overgrown, but it had offered little enough encouragement to the fungoid life-forms which predominated here. It had been carpeted, and nothing more. But the old buildings had offered support and framework to an ecosystem which was not replete with self-supporting structures. The new life of the Underworld had found a use for cities, and it had taken over despite the poisons which often built up there. In time, even the atomic and chemical waste would be co-opted, somehow, into the cycles of life which were adapting to the corpses of civilization. The process was going on, even now. Poison is a temporary thing. It kills, but out of the death it causes there comes new life, ultimately.
This city had become a forest, its concrete bones substituting for the xylem skeletons which had been lost when the old world was condemned to darkness. All the trees were gone, but the forests simply moved into the cities. Life is never defeated—evolution simply changes gear, and the process of adaptation begins, and continues forever.
“It’s all so still,” said the driver. “Nothing moves at all.”
“There’s no wind,” said Germont. “Not here. There must be air currents down here, and fierce ones where the situation is right. But here the air’s quite dead. Stale.”
“There are no animals,” said the driver. “None at all.”
Germont shrugged. “They won’t wait for the light. They must have been able to hear the convoy for miles.”
“But why would they run?” asked the driver. “They sure as hell haven’t learned to be afraid of armored trucks.”
“They’d be afraid of the noise,” said Germont.
The driver shook his head. “I don’t like it,” he said. “That line of lights in the sky, these great hulking masses of sponge on either side. It feels as though there’s something different about just here. It’s as if that stuff out there was full of things just sitting on either side of the road but staying clear. Watching us.”
For a few moments, Germont didn’t reply. His eyes followed the cone of light swinging across the face of the forest. Then he said: “Get some sleep.”
As the driver clambered down from the cockpit and moved back to the belly of the vehicle, where eight other men were waiting—resting, talking, peeping through the portholes, and trying to hold down the unease in their stomachs, Germont continued to follow the progress of the light.
All the plant flesh was gray. There were all shades, but no colors. This was a color-blind world. Even in the lands where the stars were clustered in the sky, Germont thought, the light would be dim enough to rob ordinary human vision of color perception and depth perception. But what about the men who lived here? Perhaps they could see colors. Perhaps not the same colors as the men of the Overworld.
The most noticeable feature of the plant masses which dressed each of the broken hulks that had once been human habitations was their corporateness. Every one consisted of thousands—perhaps millions—of individuals, and the range of specific types was considerable. And yet all the grays and whites and blacks were blurred. The whole structure was amorphous. All the individual cups and caps, bulbs and wracks, squabs and sacs, were integrated, making use of one another, intertwining with one another, almost blending with one another. Germont knew that the apparent corporate identity was an illusion—that there must be fierce competition, interspecific and intraspecific, for every inch of support and space—but he was not sure that the illusion might not be more real than the reality. The competition was collaboration, of a kind. The vast tangle of shapes, crinose and petinated, aciform and orbicular, was—in some way—a unit. Out of the internal balance of the struggle for existence there was made some kind of entity. The whole forest, which might stretch for ten or fifty miles back on either side of the road, was a colossal life-system, a superorganism. The city had come to life. And the convoy—forty-five vehicles in single file carrying five hundred men to inoculate a whole world with death—was just a worm in its gut. A dangerous invader inside it, waiting to bite.
Germont’s vehicle was air-tight and armored. Its six huge wheels could cope with virtually any terrain. It carried a flame-thrower and a machine gun in the turret where the searchlight was mounted. It was a sealed package containing a fragment of the Overworld. Nothing could possibly harm him, or any of his men. They could spew out poison to eat up the life of the Underworld’s cities, but the Underworld could do nothing to them.
And yet Germont was afraid.
He came down from the cockpit, seated himself in front of the miniature holoscreen at his communications console, and activated it. Some minutes passed before his call was answered. He did not know the woman who answered, and he did not ask her name. She represented the Movement, and that was identity enough so far as Germont was concerned.
He gave exact details of the convoy’s position and confirmed that he was exactly on schedule.
“The Delta contingent will remain in this locale,” he said. “They will make preliminary investigations in the morning. Preparations for experimental seeding will take place as per schedule. We have encountered no difficulties. The other three contingents will proceed to the rendezvous with Zuvara at nine a.m. We have seen no sign of any animal life-form. All equipment is functioning, and air filtration is one hundred percent effective. Water purification apparatus has not yet been tested in the field, but contingent Delta will report tomorrow.”
The woman acknowledged the information, and Germont switched off. There was no conversation. The woman’s presence had been a formality—a concession to the principle of human involvement. The cybernet had recorded his report, and would have acted on it had any action been necessary. It would also have relayed any new instructions. The illusion of human communication was in some ways similar to the illusion of unity in the forest life-system. At the most basic level, no such communication was taking place. But the purpose of human communication was what gave the perfect arbitration of the cybernet a meaning.
He went back into the belly of the vehicle, and lay on his bunk waiting for sleep. He found difficulty in relinquishing his tight hold on consciousness, and when he finally slept, he dreamed.
More than once, during the long night, he awoke into his dreams. And what he found there frightened him.
4.
“Why didn’t you come back to the Overworld when you had the opportunity?” asked Rypeck.
Joth put the tips of his fingers to his mouth and pressed his palms together while he contemplated the question.
“The reasons are complicated,” he said, finally. “They didn’t seem so at the time, but I didn’t think about it much. I just did what I felt I ought to do. I suppose I worked out the reasons subconsciously—or perhaps I invented them later to explain myself. When I found the door in the metal wall, I found my father. He’d finally been compelled to look outside his nightmares, into the substance of his visions. He’d found a way into the world he wanted to save, just as I’d found a way out. We collided. It wasn’t really that much of a coincidence—the same things which moved him moved me, factors external to both of us.
“He wasn’t quite dead when I found him, but he couldn’t do or say anything. He was still bleeding from a wound—a bullet wound. Finding him there just knocked the bottom out of the world. I was running home, and suddenly there was no home to run to. By then I had other priorities. Nita and Huldi were cut adrift, just as I was. When I buried my father I felt myself thrown back into their predicament. Drifting in the world, with no purpose—cut right out of the cloth of existence. Whether I came back or stayed, I’d have had to start all over again. I stayed, because that’s where I was. I stayed with
