Alien Earth Read online

  Farris felt a chill. He muttered over his shoulder, “You had better go back down and wait.”

  “No,” she whispered. “There is Andre.”

  He turned, startled. Then he too saw Berreau.

  His blond head bare, his face set and white and masklike, standing frozenly beneath a big wild-fig a hundred feet to the right.

  Hunati!

  Farris had expected it, but that didn’t make it less shocking. It wasn’t that the tribesmen mattered less as human beings. It was just that he had talked with a normal Berreau only a few hours before. And now, to see him like this!

  Berreau stood in a position ludicrously reminiscent of the old-time “living statues.” One foot was slightly raised, his body bent a little forward, his arms raised a little.

  Like the frozen tribesmen ahead, Berreau was facing toward the inner recesses of the grove, where the giant banyans loomed.

  Farris touched his arm. “Berreau, you have to snap out of this.”

  “It’s no use to speak to him,” whispered the girl. “He can’t hear.”

  No, he couldn’t hear. He was living at a tempo so low that no ordinary sound could make sense to his ears. His face was a rigid mask, lips slightly parted to breathe, eyes fixed ahead. Slowly, slowly, the lids crept down and veiled those staring eyes and then crept open again in the infinitely slow wink. Slowly, slowly, his slightly raised left foot moved down toward the ground.

  Movement, pulse, breathing — all a hundred times slower than normal. Living, but not in a human way — not in a human way at all.

  Lys was not so stunned as Farris was. He realized later that she must have seen her brother like this, before.

  “We must take him back to the bungalow, somehow,” she murmured. “I can’t let him stay out here for many days and nights, again!”

  Farris welcomed the small practical problem that took his thoughts for a moment away from this frozen, standing horror.

  “We can rig a stretcher, from our jackets,” he said. “I’ll cut a couple of poles.”

  The two bamboos, through the sleeves of the two jackets, made a makeshift stretcher which they laid upon the ground.

  Farris lifted Berreau. The man’s body was rigid, muscles locked in an effort no less strong because it was infinitely slow.

  He got the young Frenchman down on the stretcher, and then looked at the girl. “Can you help carry him? Or will you get a native?”

  She shook her head. “The tribesmen mustn’t know of this. Andre isn’t heavy.”

  He wasn’t. He was light as though wasted by fever, though the sickened Farris knew that it wasn’t any fever that had done it.

  Why should a civilized young botanist go out into the forest and partake of a filthy primitive drug of some kind that slowed him down to a frozen stupor? It didn’t make sense.

  Lys bore her share of their living burden through the gathering twilight, in stolid silence. Even when they put Berreau down at intervals to rest, she did not speak.

  It was not until they reached the dark bungalow and had put him down on his bed, that the girl sank into a chair and buried her face in her hands.

  Farris spoke with a rough encouragement he did not feel. “Don’t get upset. He’ll be all right now. I’ll soon bring him out of this.”

  She shook her head. “No, you must not attempt that! He must come out of it by himself. And it will take many days.”

  The devil it would, Farris thought. He had teak to find, and he needed Berreau to arrange for workers.

  Then the dejection of the girl’s small figure got him. He patted her shoulder.

  “All right, I’ll help you take care of him. And together, we’ll pound some sense into him and make him go back home. Now you see about dinner.”

  She lit a gasoline lamp, and went out. He heard her calling the servants.

  He looked down at Berreau. He felt a little sick, again. The Frenchman lay, eyes staring toward the ceiling. He was living, breathing — and yet his retarded life-tempo cut him off from Farris as effectually as death would.

  No, not quite. Slowly, so slowly that he could hardly detect the movement, Berreau’s eyes turned toward Farris’ figure.

  Lys came back into the room. She was quiet, but he was getting to know her better, and he knew by her face that she was startled.

  “The servants are gone! Ahra, and the girls — and your guide. They must have seen us bring Andre in.”

  Farris understood. “They left because we brought back a man who’s hunati?”

  She nodded. “All the tribespeople fear the rite. It’s said there’s only a few who belong to it, but they’re dreaded.”

  Farris spared a moment to curse softly the vanished Annamese. “Piang would bolt like a scared rabbit, from something like this. A sweet beginning for my job here.”

  “Perhaps you had better leave,” Lys said uncertainly. Then she added contradictorily, “No, I can’t be heroic about it! Please stay!”

  “That’s for sure,” he told her. “I can’t go back down river and report that I shirked my job because of—’’

  He stopped, for she wasn’t listening to him. She was looking past him, toward the bed.

  Farris swung around. While they two had been talking, Berreau had been moving. Infinitely slowly — but moving.

  His feet were on the floor now. He was getting up. His body straightened with a painful, dragging slowness, for many minutes.

  Then his right foot began to rise almost imperceptibly from the floor. He was starting to walk, only a hundred times slower than normal.

  He was starting to walk toward the door.

  Lys’ eyes had a yearning pity in them. “He is trying to go back up to the forest. He will try so long as he is hunati.”

  Farris gently lifted Berreau back to the bed. He felt a cold dampness on his forehead.

  What was there up there that drew worshippers in a strange trance of slowed-down life?

  CHAPTER 3

  Unholy Lure

  He turned to the girl and asked, “How long will he stay in this condition?”

  “A long time,” she answered heavily. “It may take weeks for the hunati to wear off.”

  Farris didn’t like the prospect, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  “All right, we’ll take care of him. You and I.”

  Lys said, “One of us will have to watch him, all the time. He will keep trying to go back to the forest.”

  “You’ve had enough for a while,” Farris told her. “I’ll watch him tonight.”

  Farris watched. Not only that night but for many nights. The days went into weeks, and the natives still shunned the house, and he saw nobody except the pale girl and the man who was living in a different way than other humans lived.

  Berreau didn’t change. He didn’t scan to sleep, nor did he seem to need food or drink. His eyes never closed, except in that infinitely slow blinking.

  He didn’t sleep, and he did not quit moving. He was always moving, only it was in that weird, utterly slow-motion tempo that one could hardly see.

  Lys had been right. Berreau wanted to go back to the forest. He might be living a hundred times slower than normal, but he was obviously still conscious in some weird way, and still trying to go back to the hushed, forbidden forest up there where they had found him.

  Farris wearied of lifting the statue-like figure back into bed, and with the girl’s permission tied Berreau’s ankles. It did not make things much better. It was even more upsetting, in a way, to sit in the lamplit bedroom and watch Berreau’s slow struggles for freedom.

  The dragging slowness of each tiny movement made Farris’ nerves twitch to see. He wished he could give Berreau some sedative to keep him asleep, but he did not dare to do that.

  He had found, on Berreau’s forearm, a tiny incision stained with sticky green. There were scars of other, old incisions near it. Whatever crazy drug had been injected into the man to make him hunati was unknown. Farris did not dare try to counterac
t its effect.

  Finally, Farris glanced up one night from his bored perusal of an old L’Illustration and then jumped to his feet.

  Berreau still lay on the bed, but he had just winked. Had winked with normal quickness, and not that slow, dragging blink.

  “Berreau!” Farris said quickly. “Are you all right now? Can you hear me?”

  Berreau looked up at him with a level, unfriendly gaze. “I can hear you. May I ask why you meddled?”

  It took Farris aback. He had been playing nurse so long that he had unconsciously come to think of the other as a sick man who would be grateful to him. He realized now that Berreau was coldly angry, not grateful.

  The Frenchman was untying his ankles. His movements were shaky, his hands trembling, but he stood up normally.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Farris shrugged. “Your sister was going up there after you. I helped her bring you back. That’s all.”

  Berreau looked a little startled. “Lys did that? But it’s a breaking of the Rite! It can mean trouble for her!”

  Resentment and raw nerves made Farris suddenly brutal. “Why should you worry about Lys now, when you’ve made her wretched for months by your dabbing in native wizardries?”

  Berreau didn’t retort angrily, as he had expected. The young Frenchman answered heavily.

  “It’s true. I’ve done that to Lys.”

  Farris exclaimed, “Berreau, why do you do it? Why this unholy business of going hunati, of living a hundred times slower? What can you gain by it?”

  The other man looked at him with haggard eyes. “By doing it, I’ve entered an alien world. A world that exists around us all our lives, but that we never live in or understand at all.”

  “What world?”

  “The world of green leaf and root and branch,” Berreau answered. “The world of plant life, which we can never comprehend because of the difference between its life-tempo and our life-tempo.”

  * * *

  Farris began dimly to understand. “You mean, this hunati change makes you live at the same tempo as plants?”

  Berreau nodded. “Yes. And that simple difference in life-tempo is the doorway into an unknown, incredible world.”

  “But how?”

  The Frenchman pointed to the half-healed incision on his bare arm. “The drug does it. A native drug, that slows down metabolism, heart-action, respiration, nerve-messages, everything.

  “Chlorophyll is its basis. The green blood of plant-life, the complex chemical that enables plants to take their energy direct from sunlight. The natives prepare it directly from grasses, by some method of their own.”

  “I shouldn’t think,” Farris said incredulously, “that chlorophyll could have any effect on an animal organism.”

  “Your saying that,” Berreau retorted, “shows that your biochemical knowledge is out of date. Back in March of Nineteen Forty-Eight, two Chicago chemists engaged in mass production or extraction of chlorophyll, announced that their injection of it into dogs and rats seemed to prolong life greatly by altering the oxidation capacity of the cells.

  “Prolong life greatly — yes! But it prolongs it, by slowing it down! A tree lives longer than a man, because it doesn’t live so fast. You can make a man live as long—and as slowly—as a tree, by injecting the right chlorophyll compound into his blood.”

  Farris said, “That’s what you meant, by saying that primitive peoples sometimes anticipate modern scientific discoveries?”

  Berreau nodded. “This chlorophyll hunati solution may be an age-old secret. I believe it’s always been known to a few among the primitive forest-folk of the world.”

  He looked somberly past the American. “Tree-worship is as old as the human race. The Sacred Tree of Sumeria, the groves of Dodona, the oaks of the Druids, the tree Ygdrasil of the Norse, even our own Christmas Tree — they all stem from primitive worship of that other, alien kind of life with which we share Earth.

  “I think that a few secret worshippers have always known how to prepare the chlorophyll drug that enabled them to attain complete communion with that other kind of life, by living at the same slow rate for a time.”

  Farris stared. “But how did you get taken into this queer secret worship?”

  The other man shrugged. “The worshippers were grateful to me, because I had saved the forests here from possible death.”

  He walked across to the corner of the room that was fitted as a botanical laboratory, and took down a test-tube. It was filled with dusty, tiny spores of a leprous, gray-green color.

  “This is the Burmese Blight, that’s withered whole great forests down south of the Mekong. A deadly thing, to tropical trees. It was starting to work up into this Laos country, but I showed the tribes how to stop it. The secret hunati sect made me one of them, in reward.”

  “But I still can’t understand why an educated man like you would want to join such a crazy mumbo-jumbo,” Farris said.

  “Dieu, I’m trying to make you understand why! To show you that it was my curiosity as a botanist that made me join the Rite and take the drug!”

  Berreau rushed on. “But you can’t understand, any more than Lys could! You can’t comprehend the wonder and strangeness and beauty of living that other kind of life!”

  Something in Berreau’s white, rapt face, in his haunted eyes, made Farris’ skin crawl. His words seemed momentarily to lift a veil, to make the familiar vaguely strange and terrifying.

  “Berreau, listen! You’ve got to cut this and leave here at once.”

  The Frenchman smiled mirthlessly. “I know. Many times, I have told myself so. But I do not go. How can I leave something that is a botanist’s heaven?”

  * * *

  Lys had come into the room, was looking wanly at her brother’s tare.

  “Andre, won’t you give it up and go home with me?” she appealed.

  “Or are you too sunken in this uncanny habit to care whether your sister breaks her heart?” Farris demanded.

  Berreau flared. “You’re a smug pair! You treat me like a drug addict, without knowing the wonder of the experience I’ve had! I’ve gone into another world, an alien Earth that is around us every day of our lives and that we can’t even see. And I’m going back again, and again.”

  “Use that chlorophyll drug and go hunati again?” Farris said grimly.

  Berreau nodded defiantly.

  “No,” said Farris. “You’re not. For if you do, we’ll just go out there and bring you in again. You’ll be quite helpless to prevent us, once you’re hunati.”

  The other man raged. “There’s a way I can stop you from doing that! Your threats are dangerous!”

  “There’s no way,” Farris said flatly. “Once you’ve frozen yourself into that slower life-tempo, you’re helpless against normal people. And I’m not threatening. I’m trying to save your sanity, man!”

  Berreau flung out of the room without answer. Lys looked at the American, with tears glimmering in her eyes.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he reassured her. “He’ll get over it, in time.”

  “I fear not,” the girl whispered. “It has become a madness in his brain.”

  Inwardly, Farris agreed. Whatever the lure of the unknown world that Berreau had entered by that change in life-tempo, it had caught him beyond all redemption.

  A chill swept Farris when he thought of it — men out there, living at the same tempo as plants, stepping clear out of the plane of animal life to a strangely different kind of life and world.

  The bungalow was oppressively silent that day — the servants gone, Berreau sulking in his laboratory, Lys moving about with misery in her eyes.

  But Berreau didn’t try to go out, though Farris had been expecting that and had been prepared for a clash. And by evening, Berreau seemed to have got over his sulks. He helped prepare dinner.

  He was almost gay, at the meal — a febrile good humor that Farris didn’t quite like. By common consent, none of the three spoke of what was uppermost
in their minds.

  Berreau retired, and Farris told Lys, “Go to bed — you’ve lost so much sleep lately you’re half asleep now I’ll keep watch.”

  In his own room, Farris found drowsiness assailing him too. He sank back in a chair, fighting the heaviness that weighed down his eyelids.

  Then, suddenly, he understood. “Drugged!” he exclaimed, and found his voice little more than a whisper. “Something in the dinner!”

  “Yes,” said a remote voice. “Yes, Farris.”

  Berreau had come in. He loomed gigantic to Farris’ blurred eyes. He came closer, and Farris saw in his hand a needle that dripped sticky green.

  “I’m sorry, Farris.” He was rolling up Farris’ sleeve, and Farris could not resist. “I’m sorry to do this to you and Lys. But you would interfere. And this is the only way I can keep you from bringing me back.”

  Farris felt the sting of the needle. He felt nothing more, before drugged unconsciousness claimed him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Incredible World

  Farris awoke, and for a dazed moment wondered what it was that so bewildered him. Then he realized.

  It was the daylight. It came and went, every few minutes. There was the darkness of night in the bedroom, and then a sudden burst of dawn, a little period of brilliant sunlight, and then night again.

  It came and went, as he watched numbly, like the slow, steady beating of a great pulse — a systole and diastole of light and darkness.

  Days shortened to minutes? But how could that be? And then, as he awakened fully, he remembered.

  “Hunati! He injected the chlorophyll drug into my bloodstream!”

  Yes. He was hunati, now. Living at a tempo a hundred times slower than normal.

  And that was why day and night seemed a hundred times faster than normal, to him. He had, already, lived through several days!

  Farris stumbled to his feet. As he did so, he knocked his pipe from the arm of the chair.

  It did not fall to the floor. It just disappeared instantly, and the next instant was lying on the floor.

  “It fell. But it fell so fast I couldn’t see it.”