I Am Crying All Inside : And Other Stories

Ogre

The moss brought the news. Hundreds of miles the word had gossiped its way along, through many devious ways. For the moss did not grow everywhere. It grew only where the soil was sparse and niggardly, where the larger, lustier, more vicious plant things could not grow to rob it of light, or uproot it, or crowd it out, or do it other harm.

The moss told the story to Nicodemus, life blanket of Don Mackenzie, and it all came about because Mackenzie took a bath.

Mackenzie took his time in the bathroom, wallowing around in the tub and braying out a song, while Nicodemus, feeling only half a thing, moped outside the door. Without Mackenzie, Nicodemus was, in fact, even less than half of a thing. Accepted as intelligent life, Nicodemus and others of his tribe were intelligent only when they were wrapped about their humans. Their intelligence and emotions were borrowed from the things that wore them.

For the aeons before the human beings came to this twilight world, the life blankets had dragged out a humdrum existence. Occasionally one of them allied itself with a higher form of plant life, but not often. After all, such an arrangement was very little better than staying as they were.

When the humans came, however, the blankets finally clicked. Between them and the men of Earth grew up a perfect mutual agreement, a highly profitable and agreeable instance of symbiosis. Overnight, the blankets became one of the greatest single factors in galactic exploration.

For the man who wore one of them, like a cloak around his shoulders, need never worry where a meal was coming from; knew, furthermore, that he would be fed correctly, with a scientific precision that automatically counterbalanced any upset of metabolism that might be brought by alien conditions. For the curious plants had the ability to gather energy and convert it into food for the human body, had an uncanny instinct as to the exact needs of the body, extending, to a limited extent, to certain basic medical requirements.

But if the life blankets gave men food and warmth, served as a family doctor, man lent them something that was even more precious—the consciousness of life. The moment one of the plants wrapped itself around a man it became, in a sense, the double of that man. It shared his intelligence and emotions, was whisked from the dreary round of its own existence into a more exalted pseudo-life.

Nicodemus, at first moping outside the bathroom door, gradually grew peeved. He felt his thin veneer of human life slowly ebbing from him and he was filled with a baffling resentment.

Finally, feeling very put upon, he waddled out of the trading post upon his own high lonesome, flapping awkwardly along, like a sheet billowing in the breeze.

The dull brick-red sun that was Sigma Draco shone down upon a world that even at high noon appeared to be in twilight and Nicodemus’ bobbling shape cast squirming, unsubstantial purple shadows upon the green and crimson ground. A rifle tree took a shot at Nicodemus but missed him by a yard at least. That tree had been off the beam for weeks. It had missed everything it shot at. Its best effort had been scaring the life out of Nellie, the bookkeeping robot that never told a lie, when it banked one of its bulletlike seeds against the steel-sheeted post.

But no one had felt very badly about that, for no one cared for Nellie. With Nellie around, no one could chisel a red cent off the company. That, incidentally, was the reason she was at the post.

But for a couple of weeks now, Nellie hadn’t bothered anybody. She had taken to chumming around with Encyclopedia, who more than likely was slowly going insane trying to figure out her thoughts.

Nicodemus told the rifle tree what he thought of it, shooting at its own flesh and blood, as it were, and kept shuffling along. The tree, knowing Nicodemus for a traitor to his own, a vegetable renegade, took another shot at him, missed by two yards and gave up in disgust.

Since he had become associated with a human, Nicodemus hadn’t had much to do with other denizens of the planet—even the Encyclopedia. But when he passed a bed of moss and heard it whispering and gossiping away, he tarried for a moment, figurative ear cocked to catch some juicy morsel.

That is how he heard that Alder, a minor musician out in Melody Bowl, finally had achieved a masterpiece. Nicodemus knew it might have happened weeks before, for Melody Bowl was half a world away and the news sometimes had to travel the long way round, but just the same he scampered as fast as he could hump back toward the post.

For this was news that couldn’t wait. This was news Mackenzie had to know at once. He managed to kick up quite a cloud of dust coming down the home stretch and flapped triumphantly through the door, above which hung the crudely lettered sign:

Just what good the sign did, no one yet had figured out. The humans were the only living things on the planet that could read it.

Before the bathroom door, Nicodemus reared up and beat his fluttering self against it with tempestuous urgency.

“All right,” yelled Mackenzie. “All right. I know I took too long again. Just calm yourself. I’ll be right out.”

Nicodemus settled down, still wriggling with the news he had to tell, heard Mackenzie swabbing out the tub.

With Nicodemus wrapped happily about him, Mackenzie strode into the office and found Nelson Harper, the factor, with his feet up on the desk, smoking his pipe and studying the ceiling.

“Howdy, lad,” said the factor. He pointed at a bottle with his pipestem. “Grab yourself a snort.”

Mackenzie grabbed one.

“Nicodemus has been out chewing fat with the moss,” he said. “Tells me a conductor by the name of Alder has composed a symphony. Moss says it’s a masterpiece.”

Harper took his feet off the desk. “Never heard of this chap, Alder,” he said.

“Never heard of Kadmar, either,” Mackenzie reminded him, “until he produced the Red Sun symphony. Now everyone is batty over him. If Alder has anything at all, we ought to get it down. Even a mediocre piece pays out. People back on Earth are plain wacky over this tree music of ours. Like that one fellow … that composer—”

“Wade,” Harper filled in. “J. Edgerton Wade. One of the greatest composers Earth had ever known. Quit in mortification after he heard the Red Sun piece. Later disappeared. No one knows where he went.”

The factor nursed his pipe between his palms. “Funny thing. Came out here figuring our best trading bet would be new drugs or maybe some new kind of food. Something for the high-class restaurants to feature, charge ten bucks a plate for. Maybe even a new mineral. Like out on Eta Cassiop. But it wasn’t any of those things. It was music. Symphony stuff. High-brow racket.”

Mackenzie took another shot at the bottle, put it back and wiped his mouth. “I’m not so sure I like this music angle,” he declared. “I don’t know much about music. But it sounds funny to me, what I’ve heard of it. Brain-twisting stuff.”

Harper grunted. “You’re O.K. as long as you have plenty of serum along. If you can’t take the music, just keep yourself shot full of serum. That way it can’t touch you.”

Mackenzie nodded. “It almost got Alexander that time, remember? Ran short of serum while he was down in the Bowl trying to dicker with the trees. Music seemed to have a hold on him. He didn’t want to leave. He fought and screeched and yelled around. … I felt like a heel, taking him away. He never has been quite the same since then. Doctors back on Earth finally were able to get him straightened out, but warned him never to come back.”

“Alexander’s back again,” said Harper. “Grant spotted him over at the Groombridge post. Throwing in with the Groomies, I guess. Just a yellow-bellied renegade. Going against his own race. You boys shouldn’t have saved him that time. Should have let the music get him.”

“What are you going to do about it?” demanded Mackenzie.

Harper shrugged his shoulders. “What can I do about it? Unless I want to declare war on the Groombridge post. And that is out. Haven’t you heard it’s all sweetness and light between Earth and Groombridge 34? That’s the reason the two posts are stuck away from Melody Bowl. So each one of us will have a fair shot at the music. All according to some pact the two companies rigged up. Galactic’s got so pure they wouldn’t even like it if they knew we had a spy planted on the Groomie post.”

“But they got one planted on us,” declared Mackenzie. “We haven’t been able to find him, of course, but we know there is one. He’s out there in the woods somewhere, watching every move we make.”

Harper nodded his head. “You can’t trust a Groomie. The lousy little insects will stoop to anything. They don’t want that music, can’t use it. Probably don’t even know what music is. Haven’t any hearing. But they know Earth wants it, will pay any price to get it, so they are out here to beat us to it. They work through birds like Alexander. They get the stuff, Alexander peddles it.”

“What if we run across Alexander, chief?”

Harper clicked his pipestem across his teeth. “Depends on circumstances. Try to hire him, maybe. Get him away from the Groomies. He’s a good trader. The company would do right by him.”

Mackenzie shook his head. “No soap. He hates Galactic. Something that happened years ago. He’d rather make us trouble than turn a good deal for himself.”

“Maybe he’s changed,” suggested Harper. “Maybe you boys saving him changed his mind.”

“I don’t think it did,” persisted Mackenzie.

The factor reached across the desk and drew a humidor in front of him, began to refill his pipe.

“Been trying to study out something else, too,” he said. “Wondering what to do with the Encyclopedia. He wants to go to Earth. Seems he’s found out just enough from us to whet his appetite for knowledge. Says he wants to go to Earth and study our civilization.”

Mackenzie grimaced. “That baby’s gone through our minds with a fine-toothed comb. He knows some of the things we’ve forgotten we ever knew. I guess it’s just the nature of him, but it gets my wind up when I think of it.”

“He’s after Nellie now,” said Harper. “Trying to untangle what she knows.”

“It would serve him right if he found out.”

“I’ve been trying to figure it out,” said Harper. “I don’t like this brain-picking of his any more than you do, but if we took him to Earth, away from his own stamping grounds, we might be able to soften him up. He certainly knows a lot about this planet that would be of value to us. He’s told me a little—”

“Don’t fool yourself,” said Mackenzie. “He hasn’t told you a thing more than he’s had to tell to make you believe it wasn’t a one-way deal. Whatever he has told you has no vital significance. Don’t kid yourself he’ll exchange information for information. That cookie’s out to get everything he can get for nothing.”

The factor regarded Mackenzie narrowly. “I’m not sure but I should put you in for an Earth vacation,” he declared. “You’re letting things upset you. You’re losing your perspective. Alien planets aren’t Earth, you know. You have to expect wacky things, get along with them, accept them on the basis of the logic that makes them the way they are.”

“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 could 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.”

Nellie emerged from a hole in the wreckage, with the Encyclopedia under one arm and a mangled radio under the other. She dumped them both on the ground. The Encyclopedia scuttled off a few feet, drilled his taproot into the soil and was at home.

Nellie glowered at Mackenzie. “I’ll report you for this,” she declared, vengefully. “The idea of breaking up a nice new car! Do you know what a car costs the company? No, of course, you don’t. And you don’t care. Just go ahead and break it up. Just like that. Nothing to it. The company’s got a lot more money to buy another one. I wonder sometimes if you ever wonder where your pay is coming from. If I was the company, I’d take it out of your salary. Every cent of it, until it was paid for.”

Smith eyed Nellie speculatively. “Some day,” he said, “I’m going to take a sledge and play tin shinny with you.”

“Maybe you got something there,” agreed Mackenzie. “There are times when I’m inclined to think the company went just a bit too far in making those robots cost-conscious.”

“You don’t need to talk like that,” shrilled Nellie. “Like I was just a machine you didn’t need to pay no attention to. I suppose next thing you will be saying it wasn’t your fault, that you couldn’t help it.”

“I kept a good quarter mile from all the groves,” growled Mackenzie. “Who ever heard of a vine that could stretch that far?”

“And that ain’t all, neither,” yelped Nellie. “Smith hit some of the rifle trees.”

The two men looked toward the grove. What Nellie said was true. Pale wisps of smoke still rose above the grove and what trees were left looked the worse for wear.

Smith clucked his tongue in mock concern.

“The trees were shooting at us,” retorted Mackenzie.

“That don’t make any difference,” Nellie yelled. “The rule book says—”

Mackenzie waved her into silence. “Yes, I know. Section 17 of the Chapter on Relations with Extraterrestrial Life: ‘No employee of this company may employ weapons against or otherwise injure or attempt to injure or threaten with injury any inhabitant of any other planet except in self-defense and then only if every means of escape or settlement has failed.’”

“And now we got to go back to the post,” Nellie shrieked. “When we were almost there, we got to turn back. News of what we did will get around. The moss probably has started it already. The idea of ripping a vine up by the roots and shooting trees. If we don’t start back right now, we won’t get back. Every living thing along the way will be laying for us.”

“It was the vine’s fault,” yelled Smith. “It tried to trap us. It tried to steal our car, probably would have killed us, just for the few lousy ounces of radium we have in the motors. That radium was ours. Not the vine’s. It belonged to your beloved company.”

“For the love of gosh, don’t tell her that,” Mackenzie warned, “or she’ll go out on a one-robot expedition, yanking vines up left and right.”

“Good idea,” insisted Smith. “She might tie into an electro. It would peel her paint.”

“How about the radio?” Mackenzie asked Nellie.

“Busted,” said Nellie, crustily.

“And the recording equipment?”

“That tape’s all right and I can fix the recorder.”

“Serum jugs busted?”

“One of them ain’t,” said Nellie.

“O.K., then,” said Mackenzie, “get back in there and dig out two bags of fertilizer. We’re going on. Melody Bowl is only about fifty miles away.”

“We can’t do that,” protested Nellie. “Every tree will be waiting for us, every vine—”

“It’s safer to go ahead than back,” said Mackenzie. “Even if we have no radio, Harper will send someone out with the flier to look us up when we are overdue.”

He rose slowly and unholstered his pistol.

“Get in there and get that stuff,” he ordered. “If you don’t, I’ll melt you down into a puddle.”

“All right,” screamed Nellie, in sudden terror. “All right. You needn’t get so tough about it.”

“Any more back talk out of you,” Mackenzie warned, “and I’ll kick you so full of dents you’ll walk stooped over.”

They stayed in the open, well away from the groves, keeping a close watch. Mackenzie went ahead and behind him came the Encyclopedia, humping along to keep pace with them. Back of the Encyclopedia was Nellie, loaded down with the bags of fertilizer and equipment. Smith brought up the rear.

A rifle tree took a shot at them, but the range was too far for accurate shooting. Back a way, an electro vine had come closer with a thunderbolt.

Walking was grueling. The grass was thick and matted and one had to plow through it, as if one were walking in water.

“I’ll make you sorry for this,” seethed Nellie. “I’ll make—”

“Shut up,” snapped Smith. “For once you’re doing a robot’s work instead of gumshoeing around to see if you can’t catch a nickel out of place.”

They breasted a hill and started to climb the long grassy slope.

Suddenly a sound like the savage ripping of a piece of cloth struck across the silence.

They halted, tensed, listening. The sound came again and then again.

“Guns!” yelped Smith.

Swiftly the two men loped up the slope, Nellie galloping awkwardly behind, the bags of fertilizer bouncing on her shoulders.

From the hilltop, Mackenzie took in the situation at a glance.

On the hillside below a man was huddled behind a boulder, working a gun with fumbling desperation, while farther down the hill a ground car had toppled over. Behind the car were three figures—one man and two insect creatures.

“Groomies!” whooped Smith.

A well-directed shot from the car took the top off the boulder and the man behind it hugged the ground.

Smith was racing quarteringly down the hill, heading toward another boulder that would outflank the trio at the car.

A yell of human rage came from the car and a bolt from one of the three guns snapped at Smith, plowing a smoking furrow no more than ten feet behind him.

Another shot flared toward Mackenzie and he plunged behind a hummock. A second shot whizzed just above his head and he hunkered down trying to push himself into the ground.

From the slope below came the high-pitched, angry chittering of the Groombridgians.

The car, Mackenzie saw, was not the only vehicle on the hillside. Apparently it had been pulling a trailer to which was lashed a tree. Mackenzie squinted against the setting sun, trying to make out what it was all about. The tree, he saw, had been expertly dug, its roots balled in earth and wrapped in sacking that shone wetly. The trailer was canted at an awkward angle, the treetop sweeping the ground, the balled roots high in the air.

Smith was pouring a deadly fire into the hostile camp and the three below were replying with a sheet of blasting bolts, plowing up the soil around the boulder. In a minute or two, Mackenzie knew, they would literally cut the ground out from under Smith. Cursing under his breath, he edged around the hummock, pushing his pistol before him, wishing he had a rifle.

The third man was slinging an occasional, inexpert shot at the three below, but wasn’t doing much to help the cause along. The battle, Mackenzie knew, was up to him and Smith.

He wondered abstractedly where Nellie was.

“Probably halfway back to the post by now,” he told himself, drawing a bead on the point from which came the most devastating blaze of firing.

But even as he depressed the firing button, the firing from below broke off in a chorus of sudden screams. The two Groombridgians leaped up and started to run, but before they made their second stride, something came whizzing through the air from the slope below and crumpled one of them.

The other hesitated, like a startled hare, uncertain where to go, and a second thing came whishing up from the bottom of the slope and smacked against his breastplate with a thud that could be heard from where Mackenzie lay.

Then, for the first time Mackenzie saw Nellie. She was striding up the hill, her left arm holding an armful of stones hugged tight against her metal chest, her right arm working like a piston. The ringing clang of stone against metal came as one of the stones missed its mark and struck the ground car.

The human was running wildly, twisting and ducking, while Nellie pegged rock after rock at him. Trying to get set for a shot at her, the barrage of whizzing stones kept him on the dodge. Angling down the hill, he finally lost his rifle when he tripped and fell. With a howl of terror, he bolted up the hillside, his life blanket standing out almost straight behind him. Nellie pegged her last stone at him, then set out, doggedly loping in his wake.

Mackenzie screamed hoarsely at her, but she did not stop. She passed out of sight over the hill, closely behind the fleeing man.

Smith whooped with delight. “Look at our Nellie go for him,” he yelled. “She’ll give him a working over when she nails him.”

Mackenzie rubbed his eyes. “Who was he?” he asked.

“Jack Alexander,” said Smith. “Grant said he was around again.”

The third man got up stiffly from behind his boulder and advanced toward them. He wore no life blanket, his clothing was in tatters, his face was bearded to the eyes.

He jerked a thumb toward the hill over which Nellie had disappeared. “A masterly military maneuver,” he declared. “Your robot sneaked around and took them from behind.”

“If she lost that recording stuff and the fertilizer, I’ll melt her down,” said Mackenzie, savagely.

The man stared at them. “You are the gentlemen from the trading post?” he asked.

They nodded, returning his gaze.

“I am Wade,” he said. “J. Edgerton Wade—”

“Wait a second,” shouted Smith. “Not the J. Edgerton Wade? The lost composer?”

The man bowed, whiskers and all. “The same,” he said. “Although I had not been aware that I was lost. I merely came out here to spend a year, a year of music such as man has never heard before.”

He glared at them. “I am a man of peace,” he declared, almost as if daring them to argue that he wasn’t, “but when those three dug up Delbert, I knew what I must do.”

“Delbert?” asked Mackenzie.

“The tree,” said Wade. “One of the music trees.”

“Those lousy planet-runners,” said Smith, “figured they’d take that tree and sell it to someone back on Earth. I can think of a lot of big shots who’d pay plenty to have one of those trees in their back yard.”

“It’s a lucky thing we came along,” said Mackenzie, soberly. “If we hadn’t, if they’d got away with it, the whole planet would have gone on the warpath. We could have closed up shop. It might have been years before we dared come back again.”

Smith rubbed his hands together, smirking. “We’ll take back their precious tree,” he declared, “and that will put us in solid! They’ll give us their tunes from now on, free for nothing, just out of pure gratitude.”

“You gentlemen,” said Wade, “are motivated by mercenary factors but you have the right idea.”

A heavy tread sounded behind them and when they turned they saw Nellie striding down the hill. She clutched a life blanket in her hand.

“He got away,” she said, “but I got his blanket. Now I got a blanket, too, just like you fellows.”

“What do you need with a life blanket?” yelled Smith. “You give that blanket to Mr. Wade. Right away. You hear me.”

Nellie pouted. “You won’t let me have anything. You never act like I’m human—”

“You aren’t,” said Smith.

“If you give that blanket to Mr. Wade,” wheedled Mackenzie, “I’ll let you drive the car.”

“You would?” asked Nellie, eagerly.

“Really,” said Wade, shifting from one foot to the other, embarrassed.

“You take that blanket,” said Mackenzie. “You need it. Looks like you haven’t eaten for a day or two.”

“I haven’t,” Wade confessed.

“Shuck into it then and get yourself a meal,” said Smith.

Nellie handed it over.

“How come you were so good pegging those rocks?” asked Smith.

Nellie’s eyes gleamed with pride. “Back on Earth I was on a baseball team,” she said. “I was the pitcher.”

Alexander’s car was undamaged except for a few dents and a smashed vision plate where Wade’s first bolt had caught it, blasting the glass and startling the operator so that he swerved sharply, spinning the treads across a boulder and upsetting it.

The music tree was unharmed, its roots still well moistened in the burlap-wrapped, water-soaked ball of earth. Inside the tractor, curled in a tight ball in the darkest corner, unperturbed by the uproar that had been going on outside, they found Delbert, the two-foot high, roly-poly conductor that resembled nothing more than a poodle dog walking on its hind legs.

The Groombridgians were dead, their crushed chitinous armor proving the steam behind Nellie’s delivery.

Smith and Wade were inside the tractor, settle down for the night. Nellie and the Encyclopedia were out in the night, hunting for the gun Alexander had dropped when he fled. Mackenzie, sitting on the ground, Nicodemus pulled snugly about him, leaned back against the car and smoked a last pipe before turning in.

The grass behind the tractor rustled.

“That you, Nellie?” Mackenzie called, softly.

Nellie clumped hesitantly around the corner of the car.

“You ain’t sore at me?” she asked.

“No, I’m not sore at you. You can’t help the way you are.”

“I didn’t find the gun,” said Nellie.

“You knew where Alexander dropped it?”

“Yes,” said Nellie. “It wasn’t there.”

Mackenzie frowned in the darkness. “That means Alexander managed to come back and get it. I don’t like that. He’ll be out gunning for us. He didn’t like the company before. He’ll really be out for blood after what we did today.”

He looked around. “Where’s the Encyclopedia?”

“I sneaked away from him. I wanted to talk to you about him.”

“O.K.,” said Mackenzie. “Fire away.”

“He’s been trying to read my brain,” said Nellie.

“I know. He read the rest of ours. Did a good job of it.”

“He’s been having trouble,” declared Nellie.

“Trouble reading your brain? I wouldn’t doubt it.”

“You don’t need to talk as if my brain—” Nellie began, but Mackenzie stopped her.

“I didn’t mean it that way, Nellie. Your brain is all right, far as I know. Maybe even better than ours. But the point is that it’s different. Ours are natural brains, the orthodox way for things to think and reason and remember. The Encyclopedia knows about those kinds of brains and the minds that go with them. Yours isn’t that kind. It’s artificial. Part mechanical, part chemical, part electrical, Lord knows what else; I’m not a robot technician. He’s never run up against that kind of brain before. It probably has him down. Matter of fact, our civilization probably has him down. If this planet ever had a real civilization, it wasn’t a mechanical one. There’s no sign of mechanization here. None of the scars machines inflict on planets.”

“I been fooling him,” said Nellie quietly. “He’s been trying to read my mind, but I been reading his.”

Mackenzie started forward. “Well, I’ll be—” he began. Then he settled back against the car, dead pipe hanging from between his teeth. “Why didn’t you ever let us know you could read minds?” he demanded. “I suppose you been sneaking around all this time, reading our minds, making fun of us, laughing behind our backs.”

“Honest, I ain’t,” said Nellie. “Cross my heart, I ain’t. I didn’t even know I could. But, when I felt the Encyclopedia prying around inside my head the way he does, it kind of got my dander up. I almost hauled off and smacked him one. And then I figured maybe I better be more subtle. I figured that if he could pry around in my mind, I could pry around in his. I tried it and it worked.”

“Just like that,” said Mackenzie.

“It wasn’t hard,” said Nellie. “It come natural. I seemed to just know how to do it.”

“If the guy that made you knew what he’d let slip through his fingers, he’d cut his throat,” Mackenzie told her.

Nellie sidled closer. “It scares me,” she said.

“What’s scaring you now?”

“That Encyclopedia knows too much.”

“Alien stuff,” said Mackenzie. “You should have expected that. Don’t go messing around with an alien mentality unless you’re ready for some shocks.”

“It ain’t that,” said Nellie. “I knew I’d find alien stuff. But he knows other things. Things he shouldn’t know.”

“About us?”

“No, about other places. Places other than the Earth and this planet here. Places Earthmen ain’t been to yet. The kind of things no Earthman could know by himself or that no Encyclopedia could know by himself, either.”

“Like what?”

“Like knowing mathematical equations that don’t sound like anything we know about,” said Nellie. “Nor like he’d know about if he’d stayed here all his life. Equations you couldn’t know unless you knew a lot more about space and time than even Earthmen know.

“Philosophy, too. Ideas that make sense in a funny sort of way, but make your head swim when you try to figure out the kind of people that would develop them.”

Mackenzie got out his pouch and refilled his pipe, got it going.

“Nellie, you think maybe this Encyclopedia has been at other minds? Minds of other people who may have come here?”

“Could be,” agreed Nellie. “Maybe a long time ago. He’s awful old. Lets on he could be immortal if he wanted to be. Said he wouldn’t die until there was nothing more in the universe to know. Said when that time came there’d be nothing more to live for.”

Mackenzie clicked his pipestem against his teeth. “He could be, too,” he said. “Immortal, I mean. Plants haven’t got all the physiological complications animals have. Given any sort of care, they theoretically could live forever.”

Grass rustled on the hillside above them and Mackenzie settled back against the car, kept on smoking. Nellie hunkered down a few feet away.

The Encyclopedia waddled down the hill, starlight glinting from his shell-like back. Ponderously he lined up with them beside the car, pushing his taproot into the ground for an evening snack.

“Understand you may be going back to Earth with us,” said Mackenzie, conversationally.

The answer came, measured in sharp and concise thought that seemed to drill deep into Mackenzie’s mind. “I should like to. Your race is interesting.”

It was hard to talk to a thing like that, Mackenzie told himself. Hard to keep the chatter casual when you knew all the time it was hunting around in the corners of your mind. Hard to match one’s voice against the brittle thought with which it talked.

“What do you think of us?” he asked and knew, as soon as he had asked it, that it was asinine.

“I know very little of you,” the Encyclopedia declared. “You have created artificial lives, while we on this planet have lived natural lives. You have bent every force that you can master to your will. You have made things work for you. First impression is that, potentially, you are dangerous.”

“I guess I asked for it,” Mackenzie said.

“I do not follow you.”

“Skip it,” said Mackenzie.

“The only trouble,” said the Encyclopedia, “is that you don’t know where you’re going.”

“That’s what makes it so much fun,” Mackenzie told him. “Cripes, if we knew where we were going there’d be no adventure. We’d know what was coming next. As it is, every corner that we turn brings a new surprise.”

“Knowing where you’re going has its advantages,” insisted the Encyclopedia.

Mackenzie knocked the pipe bowl out on his boot heel, tramped on the glowing ash.

“So you have us pegged,” he said.

“No,” said the Encyclopedia. “Just first impressions.”

The music trees were twisted gray ghosts in the murky dawn. The conductors, except for the few who refused to let even a visit from the Earthmen rouse them from their daylight slumber, squatted like black imps on their podia.

Delbert rode on Smith’s shoulder, one clawlike hand entwined in Smith’s hair to keep from falling off. The Encyclopedia waddled along in the wake of the Earthman party. Wade led the way towards Alder’s podium.

The Bowl buzzed with the hum of distorted thought, the thought of many little folk squatting on their mounds—an alien thing that made Mackenzie’s neck hairs bristle just a little as it beat into his mind. There were no really separate thoughts, no one commanding thought, just the chitter-chatter of hundreds of little thoughts, as if the conductors might be gossiping.

The yellow cliffs stood like a sentinel wall and above the path that led to the escarpment, the tractor loomed like a straddled beetle against the early dawn.

Alder rose from the podium to greet them, a disreputable-looking gnome on gnarly legs.

The Earth delegation squatted on the ground. Delbert, from his perch on Smith’s shoulder, made a face at Alder.

Silence held for a moment and then Mackenzie, dispensing with formalities, spoke to Alder. “We rescued Delbert for you,” he told the gnome. “We brought him back.”

Alder scowled and his thoughts were fuzzy with disgust. “We do not want him back,” he said.

Mackenzie, taken aback, stammered. “Why, we thought … that is, he’s one of you … we went to a lot of trouble to rescue him—”

“He’s a nuisance,” declared Alder. “He’s a disgrace. He’s a no-good. He’s always trying things.”

“You’re not so hot yourself,” piped Delbert’s thought. “Just a bunch of fuddy-duddies. A crowd of corn peddlers. You’re sore at me because I want to be different. Because I dust it off—”

“You see,” said Alder to Mackenzie, “what he is like.”

“Why, yes,” agreed Mackenzie, “but there are times when new ideas have some values. Perhaps he may be—”

Alder leveled an accusing finger at Wade. “He was all right until you took to hanging around,” he screamed. “Then he picked up some of your ideas. You contaminated him. Your silly notions about music—” Alder’s thoughts gulped in sheer exasperation, then took up again. “Why did you come? No one asked you to. Why don’t you mind your own business?”

Wade, red faced behind his beard, seemed close to apoplexy.

“I’ve never been so insulted in all my life,” he howled. He thumped his chest with a doubled fist. “Back on Earth I wrote great symphonies myself. I never held with frivolous music. I never—”

“Crawl back into your hole,” Delbert shrilled at Alder. “You guys don’t know what music is. You saw out the same stuff day after day. You never lay it in the groove. You never get gated up. You all got long underwear.”

Alder waved knotted fists above his head and hopped up and down in rage. “Such language!” he shrieked. “Never was the like heard here before.”

The whole Bowl was yammering. Yammering with clashing thoughts of rage and insult.

“Now, wait,” Mackenzie shouted. “All of you, quiet down!”

Wade puffed out his breath, turned a shade less purple. Alder squatted back on his haunches, unknotted his fists, tried his best to look composed. The clangor of thought subsided to a murmur.

“You’re sure about this?” Mackenzie asked Alder. “Sure you don’t want Delbert back.”

“Mister,” said Alder, “there never was a happier day in Melody Bowl than the day we found him gone.”

A rising murmur of assent from the other conductors underscored his words.

“We have some others we’d like to get rid of, too,” said Alder.

From far off across the Bowl came a yelping thought of derision.

“You see,” said Alder, looking owlishly at Mackenzie, “what it is like. What we have to contend with. All because this … this … this—”

Glaring at Wade, thoughts failed him. Carefully he settled back upon his haunches, composed his face again.

“If the rest were gone,” he said, “we could settle down. But as it is, these few keep us in an uproar all the time. We can’t concentrate, we can’t really work. We can’t do the things we want to do.”

Mackenzie pushed back his hat and scratched his head.

“Alder,” he declared, “you sure are in a mess.”

“I was hoping,” Alder said, “that you might be able to take them off our hands.”

“Take them off your hands!” yelled Smith. “I’ll say we’ll take them! We’ll take as many—”

Mackenzie nudged Smith in the ribs with his elbow, viciously. Smith gulped into silence. Mackenzie tried to keep his face straight.

“You can’t take them trees,” said Nellie, icily. “It’s against the law.”

Mackenzie gasped. “The law?”

“Sure, the regulations. The company’s got regulations. Or don’t you know that? Never bothered to read them, probably. Just like you. Never pay no attention to the things you should.”

“Nellie,” said Smith savagely, “you keep out of this. I guess if we want to do a little favor for Alder here—”

“But it’s against the law!” screeched Nellie.

“I know,” said Mackenzie. “Section 34 of the chapter on Relations with Extraterrestrial Life. ‘No member of this company shall interfere in any phase of the internal affairs of another race.’”

“That’s it,” said Nellie, pleased with herself. “And if you take some of these trees, you’ll be meddling in a quarrel that you have no business having anything to do with.”

Mackenzie flipped his hands. “You see,” he said to Alder.

“We’ll give you a monopoly on our music,” tempted Alder. “We’ll let you know when we have anything. We won’t let the Groomies have it and we’ll keep our prices right.”

Nellie shook her head. “No,” she said.

Alder bargained. “Bushel and a half instead of two bushel.”

“No,” said Nellie.

“It’s a deal,” declared Mackenzie. “Just point out your duds and we’ll haul them away.”

“But Nellie said no,” Alder pointed out. “And you say yes. I don’t understand.”

“We’ll take care of Nellie,” Smith told him, soberly.

“You won’t take them trees,” said Nellie. “I won’t let you take them. I’ll see to that.”

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Mackenzie said. “Just point out the ones you want to get rid of.”

Alder said primly: “You’ve made us very happy.”

Mackenzie got up and looked around. “Where’s the Encyclopedia?” he asked.

“He cleared out a minute ago,” said Smith. “Headed back for the car.”

Mackenzie saw him, scuttling swiftly up the path towards the cliff top.

It was topsy-turvy and utterly crazy, like something out of that old book for children written by a man named Carroll. There was no sense to it. It was like taking candy from a baby.

Walking up the cliff path back to the tractor, Mackenzie knew it was, felt that he should pinch himself to know it was no dream.

He had hoped—just hoped—to avert relentless, merciless war against Earthmen throughout the planet by bringing back the stolen music tree. And here he was, with other music trees for his own, and a bargain thrown in to boot.

There was something wrong, Mackenzie told himself, something utterly and nonsensically wrong. But he couldn’t put his finger on it.

There was no need to worry, he told himself. The thing to do was to get those trees and get out of there before Alder and the others changed their minds.

“It’s funny,” Wade said behind him.

“It is,” agreed Mackenzie. “Everything is funny here.”

“I mean about those trees,” said Wade. “I’d swear Delbert was all right. So were all the others. They played the same music the others played. If there had been any faulty orchestration, any digression from form, I am sure I would have noticed it.”

Mackenzie spun around and grasped Wade by the arm. “You mean they weren’t lousing up the concerts? That Delbert, here, played just like the rest?”

Wade nodded.

“That ain’t so,” shrilled Delbert from his perch on Smith’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t play like the rest of them. I want to kick the stuff around. I always dig it up and hang it out the window. I dream it up and send it away out wide.”

“Where’d you pick up that lingo?” Mackenzie snapped. “I never heard anything like it before.”

“I learned it from him,” declared Delbert, pointing at Wade.

Wade’s face was purple and his eyes were glassy.

“It’s practically prehistoric,” he gulped. “It’s terms that were used back in the twentieth century to describe a certain kind of popular rendition. I read about it in a history covering the origins of music. There was a glossary of the terms. They were so fantastic they stuck in my mind.”

Smith puckered his lips, whistling soundlessly. “So that’s how he picked it up. He caught it from your thoughts. Same principle the Encyclopedia uses, although not so advanced.”

“He lacks the Encyclopedia’s distinction,” explained Mackenzie. “He didn’t know the stuff he was picking up was something that had happened long ago.”

“I have a notion to wring his neck,” Wade threatened.

“You’ll keep your hands off him,” grated Mackenzie. “This deal stinks to the high heavens, but seven music trees are seven music trees. Screwy deal or not, I’m going through with it.”

“Look, fellows,” said Nellie. “I wish you wouldn’t do it.”

Mackenzie puckered his brow. “What’s the matter with you, Nellie? Why did you make that uproar about the law down there? There’s a rule, sure, but in a thing like this it’s different. The company can afford to have a rule or two broken for seven music trees. You know what will happen, don’t you, when we get those trees back home. We can charge a thousand bucks a throw to hear them and have to use a club to keep the crowds away.”

“And the best of it is,” Smith pointed out, “that once they hear them, they’ll have to come again. They’ll never get tired of them. Instead of that, every time they hear them, they’ll want to hear them all the more. It’ll get to be an obsession, a part of the people’s life. They’ll steal, murder, do anything so they can hear the trees.”

“That,” said Mackenzie, soberly, “is the one thing I’m afraid of.”

“I only tried to stop you,” Nellie said. “I know as well as you do that the law won’t hold in a thing like this. But there was something else. The way the conductors sounded. Almost as if they were jeering at us. Like a gang of boys out in the street hooting at someone they just pulled a fast one on.”

“You’re batty,” Smith declared.

“We have to go through with it,” Mackenzie announced, flatly. “If anyone ever found we’d let a chance like this slip through our fingers, they’d crucify us for it.”

“You’re going to get in touch with Harper?” Smith asked.

Mackenzie nodded. “He’ll have to get hold of Earth, have them send out a ship right away to take back the trees.”

“I still think,” said Nellie, “there’s a nigger in the woodpile.”

Mackenzie flipped the toggle and the visiphone went dead.

Harper had been hard to convince. Mackenzie, thinking about it, couldn’t blame him much. After all, it did sound incredible. But then, this whole planet was incredible.

Mackenzie reached into his pocket and hauled forth his pipe and pouch. Nellie probably would raise hell about helping to dig up those other six trees, but she’d have to get over it. They’d have to work as fast as they could. They couldn’t spend more than one night up here on the rim. There wasn’t enough serum for longer than that. One jug of the stuff wouldn’t go too far.

Suddenly excited shouts came from outside the car, shouts of consternation.

With a single leap, Mackenzie left the chair and jumped for the door. Outside, he almost bumped into Smith, who came running around the corner of the tractor. Wade, who had been down at the cliff’s edge, was racing toward them.

“It’s Nellie,” shouted Smith. “Look at that robot!”

Nellie was marching toward them, dragging in her wake a thing that bounced and struggled. A rifle-tree grove fired a volley and one of the pellets caught Nellie in the shoulder, puffing into dust, staggering her a little.

The bouncing thing was the Encyclopedia. Nellie had hold of his taproot, was hauling him unceremoniously across the bumpy ground.

“Put him down!” Mackenzie yelled at her. “Let him go!”

“He stole the serum,” howled Nellie. “He stole the serum and broke it on a rock!”

She swung the Encyclopedia toward them in a looping heave. The intelligent vegetable bounced a couple of times, struggled to get right side up, then scurried off a few feet, root coiled tightly against its underside.

Smith moved toward it threateningly. “I ought to kick the living innards out of you,” he yelled. “We need that serum. You knew why we needed it.”

“You threaten me with force,” said the Encyclopedia. “The most primitive method of compulsion.”

“It works,” Smith told him shortly.

The Encyclopedia’s thoughts were unruffled, almost serene, as clear and concise as ever. “You have a law that forbids your threatening or harming any alien thing.”

“Chum,” declared Smith, “you better get wised up on laws. There are times when certain laws don’t hold. And this is one of them.”

“Just a minute,” said Mackenzie. He spoke to the Encyclopedia. “What is your understanding of a law?”

“It is a rule you live by,” the Encyclopedia said. “It is something that is necessary. You cannot violate it.”

“He got that from Nellie,” said Smith.

“You think because there is a law against it, we won’t take the trees?”

“There is a law against it,” said the Encyclopedia. “You cannot take the trees.”

“So as soon as you found that out, you lammed up here and stole the serum, eh?”

“He’s figuring on indoctrinating us,” Nellie explained. “Maybe that word ain’t so good. Maybe conditioning is better. It’s sort of mixed up. I don’t know if I’ve got it straight. He took the serum so we would hear the trees without being able to defend ourselves against them. He figured when we heard the music, we’d go ahead and take the trees.”

“Law or no law?”

“That’s it,” Nellie said. “Law or no law.”

Smith whirled on the robot. “What kind of jabber is this? How do you know what he was planning?”

“I read his mind,” said Nellie. “Hard to get at, the thing that he was planning, because he kept it deep. But some of it jarred up where I could reach it when you threatened him.”

“You can’t do that!” shrieked the Encyclopedia. “Not you! Not a machine!”

Mackenzie laughed shortly. “Too bad, big boy, but she can. She’s been doing it.”

Smith stared at Mackenzie.

“It’s all right,” Mackenzie said. “It isn’t any bluff. She told me about it last night.”

“You are unduly alarmed,” the Encyclopedia said. “You are putting a wrong interpretation—”

A quiet voice spoke, almost as if it were a voice inside Mackenzie’s mind.

“Don’t believe a thing he tells you, pal. Don’t fall for any of his lies.”

“Nicodemus! You know something about this?”

“It’s the trees,” said Nicodemus. “The music does something to you. It changes you. Makes you different than you were before. Wade is different. He doesn’t know it, but he is.”

“If you mean the music chains one to it, that is true,” said Wade. “I may as well admit it. I could not live without the music. I could not leave the Bowl. Perhaps you gentlemen have thought that I would go back with you. But I cannot go. I cannot leave. It will work the same with anyone. Alexander was here for a while when he ran short of serum. Doctors treated him and he was all right, but he came back. He had to come back. He couldn’t stay away.”

“It isn’t only that,” declared Nicodemus. “It changes you, too, in other ways. It can change you any way it wants to. Change your way of thinking. Change your viewpoints.”

Wade strode forward. “It isn’t true,” he yelled. “I’m the same as when I came here.”

“You heard things,” said Nicodemus, “felt things in the music you couldn’t understand. Things you wanted to understand, but couldn’t. Strange emotions that you yearned to share, but could never reach. Strange thoughts that tantalized you for days.”

Wade sobered, stared at them with haunted eyes.

“That was the way it was,” he whispered. “That was just the way it was.”

He glanced around, like a trapped animal seeking escape.

“But I don’t feel any different,” he mumbled. “I still am human. I think like a man, act like a man.”

“Of course you do,” said Nicodemus. “Otherwise you would have been scared away. If you had known what was happening to you, you wouldn’t let it happen. And you have had less than a year of it. Less than a year of this conditioning. Five years and you would be less human. Ten years and you would be beginning to be the kind of thing the trees want you to be.”

“And we were going to take some of those trees to Earth!” Smith shouted. “Seven of them! So the people of the Earth could hear them. Listen to them, night after night. The whole world listening to them on the radio. A whole world being conditioned, being changed by seven music trees.”

“But why?” asked Wade, bewildered.

“Why did men domesticate animals?” Mackenzie asked. “You wouldn’t find out by asking the animals, for they don’t know. There is just as much point asking a dog why he was domesticated as there is in asking us why the trees want to condition us. For some purpose of their own, undoubtedly, that is perfectly clear and logical to them. A purpose that undoubtedly never can be clear and logical to us.”

“Nicodemus,” said the Encyclopedia, and his thought was deadly cold, “you have betrayed your own.”

Mackenzie laughed harshly. “You’re wrong there,” he told the vegetable, “because Nicodemus isn’t a plant, any more. He’s a human. The same thing has happened to him as you want to have happen to us. He has become a human in everything but physical make-up. He thinks as a man does. His viewpoints are ours, not yours.”

“That is right,” said Nicodemus. “I am a man.”

A piece of cloth ripped savagely and for an instant the group was blinded by a surge of energy that leaped from the thicket a hundred yards away. Smith gurgled once in sudden agony and the energy was gone.

Frozen momentarily by surprise, Mackenzie watched Smith stagger, face tight with pain, hand clapped to his side. Slowly the man wilted, sagged in the middle and went down.

Silently, Nellie leaped forward, was sprinting for the thicket. With a hoarse cry, Mackenzie bent over Smith.

Smith grinned at him, a twisted grin. His mouth worked, but no words came. His hand slid away from his side and he went limp, but his chest rose and fell with a slightly slower breath. His life blanket had shifted its position to cover the wounded side.

Mackenzie straightened up, hauling the pistol from his belt. A man had risen from the thicket, was leveling a gun at the charging Nellie. With a wild yell, Mackenzie shot from the hip. The lashing charge missed the man but half the thicket disappeared in a blinding sheet of flame.

The man with the gun ducked as the flame puffed out at him and in that instant Nellie closed. The man yelled once, a long-drawn howl of terror as Nellie swung him above her head and dashed him down. The smoking thicket hid the rest of it. Mackenzie, pistol hanging limply by his side, watched Nellie’s right fist lift and fall with brutal precision, heard the thud of life being beaten from a human body.

Sickened, he turned back to Smith. Wade was kneeling beside the wounded man. He looked up.

“He seems to be unconscious.”

Mackenzie nodded. “The blanket put him out. Gave him an anesthetic. It’ll take care of him.”

Mackenzie glanced up sharply at a scurry in the grass. The Encyclopedia, taking advantage of the moment, was almost out of sight, scuttling toward a grove of rifle trees.

A step grated behind him.

“It was Alexander,” Nellie said. “He won’t bother us no more.”

Nelson Harper, factor at the post, was lighting up his pipe when the visiphone signal buzzed and the light flashed on.

Startled, Harper reached out and snapped on the set. Mackenzie’s face came in, a face streaked with dirt and perspiration, stark with fear. He waited for no greeting. His lips were already moving even as the plate flickered and cleared.

“It’s all off, chief,” he said. “The deal is off. I can’t bring in those trees.”

“You got to bring them in,” yelled Harper. “I’ve already called Earth. I got them turning handsprings. They say it’s the greatest thing that ever happened. They’re sending out a ship within an hour.”

“Call them back and tell them not to bother,” Mackenzie snapped.

“But you told me everything was set,” yelped Harper. “You told me nothing could happen. You said you’d bring them in if you had to crawl on hands and knees and pack them on your back.”

“I told you every word of that,” agreed Mackenzie. “Probably even more. But I didn’t know what I know now.”

Harper groaned. “Galactic is plastering every front page in the Solar System with the news. Earth radios right now are bellowing it out from Mercury to Pluto. Before another hour is gone every man, woman and child will know those trees are coming to Earth. And once they know that, there’s nothing we can do. Do you understand that, Mackenzie? We have to get them there!”

“I can’t do it, chief,” Mackenzie insisted, stubbornly.

“Why can’t you?” screamed Harper. “So help me Hannah, if you don’t—”

“I can’t bring them in because Nellie’s burning them. She’s down in the Bowl right now with a flamer. When she’s through, there won’t be any music trees.”

“Go out and stop her!” shrieked Harper. “What are you sitting there for! Go out and stop her! Blast her if you have to. Do anything, but stop her! That crazy robot—”

“I told her to,” snapped Mackenzie. “I ordered her to do it. When I get through here, I’m going down and help her.”

“You’re crazy, man!” yelled Harper. “Stark, staring crazy. They’ll throw the book at you for this. You’ll be lucky if you just get life—”

Two darting hands loomed in the plate, hands that snapped down and closed around Mackenzie’s throat, hands that dragged him away and left the screen blank, but with a certain blurring motion, as if two men might be fighting for their lives just in front of it.

“Mackenzie!” screamed Harper. “Mackenzie!”

Something smashed into the screen and shattered it, leaving the broken glass gaping in jagged shards.

Harper clawed at the visiphone. “Mackenzie! Mackenzie, what’s happening!”

In answer the screen exploded in a flash of violent flame, howled like a screeching banshee and then went dead.

Harper stood frozen in the room, listening to the faint purring of the radio. His pipe fell from his hand and bounced along the floor, spilling burned tobacco.

Cold, clammy fear closed down upon him, squeezing his heart. A fear that twisted him and mocked him. Galactic would break him for this, he knew. Send him out to some of the jungle planets as the rankest subordinate. He would be marked for life, a man not to be trusted, a man who had failed to uphold the prestige of the company.

Suddenly a faint spark of hope stirred deep within him. If he could get there soon enough! if he could get to Melody Bowl in time, he might stop this madness. Might at least save something, save a few of the precious trees.

The flier was in the compound, waiting. Within half an hour he could be above the Bowl.

He leaped for the door, shoved it open and even as he did a pellet whistled past his cheek and exploded into a puff of dust against the door frame. Instinctively, he ducked and another pellet brushed his hair. A third caught him in the leg with stinging force and brought him down. A fourth puffed dust into his face.

He fought his way to his knees, was staggered by another shot that slammed into his side. He raised his right arm to protect his face and a sledge-hammer blow slapped his wrist. Pain flowed along his arm and in sheer panic he turned and scrambled on hands and knees across the threshold, kicked the door shut with his foot.

Sitting flat on the floor, he held his right wrist in his left hand. He tried to make his fingers wiggle and they wouldn’t. The wrist, he knew, was broken.

After weeks of being off the beam the rifle tree outside the compound suddenly had regained its aim and gone on a rampage.

Mackenzie raised himself off the floor and braced himself with one elbow, while with the other hand he fumbled at his throbbing throat. The interior of the tractor danced with wavy motion and his head thumped and pounded with pain.

Slowly, carefully, he inched himself back so he could lean against the wall. Gradually the room stopped rocking, but the pounding in his head went on.

Someone was standing in the doorway of the tractor and he fought to focus his eyes, trying to make out who it was.

A voice screeched across his nerves.

“I’m taking your blankets. You’ll get them back when you decide to leave the trees alone.”

Mackenzie tried to fashion words, but all he accomplished was a croak. He tried again.

“Wade?” he asked.

It was Wade, he saw.

The man stood within the doorway, one hand clutching a pair of blankets, the other holding a gun.

“You’re crazy, Wade,” he whispered. “We have to burn the trees. The human race never would be safe. Even if they fail this time, they’ll try again. And again—and yet again. And some day they will get us. Even without going to Earth they can get us. They can twist us to their purpose with recordings alone. Long distance propaganda. Take a bit longer, but it will do the job as well.”

“They are beautiful,” said Wade. “The most beautiful things in all the universe. I can’t let you destroy them. You must not destroy them.”

“But can’t you see,” croaked Mackenzie, “that’s the thing that makes them so dangerous. Their beauty, the beauty of their music, is fatal. No one can resist it.”

“It was the thing I lived by,” Wade told him, soberly. “You say it made me something that was not quite human. But what difference does that make. Must racial purity, in thought and action, be a fetish that would chain us to a drab existence when something better, something greater, is offered. And we never would have known. That is the best of it all, we never would have known. They would have changed us, yes, but so slowly, so gradually, that we would not have suspected. Our decisions and our actions and our way of thought would still have seemed to be our own. The trees never would have been anything more than something cultural.”

“They want our mechanization,” said Mackenzie. “Plants can’t develop machines. Given that, they might have taken us along a road we, in our rightful heritage, never would have taken.”

“How can we be sure,” asked Wade, “that our heritage would have guided us aright?”

Mackenzie slid straighter against the wall. His head still throbbed and his throat still ached.

“You’ve been thinking about this?” he asked.

Wade nodded. “At first there was the natural reaction of horror. But, logically, that reaction is erroneous. Our schools teach our children a way of life. Our press strives to formulate our adult opinion and belief. The trees were doing no more to us than we do to ourselves. And perhaps, for a purpose no more selfish.”

Mackenzie shook his head. “We must live our own life. We must follow the path the attributes of humanity decree that we should follow. And anyway, you’re wasting your time.”

“I don’t understand,” said Wade.

“Nellie already is burning the trees,” Mackenzie told him. “I sent her out before I made the call to Harper.”

“No, she’s not,” said Wade.

Mackenzie sat bolt upright. “What do you mean?”

Wade flipped the pistol as Mackenzie moved as if to regain his feet.

“It doesn’t matter what I mean,” he snapped. “Nellie isn’t burning any trees. She isn’t in a position to burn any trees. And neither are you, for I’ve taken both your flamers. And the tractor won’t run, either. I’ve seen to that. So the only thing that you can do is stay right here.”

Mackenzie motioned toward Smith, lying on the floor. “You’re taking his blanket, too?”

Wade nodded.

“But you can’t. Smith will die. Without that blanket he doesn’t have a chance. The blanket could have healed the wound, kept him fed correctly, kept him warm—”

“That,” said Wade, “is all the more reason that you come to terms directly.”

“Your terms,” said Mackenzie, “are that we leave the trees unharmed.”

“Those are my terms.”

Mackenzie shook his head. “I can’t take the chance,” he said.

“When you decide, just step out and shout,” Wade told him. “I’ll stay in calling distance.”

He backed slowly from the door.

Smith needed warmth and food. In the hour since his blanket had been taken from him he had regained consciousness, had mumbled feverishly and tossed about, his hand clawing at his wounded side.

Squatting beside him, Mackenzie had tried to quiet him, had felt a wave of slow terror as he thought of the hours ahead.

There was no food in the tractor, no means for making heat. There was no need for such provision so long as they had had their life blankets—but now the blankets were gone. There was a first-aid cabinet and with the materials that he found there, Mackenzie did his fumbling best, but there was nothing to relieve Smith’s pain, nothing to control his fever. For treatment such as that they had relied upon the blankets.

The atomic motor might have been rigged up to furnish heat, but Wade had taken the firing mechanism control.

Night was falling and that meant the air would grow colder. Not too cold to live, of course, but cold enough to spell doom to a man in Smith’s condition.

Mackenzie squatted on his heels and stared at Smith.

“If I could only find Nellie,” he thought.

He had tried to find her—briefly. He had raced along the rim of the Bowl for a mile or so, but had seen no sign of her. He had been afraid to go farther, afraid to stay too long from the man back in the tractor.

Smith mumbled and Mackenzie bent low to try to catch the words. But there were no words.

Slowly he rose and headed for the door. First of all, he needed heat. Then food. The heat came first. An open fire wasn’t the best way to make heat, of course, but it was better than nothing.

The uprooted music tree, balled roots silhouetted against the sky, loomed before him in the dusk. He found a few dead branches and tore them off. They would do to start the fire. After that he would have to rely on green wood to keep it going. Tomorrow he could forage about for suitable fuel.

In the Bowl below, the music trees were tuning up for the evening concert.

Back in the tractor, he found a knife, carefully slivered several of the branches for easy lighting, piled them ready for his pocket lighter.

The lighter flared and a tiny figure hopped up on the threshold of the tractor, squatting there, blinking at the light.

Startled, Mackenzie held the lighter without touching it to the wood, stared at the thing that perched in the doorway.

Delbert’s squeaky thought drilled into his brain.

“What you doing?”

“Building a fire,” Mackenzie told him.

“What’s a fire?”

“It’s a … it’s a … say, don’t you know what a fire is?”

“Nope,” said Delbert.

“It’s a chemical action,” Mackenzie said. “It breaks up matter and releases energy in the form of heat.”

“What you building a fire with?” asked Delbert, blinking in the flare of the lighter.

“With branches from a tree.”

Delbert’s eyes widened and his thought was jittery.

“A tree?”

“Sure, a tree. Wood. It burns. It gives off heat. I need heat.”

“What tree?”

“Why—” And then Mackenzie stopped with sudden realization. His thumb relaxed and the flame went out.

Delbert shrieked at him in sudden terror and anger. “It’s my tree! You’re building a fire with my tree!”

Mackenzie sat in silence.

“When you burn my tree, it’s gone,” yelled Delbert. “Isn’t that right? When you burn my tree, it’s gone?”

Mackenzie nodded.

“But why do you do it?” shrilled Delbert.

“I need heat,” said Mackenzie, doggedly. “If I don’t have heat, my friend will die. It’s the only way I can get heat.”

“But my tree!”

Mackenzie shrugged. “I need a fire, see? And I’m getting it any way I can.”

He flipped his thumb again and the lighter flared.

“But I never did anything to you,” Delbert howled, rocking on the metal door sill. “I’m your friend, I am. I never did a thing to hurt you.”

“No?” asked Mackenzie.

“No,” yelled Delbert.

“What about that scheme of yours?” asked Mackenzie. “Trying to trick me into taking trees to Earth?”

“That wasn’t my idea,” yipped Delbert. “It wasn’t any of the trees’ ideas. The Encyclopedia thought it up.”

A bulky form loomed outside the door. “Someone talking about me?” it asked.

The Encyclopedia was back again.

Arrogantly, he shouldered Delbert aside, stepped into the tractor.

“I saw Wade,” he said.

Mackenzie glared at him. “So you figured it would be safe to come.”

“Certainly,” said the Encyclopedia. “Your formula of force counts for nothing now. You have no means to enforce it.”

Mackenzie’s hand shot out and grasped the Encyclopedia with a vicious grip, hurled him into the interior of the tractor.

“Just try to get out this door,” he snarled. “You’ll soon find out if the formula of force amounts to anything.”

The Encyclopedia picked himself up, shook himself like a ruffled hen. But his thought was cool and calm.

“I can’t see what this avails you.”

“It gives us soup,” Mackenzie snapped.

He sized the Encyclopedia up. “Good vegetable soup. Something like cabbage. Never cared much for cabbage soup, myself, but—”

“Soup?”

“Yeah, soup. Stuff to eat. Food.”

“Food!” The Encyclopedia’s thought held a tremor of anxiety. “You would use me as food.”

“Why not?” Mackenzie asked him. “You’re nothing but a vegetable. An intelligent vegetable, granted, but still a vegetable.”

He felt the Encyclopedia’s groping thought-fingers prying into his mind.

“Go ahead,” he told him, “but you won’t like what you find.”

The Encyclopedia’s thoughts almost gasped. “You withheld this from me!” he charged.

“We withheld nothing from you,” Mackenzie declared. “We never had occasion to think of it … to remember to what use Men at one time put plants, to what use we still put plants in certain cases. The only reason we don’t use them so extensively now is that we have advanced beyond the need of them. Let that need exist again and—”

“You ate us,” strummed the Encyclopedia. “You used us to build your shelters! You destroyed us to create heat for your selfish purposes!”

“Pipe down,” Mackenzie told him. “It’s the way we did it that gets you. The idea that we thought we had a right to. That we went out and took, without even asking, never wondering what the plant might think about it. That hurts your racial dignity.”

He stopped, then moved closer to the doorway. From the Bowl below came the first strains of the music. The tuning up, the preliminary to the concert, was over.

“O.K.,” Mackenzie said, “I’ll hurt it some more. Even you are nothing but a plant to me. Just because you’ve learned some civilized tricks doesn’t make you my equal. It never did. We humans can’t slur off the experiences of the past so easily. It would take thousands of years of association with things like you before we even began to regard you as anything other than a plant, a thing that we used in the past and might use again.”

“Still cabbage soup,” said the Encyclopedia.

“Still cabbage soup,” Mackenzie told him.

The music stopped. Stopped dead still, in the middle of a note.

“See,” said Mackenzie, “even the music fails you.”

Silence rolled at them in engulfing waves and through the stillness came another sound, the clop, clop of heavy, plodding feet.

“Nellie!” yelled Mackenzie.

A bulky shadow loomed in the darkness.

“Yeah, chief, it’s me,” said Nellie. “I brung you something.”

She dumped Wade across the doorway.

Wade rolled over and groaned. There were skittering, flapping sounds as two fluttering shapes detached themselves from Wade’s shoulders.

“Nellie,” said Mackenzie, harshly, “there was no need to beat him up. You should have brought him back just as he was and let me take care of him.”

“Gee, boss,” protested Nellie. “I didn’t beat him up. He was like that when I found him.”

Nicodemus was clawing his way to Mackenzie’s shoulder, while Smith’s life blanket scuttled for the corner where his master lay.

“It was us, boss,” piped Nicodemus. “We laid him out.”

“You laid him out?”

“Sure, there was two of us and only one of him. We fed him poison.”

Nicodemus settled into place on Mackenzie’s shoulders.

“I didn’t like him,” he declared. “He wasn’t nothing like you, boss. I didn’t want to change like him. I wanted to stay like you.”

“This poison?” asked Mackenzie. “Nothing fatal, I hope.”

“Sure not, pal,” Nicodemus told him. “We only made him sick. He didn’t know what was happening until it was too late to do anything about it. We bargained with him, we did. We told him we’d quit feeding it to him if he took us back. He was on his way here, too, but he’d never have made it if it hadn’t been for Nellie.”

“Chief,” pleaded Nellie, “when he gets so he knows what it’s all about, won’t you let me have him for about five minutes?”

“No,” said Mackenzie.

“He strung me up,” wailed Nellie. “He hid in the cliff and lassoed me and left me hanging there. It took me hours to get loose. Honest, I wouldn’t hurt him much. I’d just kick him around a little, gentle-like.”

From the cliff top came the rustling of grass as if hundreds of little feet were advancing upon them.

“We got visitors,” said Nicodemus.

The visitors, Mackenzie saw, were the conductors, dozens of little gnomelike figures that moved up and squatted on their haunches, faintly luminous eyes blinking at them.

One of them shambled forward. As he came closer, Mackenzie saw that it was Alder.

“Well?” Mackenzie demanded.

“We came to tell you the deal is off,” Alder squeaked. “Delbert came and told us.”

“Told you what?”

“About what you do to trees.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

“But you made the deal,” Mackenzie told him. “You can’t back out now. Why, Earth is waiting breathless—”

“Don’t try to kid me,” snapped Alder. “You don’t want us any more than we want you. It was a dirty trick to start with, but it wasn’t any of our doing. The Encyclopedia talked us into it. He told us we had a duty. A duty to our race. To act as missionaries to the inferior races of the Galaxy.

“We didn’t take to it at first. Music, you see, is our life. We have been creating music for so long that our origin is lost in the dim antiquity of a planet that long ago has passed its zenith of existence. We will be creating music in that far day when the planet falls apart beneath our feet. You live by a code of accomplishment by action. We live by a code of accomplishment by music. Kadmar’s Red Sun symphony was a greater triumph for us than the discovery of a new planetary system is for you. It pleased us when you liked our music. It will please us if you still like our music, even after what has happened. But we will not allow you to take any of us to Earth.”

“The monopoly on the music still stands?” asked Mackenzie.

“It still stands. Come whenever you want to and record my symphony. When there are others we will let you know.”

“And the propaganda in the music?”

“From now on,” Alder promised, “the propaganda is out. If, from now on, our music changes you, it will change you through its own power. It may do that, but we will not try to shape your lives.”

“How can we depend on that?”

“Certainly,” said Alder. “There are certain tests you could devise. Not that they will be necessary.”

“We’ll devise the tests,” declared Mackenzie. “Sorry, but we can’t trust you.”

“I’m sorry that you can’t,” said Alder, and he sounded as if he were.

“I was going to burn you,” Mackenzie said, snapping his words off brutally. “Destroy you. Wipe you out. There was nothing you could have done about it. Nothing you could have done to stop me.”

“You’re still barbarians,” Alder told him. “You have conquered the distances between the stars, you have built a great civilization, but your methods are still ruthless and degenerate.”

“The Encyclopedia calls it a formula of force,” Mackenzie said. “No matter what you call it, it still works. It’s the thing that took us up. I warn you. If you ever again try to trick the human race, there will be hell to pay. A human being will destroy anything to save himself. Remember that—we destroy anything that threatens us.”

Something swished out of the tractor door and Mackenzie whirled about.

“It’s the Encyclopedia!” he yelled. “He’s trying to get away! Nellie!”

There was a thrashing rustle. “Got him, boss,” said Nellie.

The robot came out of the darkness, dragging the Encyclopedia along by his leafy topknot.

Mackenzie turned back to the composers, but the composers were gone. The grass rustled eerily towards the cliff edge as dozens of tiny feet scurried through it.

“What now?” asked Nellie. “Do we burn the trees?”

Mackenzie shook his head. “No, Nellie. We won’t burn them.”

“We got them scared,” said Nellie. “Scared pink with purple spots.”

“Perhaps we have,” said Mackenzie. “Let’s hope so, at least. But it isn’t only that they’re scared. They probably loathe us and that is better yet. Like we’d loathe some form of life that bred and reared men for food—that thought of Man as nothing else than food. All the time they’ve thought of themselves as the greatest intellectual force in the universe. We’ve given them a jolt. We’ve scared them and hurt their pride and shook their confidence. They’ve run up against something that is more than a match for them. Maybe they’ll think twice again before they try any more shenanigans.”

Down in the Bowl the music began again.

Mackenzie went in to look at Smith. The man was sleeping peacefully, his blanket wrapped around him. Wade sat in a corner, head held in his hands.

Outside, a rocket murmured and Nellie yelled. Mackenzie spun on his heel and dashed through the door. A ship was swinging over the Bowl, lighting up the area with floods. Swiftly it swooped down, came to ground a hundred yards away.

Harper, right arm in a sling, tumbled out and raced toward them.

“You didn’t burn them!” he was yelling. “You didn’t burn them!”

Mackenzie shook his head.

Harper pounded him on the back with his good hand. “Knew you wouldn’t. Knew you wouldn’t all the time. Just kidding the chief, eh? Having a little fun.”

“Not exactly fun.”

“About them trees,” said Harper. “We can’t take them back to Earth, after all.”

“I told you that,” Mackenzie said.

“Earth just called me, half an hour ago,” said Harper. “Seems there’s a law, passed centuries ago. Against bringing alien plants to Earth. Some lunkhead once brought a bunch of stuff from Mars that just about ruined Earth, so they passed the law. Been there all the time, forgotten.”

Mackenzie nodded. “Someone dug it up.”

“That’s right,” said Harper. “And slapped an injunction on Galactic. We can’t touch those trees.”

“You wouldn’t have anyhow,” said Mackenzie. “They wouldn’t go.”

“But you made the deal! They were anxious to go—”

“That,” Mackenzie told him, “was before they found out we used plants for food—and other things.”

“But … but—”

“To them,” said Mackenzie, “we’re just a gang of ogres. Something they’ll scare the little plants with. Tell them if they don’t be quiet the humans will get ’em.”

Nellie came around the corner of the tractor, still hauling the Encyclopedia by his topknot.

“Hey,” yelled Harper, “what goes on here?”

“We’ll have to build a concentration camp,” said Mackenzie. “Big high fence.” He motioned with his thumb toward the Encyclopedia.

Harper stared. “But he hasn’t done anything!”

“Nothing but try to take over the human race,” Mackenzie said.

Harper sighed. “That makes two fences we got to build. That rifle tree back at the post is shooting up the place.”

Mackenzie grinned. “Maybe the one fence will do for the both of them.”