Donald A. Wollheim (ed) (25 page)

Lundy
didn't like them.

The weeds grew in thicker and closer. They
bulged out their roots, in over the stone edges. The flowers opened their
bright hungry mouths and yearned at Lundy, reaching.

Reaching.
Not
quite touching. Not yet.

He was tired. The brandy and the
benzedrine
began to die in him. He changed his oxygen cylinder. That helped, but not much.
He took more dope, but he was afraid to go heavy on it lest he drive his heart
too hard. His legs turned numb.

He hadn't slept for a long time. Tracking
Farrell hadn't been any breeze, and taking him—and
It—
had
been plain and fancy hell. Lundy was only human. He was tired.
Bushed.
Cooked.
Beat to the socks.

He sat down and rested a while, turning off his light to save the
battery. The flowers watched him, glowing in the dark. He closed his
eyas
, but he could still feel them, watching and waiting.

After
a minute or two he got up and went on.

The weeds grew thicker, and taller, and heavier with flowers.

More
benzedrine
,
and damn the heart. The helmet light cut a cold white tunnel through the
blackness. He followed it, walking faster. Weed fronds met and interlaced high
above him, closing him in. Flowers bent inward, downward. Their petals almost
brushed him.
Fleshy petals, hungry and alive.

He started to run, over the wheel-ruts and
the worn hollows of the road that still went somewhere, under the black sea.

Lundy ran clumsily for a long time between
the dark and pressing walls. The flowers got closer. They got close enough to
catch his
vac
-suit, like hands grasping and slipping
and grasping again. He began using the blaster.

He burned off a lot of them that way. They
didn't like it. They began swaying in from their roots and down from the laced
ceiling over his head. They hurt. They were angry. Lundy ran, sobbing without
tears.

The road did him in. It crossed him up,
suddenly, without warning. It ran along smoothly under the tunnel of weeds,
and then it was a broken, jumbled mass of huge stone blocks, tipped up and
thrown around like something a giant's kid got tired of playing with.

And
the weeds had found places to stand in between them.

Lundy tripped and fell, cracking his head
against the back of his helmet. For a moment all he could see was bright light
flashing. Then that stopped, and he realized he must have jarred a connection
loose somewhere because his own light was out.

He began to crawl over a great tilted block.
The flowers burned bright in the darkness.
Bright and close.
Very close. Lundy opened his mouth. Nothing came out but a hoarse animal
whimper. He was still holding a blaster. He fired it off a couple of times, and
then he was on top of the block, lying flat on his belly.

He knew it was the end of the line, because
he couldn't move any more.

The
bright flowers came down through the dark. Lundy lay watching them. His face
was quite blank. His dark eyes held a stubborn hatred, but nothing else.

He watched the flowers fasten on his
vac
-suit and start working. Then, from up ahead, through
the dark close tunnel of the weeds, he saw the light.

It flared out suddenly, like lightning.
A sheet of hot, bright gold cracking out like a whipped banner,
lighting the end of the road.

Lighting the city, and the little procession coming out of

it
.

Lundy didn't believe any of it. He was half
dead already, with his mind floating free of his body and beginning to be
wrapped up in dark clouds. He watched what he saw incuriously.

The golden light died down, and then flared
out twice more, rhythmically. The road ran smooth again beyond the end of the
tunnel, straight across a narrow plain. Beyond that, the city rose.

Lundy couldn't see much of it, because of the
weeds. But it seemed to be a big city. There was a wall around it, of green
marble veined with dusky rose, the edges worn round by centuries of water.
There were broad gates of pure untarnished gold, standing open on golden
pintles
. Beyond them was a vast square paved in cloud-grey
quartz, and the buildings rose around it like the castles Lundy remembered
from Earth and his childhood, when there were clouds of a certain kind at
sunset.

That's what the whole place looked like,
under the flaring golden light.
Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset.
Remote, dreaming in beauty, with the black water drawn across it like a
veil—something never destroyed because it never existed.

The creatures who came from between the
golden gates and down the road were like tiny wisps of those clouds, torn free
by some cold wandering breeze and driven away from the light.

They came drifting toward Lundy. They didn't
seem to be moving fast, but they must have been because quite suddenly they were
among the weeds. There were a lot of them; maybe forty or fifty. They seemed to
be between three and four feet tall, and they were all the same sad, blue-grey,
twilight color.

Lundy couldn't see what they were. They were
vaguely man-shaped, and vaguely finny, and something that was more than vaguely
something else, only he couldn't place it.

He was suddenly beyond caring. The dull black
curtain around his mind got a hole in it, and fear came shrieking through it.
He could feel the working and pulling of his
vac
-suit
where the flowers were chewing on it as though it were his own skin.

He could feel sweat running cold on his body.
In a minute that would be sea water running, and then . . .

Lundy began to fight. His lips peeled back
off his teeth, but he didn't make any noise except his heavy breathing. He
fought the flowers,
pardy
with the blaster, partly
with brute strength. No
science,
no thought.
Just the last blind struggle of an animal that didn't want to die.

The flowers held him. They smothered him,
crushed him down,
wrapped
him in lovely burning petals
of destruction. He seared a lot of them, but there were always more. Lundy
didn't fight long.

He lay on his back, knees drawn up a little toward a rigid, knotted
belly, blind with sweat, his heart kicking him like a logger's boot.
Cold, tense—waiting.

And then the flowers went
away.

They didn't want to. They let go reluctantly, drawing back and snarling
like cats robbed of a fat mouse, making small hungry feints at him. But they
went.

Lundy came nearer fanning off for keeps then
than he ever had. Reaction wrung him out like a wet bar-rag. His heart quit
beating; his body jerked like something on a string.

Then, through a mist that might have been
sweat, or tears, on the edge of the Hereafter, he saw the little blue-grey
people looking down at him.

They hovered in a cloud above him, holding
place with membranes as fluttering and delicate as bird-calls on a windy day.
The membranes ran between arm- and leg-members, both of which had thin flat
swimming-webs. There were suckers on the legs, about where the heels would have
been if they'd had feet.

Their bodies were slender and supple, and
definitely feminine without having any of the usual human characteristics.
They were beautiful. They weren't like anything Lundy had even seen before, or
even dreamed about, but they were beautiful.

They had faces.
Queer
little pixie things without noses.
Their noses were round and tiny and
rather sweet, but their eyes were their dominant feature.

Huge round golden eyes with
pupils of deep brown.
Soft eyes, gentle, inquiring, it made Lundy feel like crying, and so
scared it made him mad.

The flowers kept weaving around hopefully.
When one got too close to Lundy, one of the little people would slap it gently,
the way you would a pet dog, and shoo it away.

"Do
you live?"

Ill

L
undy
wasn't surprised by
the
telepathic voice. Thought-communication was commoner than speech and a lot simpler
in many places on the inhabited worlds. Special gave its men a thorough
training in it. "I live, thanks to you."

There was something in the quality of the
brain he touched that puzzled him. It was like nothing he'd ever met before.

He got to his feet, not very steadily.
"You came just in time. How did you know I was here?"

"Your fear-thoughts carried to us. We
know what it is to be afraid. So we came."

"There's nothing I can say but 'Thank you.'"

"But of course we
helpedl
Why not? You
needn't thank us."

Lundy looked at the flowers burning sullenly
in the gloom. "How is it you can boss them around? Why don't
they
. . ."

"But they're not cannibals! Not like—
The
Others."
There was pure cold dread in that last
thought.

"Cannibals."
Lundy looked up at the cloud of dainty
blue-grey woman-things. His skin got cold and a size too small for him.

Their soft golden eyes smiled down at him. "We're different from
you, yes.
Just as we're different from the fish.
What
is your thought? Bright things growing—weed—yes, they're kin to us."

Kin, thought Lundy. Yeah.
About
like we are to the animals.
Plants.
Living
plants were no novelty on Venus. Why not plants with thinking minds?
Plants that earned their roots along with them, and watched you
with sad soft eyes.

"Let's
get out of here," said Lundy.

They went down along the dark tunnel and out onto the road, and the
flowers yearned like hungry dogs after Lundy but didn't touch him. He started
out across the narrow plain, with the plant-women drifting cloudlike around
him.

Seaweed.
Little bits of kelp that
could talk to you.
It made Lundy feel queer.

The city made him feel queer, too. It was
dark when he first saw it from the plain, with only the moonlight glow of the
sand to touch it. It was a big city, stretching away behind its barrier wall.
Big and silent and very old, waiting there at the end of its road.

It was curiously more real
in the
dim
light. Lundy lost trace of the water for a moment. It was
like walking toward a sleeping city in the moonlight, feeling the secretive,
faindy
hostile strength of it
laired and leashed, until dawn. . . .

Only there would never be a dawn for this
city.
Never, any more.

Lundy wanted suddenly to run away.

"Don't
be afraid. We live there. It's safe."

Lundy shook his head irritably. Quite suddenly the brilliant light
flared out again, three regular flashes. It seemed to come from somewhere to
the right, out of a range of undersea mountains. Lundy felt a faint trembling
of the sand.
A
volcanic fissure, probably, opened when the
sand sank.

The golden light changed the city again.
Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset—a place where you could set your boots
down on a dream.

When he went in through the gates he was
awed, but not afraid. And then, while he stood in the square looking up at the
great dim buildings, the thought came drifting down to him out of the cloud of
little woman-things.

"It
was
safe. It was happy—before
She
came."

After a long moment Lundy said, "She?"

"We haven't seen her. But our mates
have. She came a little while ago and walked through the streets, and all our
mates left us to follow her. They say she's beautiful beyond any of us, and . .
."