins purple. The little archers had sent their arrows under the faceplates into the skin; they must have stood at the feet of the elephantine men and fired upward just before the axes smashed their heads in.
They had been defending a huge chamber which had to be the main center of communication for the Dhulhulikh. Around the walls, on three levels, were at least a hundred huge diaphragms. And there were about fifty more corpses and three more dead Neshgai. The chamber floor was inches deep in blood.
Graushpaz, seeing Ulysses, lifted his trunk and snorted shrilly. He said, “This has been too easy. I do not think I have redeemed myself.”
“This is not over yet by a long way,” Ulysses said. He stationed guards outside the entrance to the great chamber, and then he approached one of the diaphragms. He reached out and tapped it three times quickly, and the diaphragm vibrated and boomed out three times.
Ulysses had availed himself of the knowledge forced from the bat-men prisoners. Though his time had been so limited while building his ships, he had given up hours of sleep to become proficient in the pulse-code.
Now he tapped on the diaphragm, “This is the stone god in the city of the Dhulhulikh.”
He had been told that The Tree was an entity and the Dhulhulikh were its servants. And the Book of Tiznak had told him much the same. But he still could not believe.
“The last of the humans!” the diaphragm vibrated in answer.
Could there be some vast vegetable brain somewhere in this colossal trunk? Or perhaps away off in another trunk, in the deep heart of The Tree itself? Or was there a little pygmy winged man squatting before another diaphragm in a buried chamber? A little man determined to maintain the myth of the thinking Tree?
“Who are you?” Ulysses tapped out.
There was a pause. He looked around. The Neshgai standing in the middle of the dome-shaped chamber were grotesque shadowy figures, their skins purple-bluish in the light. Awina was, as usual, beside him. The white parts of her fur looked icy bluish, and her eyes were so dark they seemed empty holes. The Wagarondit and Alkunquib looked like half-cat, half-burglar surrealist statues. The abacus machines with their squares of upright strings and beads were pale subterranean robots. The bat-men prisoners were hunched together in one corner, their brown skins now black in the light and their faces reflecting the knowledge of their sure death.
Ulysses lifted his hand to signal the men carrying the bombs to come to him. At that moment, the diaphragm vibrated.
“I am Wurutana!”
“The Tree?” Ulysses tapped back.
“The Tree!”
The code for the exclamation mark came through seemingly louder. So the vegetable entity, if it was one, could have emotion, in this case, pride. And why not? It was not possible for sentient life to exist without emotion. Emotion was as natural and as vital for sapiency as intelligence. Those science-fiction stories with unemotional, extraterrestrial sapients were based on an unrealistic premise. A life form needed emotion to survive as much as it needed a thinking mind. No living creature could thrive, or even exist, on logic alone. Not unless it was a protein or vegetable computer and, therefore, not self-conscious.
“I learned about you many thousands of years ago,” the diaphragm pulsed.
He wondered how this entity could have any sense of time. Did it sense each year by some subtle internal change responding to the change of seasons? Or did it have some internal clock placed in it by the geneticists who had designed it?
“Those who must die told me about you.”
Those who must die. Thus it designated the little forms of mobile life that communicated with it.
“Those who must die can nevertheless kill” Ulysses tapped.
He got back the answer he expected.
“They cannot kill me! I am immortal! And invincible!”
“If that is so,” Ulysses tapped, “why do you fear me?”
There was another moment of silence. He hoped that the vegetable brain was quivering with shock. It gave him a perverse pleasure to upset the creature, though there was no other profit in it for him.
Finally, the diaphragm boomed, “I do not fear you, one who must die!”
“Then why did you try to have me captured? What had I done to you to warrant your hostility?”
“I wanted to talk to you. You were a strange thing, an anachronism, a species that has been extinct for twenty million years.”
It was Ulysses’ turn to be shocked. So the time was twenty, not ten, million years. Twenty million years!
He told himself that there was no reason to be startled. Twenty million years meant no more than ten.
“How do you know that?” he tapped.
“I was told so by my creators. They put an enormous amount of data into my memory cells.”
“Were your creators human?”
The diaphragm did not move for several seconds and then, “Yes.”
So this was why, despite its denial, it feared him. Men had created it, and so a man could destroy it. That must be its logic. What it probably did not know was that this man was an ignorant savage in comparison with the creators of The Tree. Still, he was not ineffectual. If he could get the proper metals, he could eventually make an atom bomb. Even The Tree could not stand up to a dozen fission devices.
But what if, as seemed likely, Earth had been stripped of all its metals? Twenty million years of sapient life must have taken everything except traces or deposits left undisturbed because of reasons of economy. There was no iron or copper anywhere. He was certain of that. Man and his successors had long ago plucked all of those out of the earth and squandered them.
However, The Tree must have a center which could be killed, after which the body must die. And it seemed probable that The Tree
would have located the Dhulhulikh here to protect that brain. If the brain were in this trunk, then it could be gotten to. It would take an enormous amount of blasting-powder and of stone chipping tools, and many many people to do it, but it could be done. And The Tree must know this.
It was also possible that The Tree had placed the Dhulhulikh here as a decoy. The brain could be in a trunk a hundred miles from here. Or in the trunk next door.
He was startled out of his reverie by the booming of the diaphragm.
“There is no reason for us to be enemies! You can live on me with great comfort and security. I can guarantee that none of the sentients who live on me will harm you. Of course, the nonsentients are not under my control any more than fleas on the sentients. But there is no such thing as one hundred percent security for those who must die. Yet the life I can offer them is far better than the life they would have without me.”
“That may be true,” Ulysses replied. “But the peoples who choose to live on you also choose a savage and ignorant and very restricted life. They can know nothing of science or sophisticated art. They can know nothing of progress.”
“Progress? What has that ever meant to any sentient life except eventual overpopulation, overkill and the poisoning of earth, air and water? Science has, in the end, meant the abuse of science, the suicide of the race and the near-death of the entire planet before the race killed itself off. This has happened a dozen times at the very least. Why do you think that human beings finally concentrated on biology at the expense of other physical sciences? Why do you think that the tree-cities were originated? Mankind realized that he had to become one with Nature. And he did. For a while. Then his arrogance, or stupidity, or greed, or whatever you call it, got the better of him again. But he was wiped out by the Andromedans, because the Andromedans thought that humanity was a very serious menace to them.
“So other sentients inherited the Earth, the sentients that mankind had created from the lesser beings in his domain. And these began to repeat mankind’s mistakes and crimes. Only they were limited in their ability to do harm because mankind had exhausted the stock of most of Earth’s minerals.
“I am the only thing that stands between the sentients, those who must die and who are also, as you truthfully said, those who must kill, and the death of life on this planet. I am The Tree, Wurutana. Not the Destroyer, as the Neshgai and Wufea call me, but the Preserver. Without me there would be no life. I keep the sentients in their place, and in so doing I benefit them and benefit all the rest of life, too.
“That is why the Neshgai and you, unless you give in, must die. You would destroy the Earth again if you could. You would not do so intentionally, of course. But you would do it.”
The humans had lived in their tree-cities, which were also their reference libraries and their computers. The great vegetables contained cells for storing information and for using this information as the residents required. But then, whether by design or the accident of evolution, the computing vegetable had become a self-conscious intelligent entity. From servant, it had become master. From vegetable, a god.
Ulysses could not deny that most of what it said was true. But he did not believe that it was inevitable that every form of sentient life would become a destroyer of life. Intelligence had to be something besides just a vehicle for advancing the interests of greed.
He tapped, “Call off your servants, the Dhulhulikh, and we will discuss our aims. Perhaps we can arrive at a peaceful understanding. We can then live side by side. There is no reason for us to war against each other.”
“Men have always been destroyers!”
Ulysses spoke to Wulka. “Put those bombs by this diaphragm. We’ll start work here.”
The bombs were stacked against the big disk and abacuses were piled against them. Several fuses were lit, and the entire party retreated from the great room to the next. When the explosion had ceased reverberating through the room, and the smoke had cleared away, they went back into the disk room. The diaphragm was gone. In the center of the area where it had stood was a round whitish fiber about three inches across. This had to be the nerve cable.
“Start digging around it,” Ulysses said. “Let’s see if it leads downward,”
He had taken the precaution of stationing some men with rockets outside the doorway. Since there had been no reaction to the blasting of the diaphragm, it seemed likely that this chamber did not have the defenses that the chambers of the Wuggrud had. Perhaps The Tree had not thought it necessary to grow them here, where there was such a strong force of Dhulhulikh.
He was wrong.
The moment that the chipping at the medium-hard wood around the nerve fiber began, reaction came. Perhaps The Tree had been stunned by the blast and had only just recovered. Perhaps… who knew what had caused the delay? Whatever it was, The Tree was fully recovered. The spray of water from a thousand hitherto unseen holes in the walls was enough to knock even the elephantine Neshgai off their feet. Ulysses felt as if a number of clubs swung by giants had hit him. He was hurled sideways and then rolled over and over to fetch up against a pile of squirming kicking bodies at the doorway.
Or at what had been the doorway. There was a thick semi-transparent membrane over it now. It had dropped down from what had been a solid wall.
The water was up to their knees within a minute. They had managed to extricate themselves and to stand up, though it was a fight to maintain their upright positions. Fortunately, the water rapidly rising around them kept sprays from striking their legs. Nevertheless, standing up, or down on the floor, they would soon drown.
At that moment, the membrane bulged and then fell inward over them. The men on the other side had blown it from the doorway with bombs.
Ulysses pushed aside the heavy glassy-feeling skin, rose from the water, now up to his waist, and then was carried forward as it rushed out through the doorway. He was caught in another tangle of bodies, but the men on the other side pulled them out one by one and helped them to their feet.
Awina, looking like a sick wet cat, got his hand and yelled at him above the roar of the spraying water. “The other exit’s closed! By something like a honeycomb!”
He walked toward the other doorway, which was filled up with a mass of pale-yellow, heavily flowing stuff inside which was a whitish, semi-rigid, somewhat flexible stuff in the form of open boxes joined together.
Before he reached the other end of the room, he was smashed into by several sprays from different directions. He was hurled forward, knocked back, turned around, and then battered off his feet. He rolled over and over, banged into Awina’s wet and soft body, was carried along, struck the quilted back of Graushpaz, and then was buried under four or five Wufea.
The floor trembled under him. Even with the yells, and the thrashings around in the water already up to their knees, and the roar of escaping water from the tiny apertures in the walls, he could feel the floor shake.
And then the water was running out of the chamber, and he was crawling over a slippery mess of fragmented honeycomb into the corridor.
The respite was brief. Water was hosing out of the walls of the corridor and out of the walls of the open cubicles of the levels along the corridor. Shrieking, winged women and children were hurled from their rooms into the corridor and then washed away. Some fell on the invaders, knocking them down.
The rocket men lost their bazookas and missiles and the bombmen let loose of their bombs. Nobody kept hold of their weapons. They needed their hands to scramble, to shove away other bodies, to protect themselves against the sprays.
Ulysses got down on his hands and knees after being bowled over six times. The water was almost up to his nose, but it kept the sprays from being effective at that level. However, he had crawled along for perhaps fifty yards when he had to stand up. The water had risen too high to crawl. A moment later, it was up to his chest.
By then the corridors were jammed with tangled bodies, Dhulhulikh fighting for survival and corpses floating
along, face-down or up, their leathery wings outspread.
The Tree’s weapons were effective, but they were not specific. To drown the enemy, it would also drown its allies.
Ulysses hoped The Tree would drop no more membranes or honeycombs. If it did, they were done for. Their explosives were lost somewhere in the water.
He looked around for Awina and, for a moment, thought she was lost or drowned. Then he saw her hanging onto the belt of Graushpaz. The huge Neshgai was wading through the water, which was up to his waist, his arms crossed to protect his face from the buffeting of the sprays. He rocked back and forth but he did not go down, as some of his fellows had. Ulysses could see only six other Neshgai, and only about twelve of his own people and ten humans seemed to be on their feet.
Then he began swimming, stopping to hammer at the little bat-women if they got in his way. He went faster then, since there seemed to be a slight dip to the floor, causing the water to flow outward to the great entrance.
He passed Awina and Graushpaz, and he shouted at her to swim after him. She released her grip and came after him.
The nightmare in the corridors came to an end a minute later. He rammed into the first narrow curving hall, was carried away and around the corner and into the next curve. Abruptly, the water level fell, and he swam out onto the branch and, a few seconds later, was beached like a fish. The water still flowed around him and moved him on gently, but he could rise to his feet.
Hands helped him then. The men from the dirigible had left their stations. He shouted at them to get back to the ship, but they ignored him. They left him to help others being swept out.
Awina was lifted to her feet, and she staggered to him. “My Lord, what shall we do next?”
Graushpaz waded out and stood to one side. Five other Neshgai came out within two minutes. The sixth failed to show.
Ulysses looked upward into the night. The remnants of a large smoke cloud was drifting by.