The birds and beasts became less numerous with every lower level, but the insects were larger. Some rather huge species, rat-sized, had transparent flesh, through which glowed the plants they had eaten. Their thumbnail-sized droppings also shone, though with a lesser light. These monsters were not true insects. Terran insects could not grow so large. Being lungless and depending on spiracles as air-inlets, their size was limited. A mutant Terran insect as large as a rat would die because oxygen would not flow into the inner parts of its body.
One species of the larger insects had a long slightly downward-curved proboscis and a rod growing from the back of the head. The length of this was equal to the length of the creature's body, and at its end was a ball which glowed. This reminded Ramstan of certain fish of the Earth's oceanic abysses. They used the light at the ends of their rods to lure other fish close enough to be caught and eaten.
Another creature was a basketball-sized, balloon-shaped arachnid which floated in the air and traveled from place to place, usually branch to leaf or vice versa, by shooting out a sticky thread for anchor and then pulling itself in by the thread. It also jetted out the thread to entangle smaller insects and so draw the prey to its mouth, which was surrounded by six tiny, clawed arms which unceasingly moved except when they seized the living food.
The launch sank deeper. It passed a snakelike thing which was at least 12 meters long. Its six-sided head bore four long curving horns; its eyes were huge and four-sided; its tongue was froglike, speeding out to catch insects or the very small, emerald-green lizardoids and, once, a tiny snake.
"The zoologists would go ape here," Nuoli said.
Ramstan did not comment. He was wandering what kind of sentients would choose to live here. Wassruss's chant had implied that at least three made this continent their dwelling place. But the chant was very old, and those mentioned in it might have moved away or died. For no rational reason, he believed that this was not true, that the three would be here. Which could mean that they had an incredibly long lifespan. Incredibly? Yes, to someone who did not know the glyfa.
Abruptly, the launch entered a zone which seemed to be lifeless. Of course, there was life; the tree was not dead. But there were no insects, birds, or animals. And a sense of timelessness stole through Ramstan. There was time -- as measured by the launch's chronometer, by the beatings of his heart, by the motion of machine and people. Nevertheless, Ramstan felt that time had died or at least had slowed down so much that it was in suspended motion or was sleeping. He felt somewhat disorientated, slightly dizzy, and vaguely and weakly panicky.
He ordered that the upper covering be opened and that no one speak or make any noise. For same reason, he was strongly compelled to listen .
Listen to what? For what?
Not knowing made him crackle with the static electricity of panic as if giant but impalpable fingers were rubbing his dry nerves.
The others, though they said nothing, rolled their eyes as if they, too, sniffed danger in the wind. But there was no wind except for the almost imperceptible movement of air made by the passage of the launch.
Ramstan looked upward, though he did not think that there was any peril -- at this moment -- from above. The sun and sky were blocked out by the branches and the leaves. They were dead, buried under vegetation. A strange thought.
As dead as time itself.
Yet, if the chant told of true things and beings, the death of time or of its near-dead heartbeat meant life for those who waited for him.
Waited? How could they know that he was coming?
Perhaps the glyfa had told them.
But the glyfa was silent and would not speak to him now.
When the upper part of the launch had been opened the first time, Ramstan had smelled a faint stench, not altogether unpleasant, of decaying plants and animal excrement. Something in it reminded him of rotting toadstools, though he did not think that he had ever smelled these before. The air had also been very dry or had seemed to be so. He was not certain, since he was beginning to distrust his senses. Now the odors were gone, though the lack did not make the air seem healthy. Indeed, it was like that of a tomb in which only the dust of corpses remained and all corruption was over. But the tomb should have been as dry as the mouth of a man lost in a desert and without water for three days. Yet, the humidity had suddenly risen. As the launch plunged soundlessly into the timeless zone, the water content increased. Ramstan suddenly felt that the moisture was stealthily increasing and, without warning, they would pass from a watery air into airless water. His throat closed up.
It was as if the planet itself had begun sweating. Drops rolled down his forehead and into his eyes, saltless water which, when licked, gave him the sensation that his tongue was betraying him. Despite the wetness, however, he smelled nothing dank or rotting. The crowded growths on the tree shone even more brightly; their cold illumination seemed to have stopped death and decay. Or to have slowed it, since there was no stopping these universal basics. Another strange thought.
He started, and he hated himself for this unwilling signal of his nervousness. He glared at Nuoli for having put her hand on his arm.
Was that touch the intimation of death? Touch. Death. Another strange thought. Strange? No thoughts were strange, but the unfamiliar or not easily available to his conscious would seem so.
Touching.
"There's something down there. It looks like a big hole," the tec-op said. "It's between two roots. Roots of this tree, I mean."
Ramstan checked on the report. The screen showed a shadowy equilateral triangle, and the readout indicated that it was 64 meters long on each side. Another readout showed that it contained a clear liquid. The bottom of the well, probably stone, was 64 meters from the surface.
The launch sank unchecked by any order from Ramstan, passed tremendous wrinkled tree-trunk bark almost covered by the glowing growths, and, after what seemed like a long time, though Ramstan still was seized by a sense of timelessness -- curious paradox, but were not all paradoxes curious? -- the launch was at the edge of the well nearest the tree.
There was no lining of the well, no coping, only bare earth around the air and the water. The three sides plunged straight down and were smooth as mud pressed by a trowel.
The launch moved out, its undersurface lights filling the well like honey.
There were three creatures moving through or on the surface of the well.
... 19 ...
"It isn't water," the tec-op said. He pointed at the column of numbers by the side of the screen. He said, "See, sir. It's a liquid, but it's heavier than water. Specific gravity is 1.6. Just a second, sir. There. The spectrographic analysis. Jesús! Nothing like it in the comparison bank!"
Nuoli, who'd been looking over the side of the launch, spoke. "One of them is hopping over the surface of . . . whatever it is."
Ramstan told the pilot to take the vehicle down to ten meters above the well. Meanwhile, the tec-op had been scanning on all sides for the "old house" which Wassruss had mentioned. He could not find it, but the building might be on the other side of one of the immense swellings at the base of the trunk. These, which plunged into the ground to become roots, were wider in diameter than ten subway tunnels put together.
The face looking up at him, the grinning face of the hopper, startled and repulsed him. It was humanoid but far more triangular than any Homo sapiens'. The hairless, deeply seamed, and leathery upper part of the skull projected so far over the face that it could have been substituted for an umbrella. A wide, blue vein passed over the central part; it pulsed sluggishly as if it were filled not with blood but with a growing colony of microbes or some yeasty organisms.
The overhanging forehead ended abruptly; the division between it and the face was right-angled. The face seemed to be something attached with adhesive to the bottom of the dome. The two eyes were deep, deep and dark blue. They were also huge, apparently one and a half times the size of Ramstan's, though he could not be sure. The tec-op's sc
reen indicated that the creature was three meters tall.
Just below the eyes was not a nose but a large round appendage of leathery flesh darker than the face, the color of which was a pale red. There did not seem to be any nostrils or openings of any kind in the projection. It pulsed like the vein on top of its skull.
The mouth was much more like a human's; the lips were very everted. The jaw was thick, and the chin was a ball with a deeply punched-in, six-pointed star.
"Some dimple," Nuoli muttered.
The ears were very small, flat, close to the face, and their convolutions were nonhuman alto-relief arabesques.
Ramstan ordered the magnifying power to be increased so he could look directly into the wide-open mouth. The teeth were like a pig's; the purplish tongue was warted.
The red leathery body reminded Ramstan of a kangaroo's, but its tail ended in a wide fan and its feet were wide, splayed, and webbed, a frog's. It used the feet and the tail to propel itself over the surface of the strange liquid.
Its upper limbs, however, were quite human and so were its hands.
The "wise one who swims" was slowly circling the well near its wall. It looked like an extinct salmon, though it was at least twelve meters long, six times the length of the average man laid out for his funeral. Another strange thought. Why had he used that comparison?
Ramstan was flabbergasted. He'd assumed that the three spoken of in the chant would be sentient. It was possible though not probable that the hopper was. But a fish could not be sentient.
Looking directly at the "cold-blood who drinks hot blood" hurt his eyes and made him feel even more disorientated. It was a shimmer of pale-reddish light fringed by purplish light. The glowing body expanded and contracted; its major length was ten meters, its minor, nine, and its major height was three meters and its minor, two. Now and then, in no regular pattern that the scan-computer could determine, the shimmering was cut off, and Ramstan got a flash of the thing behind the light. It seemed to him at first that it looked like a mixture of bat and octopus. It had a head, but it was on top of the central part of an oblong body, not at one end. The features and the teeth, if they were teeth, were like a South American vampire bat's. He had no sooner fixed that in his mind than the next glimpse showed him a broad face, half lion, half human, and a hint of something else. He did not know what the something else was.
Nuoli said, "Jumala!" and spoke then in Terrish. "I saw into its eyes. They looked black, genuinely black. And . . . I must have been seeing things. . . my imagination . . . I thought I saw stars deep within them. Constellations . . . a gas cloud . . . shining . . . white."
Ramstan did not reply. He ordered the launch taken to a meter above the head of the hopper. It had sunk to its waist, but now it began thrusting its webbed and splayed hands and feet against the liquid. It rose swiftly, spread out flat on the surface, then reared upright. And it began hopping.
Ramstan told the com-op to put some Urzint phrases into the translator. He did not believe that these would be understood, but Urzint was the interplanetary language in the areas where he'd been, and he had to try something.
The hopper stopped, began sinking, and also began laughing. At least, the hooting sounded somewhat like laughter.
The huge fish rolled so that its right eye was above the surface, and this regarded the launch steadily.
The shimmering thing did not move.
Ramstan was not the only person startled when the hopper gabbled in an unfamiliar language full of throaty and hissing sounds, then switched to Urzint.
"Go to the house! Go to the house! Go to the house!"
Nuoli was the first to break the silence in the launch. "What I tell you three times is true," she murmured.
"It's not indicative but imperative," Ramstan said. "Nothing to do with validity."
"Well, at least we know it's sentient."
"Not necessarily," he said. "It may be like a parrot. Trained to utter the directions when it's spoken to by strangers. Or . . ."
"But in Urzint?"
Ramstan did not comment. Obviously, the Urzint people must have been here at one time. Or perhaps the hopper had met the legended pachydermoids on some other planet.
He ordered the launch to rise to the left. That seemed as good a direction as the right, though he may have had psychological reasons for choosing it.
The house, if it could be called such, was located three root-swellings over from that by the well. The distance from the well was 300 meters, which Ramstan would not have said was "nearby." It was three structures arranged vertically or perhaps was one structure with three stories which only looked like separate ones stacked. If it, or they, were a habitation, it was certainly one he had never before encountered.
The main body of each was an oblate sphere, from the equator of which extended a long tapering body toward the tree. He at first thought that each looked like a round birdhead with a long bill. Then he perceived it as a spermatozoon with its thick head and long thin tail, except that the tail was straight, not curving. His third impression was of a mace, a staff at the end of which was a big ball for bludgeoning. The spheres were, according to the scanner, 50 meters in diameter and the extensions were 100 meters long.
The bottom structure was green; the middle one, blue; the top one, black. Over each a rusty-red lichenous growth formed circles and near-squares and rough triangles but with enough of the metallic-looking surface exposed to reveal its color. The growth was thick enough to provide nesting places for the archeopteryx-like birds and various species of lizardoids and insects. Also, and this surprised the Terrans because they had by now assumed that this planet's birds were in a primitive stage of evolution, there was an owl, or what looked like one, and a storkish avian. The "owl" cachinnated at them, its cry sounding like the hopper's laughter, and flew off on snowy black-barred wings. The "stork" looked once at the launch and then began jabbing itself in the breast plumage, apparently in search of parasites.
"They may not be indigenous," Nuoli said.
Ramstan thought that she could be right, but he did not say so. Her comment annoyed him; she had always been too given to talking when it would have been better to be silent or to confine herself to elemental moans and sighs and screams.
Moreover, except for the owl's cry, which had broken the glassy silence or -- strange thought -- blasphemed it, there was a lack of sound even deeper than that in the levels where life had ceased to be evident. Ramstan suddenly realized that this silence had existed since he had entered the seemingly nonzoic area.
Whatever his misgivings, starts, and too-late perceptions, the air was heavy, motionless, and dark. The light-shedding plants were less numerous than above. Around him was a twilight, brooding in between day and night. Brooding.
Something, or some things, sat and waited for him, but their thoughts were not entirely on him.
"It's spooky," Nuoli said.
As the launch settled like a sinking canoe in the deeps, Ramstan told the marines and sailors to have their weapons ready. But they were not to hold them. The holsters for the olsons should be unsealed and the larger arms should be on the deck out of sight of anyone in the house.
"We don't want to appear belligerent," he said.
They looked as if they'd like to have much more information than this. For instance, why were they here and what was in the house?
The launch settled on the thick lichenish growth which spread from the building and covered the earth between the two colossal root-swellings. Nobody spoke for a moment; the silence was as if sound itself had died.
After a long look at the "house," Ramstan said, softly, "I'll go alone."