Fortunately, he was cautious about approaching them. Each plant had a large hole on each side, situated halfway down the length. He neared one that was separated from the others, and as he did so, it turned to present one of the holes. The thing had no eyes, but it must have had keen hearing. Or, for all he knew, it had a sonic transceiver, perhaps on the order of a bat's.
Whatever its biological mechanisms, it turned as he circled it. He took a few more steps toward it, then stopped. Something dark appeared in the hole, something pulsed, then a black-red mass of flesh extruded. In the center was a hole, from which, in a few seconds, protruded a short pipe of cartilage or bony material.
It looked too much like a gun to him. He threw himself down on the ground, though it hurt his ribs and head when he did so. There was a popping sound, and something shot over his head. He rolled to one side, got up, and ran after the missile. It was a dart made of bone, feathered at one end, and sharp enough to pierce flesh at the other. Something green and sticky coated the point.
The plants were carnivorous, unless the compressed-air propelled dart was used only for self-defense. This didn't seem likely.
Staying out of range, Kickaha moved around the plants. The one who'd shot at him was taking in air with loud gulping sounds. The others turned as he circled.
They had neither eyes nor tentacles. But they could "see" him, and they must have some way of getting the meat of their prey into their bodies for digestion. He'd wait and find out,
It didn't take long. The plants moved up to the now-rotting carcasses of the antelopes and gazelles. The first to get there straddled the bodies and then sat down on them. He watched for a while before he understood just how they ate. A pair of flexible lips protruded from the bottom of the trunks and tore at the meat. Evidently, the lips were lined with tiny but sharp teeth.
Urthona had not mentioned this type of flesh-eating tree. Maybe he hadn't done so because he was hoping that Kickaha and Anana would venture within range of the poison-tipped darts.
Kickaha decided to move on. He had recovered enough to walk at a fairly fast pace. But first he needed some more weapons.
It wasn't difficult to collect them. He would walk to just within range of a plant, run toward it a few steps, and then duck down. The maneuvers caused him some pain, but they were worth it. After collecting a dozen darts, he cut off a piece of his trousers with his knife, and wrapped the missiles in it. He stuck the package in his rear pocket, and, waving a jaunty thanks to the plants, started along the channel.
By now the area was beginning to fill up with animals. They'd scented the water, come running, and were drinking their fill. He went around a herd of thirty elephants which were sucking up the water into their trunks, then squirting it into their mouths. Some of the babies were swimming around and playing with each other. The leader, a big mother, eyed him warily but made no short threatening charges.
These tuskless pachyderms were as tall as African elephants but longer-legged and less massively bodied.
A half an hour later, he came across a herd attacking a "grove" of the missile-shooting plants. These spat the tiny darts into the thick hides of the elephants, which ignored them. Apparently the poison did not affect them. The adults rammed into the plants, knocked them over, and then began stripping the short branches with their trunks. After that the plants were lifted by the trunks and stuck crosswise into the great mouths. The munching began, the giant molars crushing the barky bodies until they were severed. The elephant then picked up one of the sections and masticated this. Everything, the vegetable and the protein parts, went down the great throats.
The young weaned beasts seized the fallen parts and ate these.
Some of the plants waddled away unpursued by the elephants. These became victims to a family of the giant moosoids, which also seemed impervious to the darts' poison. Their attackers, which looked like blue-haired, antlerless Canadian moose, tore the fallen plants apart with their teeth.
Kickaha, who was able to get closer to them than to the pachyderms, noted that the moosoids were careful about one thing. When they came to an organ which he supposed contained the darts, they pushed it aside. Everything else, including the fleshy-looking legs, went into their gullets.
Kickaha waited until he could grab one of the sacs. He cut it open and found a dozen darts inside it, each inside a tubule. He put these into the cloth, and went on his way.
Several times families of lion-sized rusty-colored sabertooth cats crossed his path. He discreetly waited until they had gone by. They saw him but were not, for the moment at least, interested in him. They also ignored the hoofed beasts. Evidently, their most immediate concern was water.
A pack of wild dogs trotted near him, their red tongues hanging out, their emerald eyes glowing. They were about two and a half feet tall, built like cheetahs, spotted like leopards.
Once he encountered a family of kangaroo-like beasts as tall as he. Their heads, however, looked like those of giant rabbits and their teeth were rodentine. The females bore fleshy hair-covered pouches on their abdomens; the heads of the young "rabaroos" stuck out of the pouches.
He was interested in the animal life, of course. But he also scanned the waterway. Once he thought he saw a human body floating in the middle of the channel, and his heart seemed to turn over. A closer look showed that it was some kind of hairless water animal. It suddenly disappeared, its bilobed tail resembling a pair of human legs held close together. A moment later, it emerged, a wriggling fish between long-whiskered jaws. The prey had four short thick legs, the head of a fish, and the vertical tail-fins of a fish. It uttered a gargling sound.
Urthona had said that all fish were amphibians, except for some that inhabited the stable sea-lands.
All life here, except for the grass, was mobile. It had to be to survive.
An hour later, one of the causes for the locomotive character of life on this world rose above the horizon. The reddish temporary moon moved slowly but when fully in view filled half of the sky. It was not directly overhead, being far enough away for Kickaha to see it edge-on. Its shape was that of two convex lenses placed back to back. A very extended oval. It rotated on its longitudinal axis so slowly that it had not traversed more than two degrees in a horizontal circle within two hours.
Finally, Kickaha quit watching it.
Urthona had said that it was one of the very small splitoffs. These occurred after every twelve major splitoffs. Though it looked huge, it was actually very small, not more than a hundred kilometers long. It seemed so big because it was so close to the surface.
Kickaha's knowledge of physics and celestial objects was limited to what he'd learned in high school, plus some reading of his own. He knew, however, that no object of that mass could go slowly in an orbit so near the planet without falling at once. Not in Earth's universe.
But his ideas of what was possible had been greatly extended when he had been gated into Jadawin's world many years ago. And now that he was in Urthona's world he was getting an even broader education. Different arrangements of space-matter, even of matter-energy conversion, were not only possible, they'd been realized by the Lords.
Some day, Terrestrials, if they survived long enough, would discover this. Then their scientists would make pocket universes in bubbles in space-matter outside of yet paradoxically within Earth's universe. But that would come after the shock of discovering that their extra-solar system astronomy was completely wrong.
How long would it be before the secondary returned to the primary? Urthona hadn't known; he'd forgotten. But he had said that the fact that they'd seen it every other day meant that they must be near the planet's north pole. Or perhaps the south pole. In any event, the splitoff was making a spiral orbit which would carry it southward or northward, as the case might be.
That vast thing cruising through the skies made Kickaha uneasy. It would soon fall to the main mass. Perhaps its orbit would end in one more passage around the planet. When it came down, it would
do swiftly. Urthona has said that he did remember that, once it came within twelve thousand feet of the surface, it decended at about a foot every two seconds. A counterrepulsive force slowed its fall so that its impact would not turn it and the area beneath and around it into a fiery mass. Indeed, the final moment before collision could be termed an "easing" rather than a crash.
But there would be a release of energy. Hot air would roar out from the fallen body, air hot enough to fry any living thing fifty miles away. And there would be major earthquakes.
There would be animals and birds and fish and plants on the moon, life forms trapped on it when the splitoff occurred. Those on the underside would be ground into bits and the bits burned. Those on the upper surface would have a fifty-fifty chance of surviving, if they weren't near the edges.
Urthona had said, however, that the splitoff masses never fell in the neighborhood of the oceans. These were in a relatively stable area; the changes in the land surrounding them were slower.
Kickaha hoped that he was near one of the five oceans.
Of all the manifestations of life, the aerial was the most noticeable. He had passed at least a million birds and winged mammals, and the sky was often blackened by flocks that must have numbered hundreds of thousands. These included many birds that had surely been brought in from Earth. There were some, also, that looked just like those he'd known in Jadawin's world. And many were so strange, often grotesque, that he supposed their ancestors had been made in Urthona's biolabs.
Wherever they came from, they were a noisy bunch-as on Earth. Their cawings, croakings, screams, pipings, warblings, whistlings, chatterings filled the air. Some were fish-eaters, either diving into the water from a height or surface swimmers who plunged after fish or frog-like creatures. Others settled down on the elephants and moosoids and pecked at parasites. Others picked food from the teeth of enormous crocodiloids. Many settled down on the branches of various plants and ate the fruit or seeds. The trees did not object to this. But sometimes the weight of the birds was so heavy that a plant would fall over, and the birds, squawking and screaming, would soar up from the fallen like smoke from a burning log.
The tentacled plants would hasten to lift their helpless fellows upright again. The untentacled were left to their fate. More often than not this was being devoured by the pachyderms and moosoids.
Three hours passed, and the menacing mass above him became tiny. It was the only thing on this world that threw a shadow, and even that was pale compared to the shades of Earth. Physically pale, that is. The emotional shadow it cast, the anxiety and near-panic, was seldom matched by anything in Kickaha's native world. A smoking volcano, a violent earthquake, a roaring hurricane were the only comparable events.
However, he had carefully observed the reactions of the birds and animals while it was overhead. They didn't seem to be disturbed by it. This meant to him they somehow "knew" that it posed no threat. Not, at least, this time.
Had Urthona given them the instinctive mechanism to enable them to predict the area in which the splitoff would fall? If he had, then that meant that there was a pattern to the splitting off and the merging of the bodies. However, what about those creatures not made in his biolabs: those which had been brought in from other universes? They hadn't been here long enough for evolution to develop any such instinctive knowledge.
Maybe the importees observed the natives and took their cue from these.
He would ask Urthona about that when he found him. If he found him. Shortly before he killed him.
Kickaha cut off some slices of the antelope leg, and, brushing away the flies, ate the meat. It was getting strong, so he threw the rest of the limb away after his belly was satisfied. A number of scarlet crows settled down on it at once. These had gotten no more than a few pieces when two large purple green-winged eagles with yellow legs drove them off.
Watching them made him wonder where birds lay their eggs. In this world, no nest would be safe. A cranny in a mountain side could be closed up or on a plain in a few days.
He had plenty of time to observe, to get the answers to his questions about the zoology of this world. If he lived long enough.
"Day" passed while he walked steadily along the edge of the channel. Near "dusk" it had begun widening. He drove off some birds from some fruit fallen from a plant and ate the half-devoured "papayas." In the middle of the "night" some smaller varieties of the rabaroos hopped by him, two long-legged baboons after them. He threw his knife into the neck of a rabaroo male as it went by. The creature fell over, causing the baboons to return for this easier prey. Kickaha pulled the knife out and threatened the primates. They barked and showed their wicked-looking canines. One tried to get behind him while the other made short charges at him.
Kickaha didn't want to tangle with them if he could help it. He cut off the legs of the rabaroo and walked away, leaving the rest to the baboons. They were satisfied with the arrangement.
Finding a safe place to sleep was almost impossible. Not only was the night alive with prowling predators, the spreading water was a menace. Twice he awoke inches deep in it and had to retreat several hundred feet to keep from drowning. Finally, he walked to the base of the nearest mountain, which had been only a hill when he had first sighted it. There were several large boulders on its slope. He lay down just above one. When the slope got too steep, the boulder would roll. The movement would awake him-he hoped. Also, most of the action seemed to be taking place in the valley. The big cats, dogs, and baboons were out, trying to sneak up on or run down the hoofed and hopping beasts.
Kickaha awoke frequently as roars, barks, growls, and screams came up from the valley. None of them seemed to be near, though. Nor was he sure that he hadn't dreamed some of the noises.
Shortly before "dawn" he sat up, gasping, his heart thudding. There was a rumbling noise. Earthquake? No, the ground was not trembling. Then he saw that the boulder had rolled away. It wasn't the only one. About half a dozen were hurtling down the slope, which was even steeper now, shooting off swellings, thumping as they hit the surface again, gathering speed, headed toward the valley floor.
That floor, however, was now all water. The only beasts there were a few big cats, up to their bellies in water, staying only to eat as much of their kills as possible before they were forced to take off. There were millions of birds, though, among them an estimated two hundred thousand long-legged flamingoes, green instead of pink like their Terrestrial counterparts. They were eating voraciously in the boiling water. Boiling not with heat but with life. Fish by the millions.
It was time to get up even if he had not had enough rest. The slope was tilting so that he would soon be sent rolling down it.
He scrambled down and went into the water up to his knees and then got down and drank from it. It was still fresh, though muddied by all the activity. One of the flamingoes came scooting through the water, following a trail of something fleeing under the surface. It stopped when Kickaha rose, and it screamed angrily. He ignored it and plunged his knife down. Its point went into the thing the flamingo had been chasing. He brought up a skewered thing which looked like a mud puppy. It did not taste like mud puppy, however. It had a flavor of trout.
Apparently, the water level was not going to rise higher. Not for a while, anyway. After filling his belly and washing his body, he slogged through knee-deep water along the base of the mountain. In an hour he'd gotten by that and was walking on a plain. About "noon" the plain was tilting to one side, about ten degrees to the horizontal, and the water was running down it. Three hours later, it was beginning to tilt the other way. He ate the rest of the mud puppy and threw the bones, with much meat attached, on the ground. Scarlet crows settled down on it to dispute about the tidbits.
The splitoff had not appeared again. He hoped that when it did fall, it would be far far away from him. It would form an enormous pile, a suddenly born mountain range of super-Himalayan proportions, on the surface. Then, according to Urthona, within several months it
would have merged with the larger mass, itself changing shape during the process.
Some months later, another splitoff would occur somewhere else. But this would be a major one. Its volume would be about one-sixteenth of that of the planet.
God help those caught on it at liftoff. God help those on it when it returned to the mother planet.
One-sixteenth of this world's mass! A wedge-shaped mass the thin edge of which would rip out of the planet's center. Roughly, over 67,700,000,000 cubic kilometers.
He shuddered. Imagine the cataclysms, the earthquakes, the staggeringly colossal hole. Imagine the healing process as the walls of the hole slid down to fill it and the rest of the planet moved to compensate. It was unimaginable.
It was a wonder that any life at all remained. Yet there was plenty.
Just before "dusk" he came through a pass between two monolithic mountains that had not changed shape for a day. The channel lay in its center, the surface of the water a few inches below the tops of the banks. There was room on both sides of the channel for ten men abreast. He walked along the channel looking now and then at the towering wall of the mountain on the right.
Its base curved slowly, the channel also curving with it. He didn't want to settle down for the night, since there was little room to avoid any of the big predators. Or, for that matter, to keep from being trampled if a herd of the hoofed beasts was stampeded.
He pushed on, slowing now and then to get as near the mountain as possible when big cats or wild dogs came along. Fortunately, they paid him no attention. It could be that they had run into human beings before and so dreaded them. Which said much for the dangerousness of Homo sapiens here. Probably, though, they found him to be a strange thing and so were wary.
In any event, they might not be able to resist the temptation to attack him if they found him sleeping on the ground. He pushed on. By dawn he was staggering with weariness. His legs hurt. His belly told him it needed more food.