“No,” said Ruiger. It took him a moment to realise what the Chid was talking about. “You mean their souls can leave their bodies. It’s not true, though. It’s only religious belief. You know what religion is? Just a story.”
“How wonderful, to be able to leave one’s body and move about without it!” The Chid seemed to reflect. “Are you here for sport?” he asked suddenly. “Do you like races?”
“We are only interested in helping our friend get better.”
“Oh, but you should game with us.”
“After our friend is better,” Ruiger said slowly, “we’ll do anything you like.”
“Excellent, excellent!” The Chid chortled again, much louder than before, a shrill, unnerving sound.
“Can we rely on you?” Ruiger pressed. “How long will it take?”
“Not long, not long. Leave him with us.”
“May we stay to watch?”
“No, no!” The Chid seemed indignant. “It is not seemly. You are our guests. Depart!”
“All right,” Ruiger said. “When shall we come back?”
“We will send him out when he is ready. Tomorrow morning, perhaps.”
“Good.” Ruiger stood uncertainly. He was eager to get out of the hut, but somehow reluctant to leave.
The Chid on the couch had completely ignored them, apart from one glance when they first entered. He still lay motionless, as if dead.
“Until tomorrow, then.”
“Until tomorrow.”
They withdrew, stiffly and awkwardly. To human sensibilities the Chid seemed to lack stability, Ruiger decided. They gave a neurotic, erratic, disconcerting impression. But it was probably a false impression, like that given by their idiot faces.
Back in the ship, Ruiger said: “Well, so far it went all right. If that Chid keeps his promise we’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“But this talk about sports and games,” Brand said anxiously. “What do they expect of us?”
“Never mind about that. As soon as we get Wessel back, and he’s all right, we simply take off.”
“We’ll owe them. They might try to stop us.”
“We’ve got guns.”
“Yeah…you know, I guess we’re all right, but what about Wessel? That hut doesn’t look a lot like an operating theatre to me. Somehow I find it hard to believe they can do anything.”
“They don’t work the way we do. But everybody knows they can accomplish miracles, almost. You’ll see. Anyway, it gives Wessel a chance. He didn’t have one before.”
They fell silent.
After a while Ruiger became restless. In crossing the continent they had backtracked on the sun; now it was evening again, and there were about eight hours to wait until dawn. Ruiger didn’t feel like sleeping. He suggested they take a walk.
After some hesitation Brand agreed. Once outside, they strolled towards the Chid’s wood, both of them curious to see what lay inside it. They skirted the depression where it grew, aware that the Chid could be watching and might not like strangers entering their private garden, if such it was.
There was little doubt that the wood was alien to the planet. It was quite unlike the open bush that covered most of the continent. Local flora and fauna were characterised by a quality of brashness, and their colours were light, all tawny, orange, and yellow, but this seemed dark and oppressive, huddled in on itself, and unnaturally silent and still. The bark of the trees was slick, olive-green in colour, and glistened, while the foliage was almost black.
Out of sight of the Chid hut, Ruiger parted some shoulder-high vegetation that screened the interior of the wood from view, and stepped between the slender tree trunks.
Quietly and cautiously, they sauntered a few yards into the wood. The light was suffusive and dim, filtering through the tree cover that seemed to press in overhead to create a totally enclosed little environment. Though fairly close-packed, the interior was less dense than the perimeter, which Ruiger began to think of as a barrier or skin. There was the same moist, rotting odour he had noticed in the Chid hut. The air was humid and surprisingly hot; presumably the wood trapped heat in some way, or else was warmed artificially.
The ground, sloping down towards the centre, was carpeted with a kind of moss, or slime, which felt unpleasant underfoot. Ruiger was struck by the dead hush of the place. Not a leaf moved; there was not the merest breath of a breeze. They crept on, descending the slope into the depths of the wood, and before long began to notice a change in the nature of the vegetation. Besides the slender trees other, less familiar plants flourished. Luxurious growths with broad, drooping leaves that dripped a yellow syrup. Python-like creepers that intertwined with the upper tree branches and pulsed slightly. Bilious parasites, like clusters of giant grapes or cancerous excrescences, that clung and tumbled down the squamous trunks, sometimes engulfing entire trees.
The wood was coming more to resemble a lush, miniature, alien jungle. Also, it was no longer still. There were sounds in it—not the rustle of leaves or the sigh of branches, but obscene little slurping and lapping sounds. Ruiger stopped, startled, as the scum carpet suddenly surged into motion just ahead of him. From it there emerged what looked like a pinkish-grey tangle of entrails, which swarmed quickly up a nearby tree and began to wrestle with the parasitic growth hanging there. The parasite apparently had a gelid consistency; the two shook and shivered like horrid jelly.
“Look,” Brand whispered.
Ruiger followed his gaze. A small creature was creeping through some undergrowth that sprouted near the base of a tree. It looked for all the world like the uncovered brain of a medium-sized mammal such as a dog or a tiger, complete with trailing spinal stem.
They watched it until it disappeared from sight. A few yards further on, they came to a clearing. It was occupied by a single tree—not one of the trees that made up the bulk of the wood, but a fat, pear-shaped trunk that contracted rhythmically like a beating heart. It was surmounted by a crown from which spread a mesh of fine twigs. As they entered the clearing this mesh suddenly released a spray of red droplets onto them.
Quickly they moved away. Ruiger examined the drops that had fallen on his tunic, head, and hands. The liquid was sticky, like blood, or bile.
Distastefully they wiped the stuff off their exposed skin.
“I’ve seen enough,” said Brand. “Let’s get out.”
“Wait,” Ruiger insisted. “We might as well go all the way.”
They were approaching the bottom of the wood now, and Ruiger guessed there might be something special there. The rich, foetid smell was becoming so strong that both men nearly gagged, but a few yards further on they broke through a thicket of clammy-feeling tendrils, and there it was.
The surrounding trees leaned over it protectively, spreading their branches to form a complete canopy above it: a little lake of blood. Ruiger was sure the stuff was blood: it looked like it and smelled like it, though with not quite the same smell as human blood. Dozens of small creatures were gathered on the shores of the pool to drink: segmented creatures the size of lobsters, creatures like the brain-animal they had seen already, creatures that consisted of clusters of tubes, resembling assemblies of veins and arteries. The forest, too, put out hoses of its own into the pool, snaking them down from the trees and across the bushes.
Ruiger and Brand stared in fascination. Was this, Ruiger wondered, a pleasant little paradise to the Chid mind? He took his eyes from the gleaming crimson surface of the lake. The wood, with its covering of slime, its slick trees, its gibbous growths and pulsing python pipes that seemed neither animal nor vegetable, no longer looked to him like a wood in the Earthly sense. Its totally enclosed, self-absorbed nature put him in mind of what it might be like inside his own body.
He grunted, and nudged Brand. “Let’s go.” Slowly they made their way up the bowl-shaped slope, towards the open starlight.
—
Minutes after they returned to the ship, the first of the Chid gifts arrived.
They did not know, at the time, that it was meant to be a gift, and if they had known, they still wouldn’t have known what they were supposed to do with it. It was an animal that came bounding from the Chid hut to prance about in front of the Earthmen’s ship. It was vaguely doglike and about the size of a Great Dane, with hairless yellow skin.
Ruiger focused the external scanner on it, magnifying the image. There were slits in the animal’s body; as it moved, these opened, revealing its internal organs.
Brand was nauseated. He turned away.
For a while the creature snuffled about the ship’s port, and leaped this way and that. “I didn’t see this beast in the Chid hut,” Brand remarked.
“Perhaps they made it.” Ruiger watched until the animal apparently wearied of what it was doing and loped back the way it had come, disappearing inside the hut.
“I’m tired,” Ruiger said. “I’d like to get some sleep.”
“Okay.”
But Brand himself could not sleep. He felt restless and uneasy. Nervously he settled down with a full percolator of coffee and kept his eye on the external viewer.
From time to time other animals left the hut and approached the ship. None were particularly alien looking, except, that was, that they were all apt to expose their innards to view as they moved. One vaguely resembled a pig, another a hairless llama, another a kangaroo. Were they all, perhaps, one animal, made over and over from the same bits and pieces?
The Chid had better not fix Wessel up that way, Brand thought aggressively. He wondered if he and Ruiger were expected to respond to these sorties. But when one didn’t know, it was safer to do nothing.
Steadily the stars, illuminating the landscape with shadowless light, moved across the sky. A short time after the pale sun had risen, Ruiger came stumbling back into the room.
“Anything happen?”
Brand gave him some coffee and told him about the animals. Ruiger sat down, staring at the viewscreen and sipping from his cup.
By now Brand felt tired himself, but his nervousness had not decreased. “You think it will be all right?” he asked Brand anxiously.
“Sure it will be all right,” Ruiger said gruffly. “Don’t be put off by that wood. Probably the whole Chid planet is like that.”
It was the first time either of them had mentioned the wood. “Listen,” Brand said, “I’ve been thinking about those animals they keep sending—”
Ruiger gave a shout. On the screen, Wessel had appeared in the open door of the Chid hut. He stood there uncertainly, and then took a step forward.
“There he is!” Ruiger crowed. “They’ve delivered the goods!”
He jumped to his feet and swept from the room. Brand followed him down to the port and out onto the coarse grass. Wessel was walking towards them. But it was not his usual walk. He plodded rather than strode, moving leadenly and awkwardly, his arms hanging loose, his face slack.
Nevertheless they both loped out to meet him. And then, as they came closer, the grin on Ruiger’s face froze. Wessel’s eye sockets were empty. The eyelids framed nothing; even the orbital bones had been removed. And Brand now realised that this eyeless Wessel wasn’t even walking towards the ship. He was making for the cliff a short distance away.
“Wessel,” he called softly. And then something else caught his attention. Crawling some yards behind Wessel there came a rounded greyish object no larger than his boot. The thing had a wrinkled, convoluted surface, with a deep crevice running down its back, and glistened as if encased in a transparent jelly.
The creature moved after the manner of a snail, on a single splayed podium. It followed after Wessel with every appearance of effort, just managing to keep up with his erratic pace. Brand and Ruiger watched the procession dumbly. The crawling creature’s front end supported a pair of white balls, their whiteness broken by neat circles of colour. These white balls were obviously human eyes, the same eyes that were missing from Wessel’s eye sockets. The grey mass, however improbable it seemed logically, was without doubt Wessel’s own brain, alive but without a body, given its own means of locomotion.
Suddenly the decerebrated body stumbled and fell. The brain seemed avid for the body. Before the body could rise it had caught up with it and clambered onto a leg. When the body started to walk again the brain clung to it like a leech, and began to climb.
The body lurched towards the cliff; the brain ascended painfully. Its rate of progress was impressive. It negotiated the hips, climbed up the back, and reached a shoulder, momentarily perching there. Then, as if hinged somehow, the back of Wessel’s head opened, the two halves coming apart and revealing an empty cavern. Into this empty skull the brain nosed its way, like a hermit crab edging into a discarded shell or a fat grey rat disappearing down a hole, and the head closed up behind it.
The Wessel body abruptly stopped walking. A shudder passed through it. Then it stood motionless, facing the sea.
Brand and Ruiger glanced at one another.
“Christ!” Ruiger said hoarsely.
“What shall we do?”
Gingerly, continuing to glance at one another for support, they approached Wessel. Wessel’s eyes were now in place and peered from their sockets, somewhat bloodshot. He might have been taken for normal, except that he seemed very, very dazed.
Angrily Ruiger unholstered his pistol and glared towards the Chid hut. “Those alien bastards aren’t getting away with this,” he said. “They’re going to put this right.”
“Wait a minute,” said Brand, holding up his hand. He turned to Wessel. “Wessel,” he said quietly, “can you hear me?”
Wessel blinked. “Sure,” he said.
“How long have you been conscious?”
No answer.
“Can you move?”
“Sure.” Wessel turned round and took a step towards them. Ruiger stumbled back, feeling that he was in the presence of something unclean. Brand, however, stood his ground.
“Can you make it back to the ship?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Then let’s walk.”
Stepping more naturally than before, Wessel accompanied Brand. Slowly they walked towards the gleaming shape of the starship.
Ruiger glowered again at the Chid hut. Then, bolstering his pistol, he followed.
Inside, they sat Wessel down in the living quarters. He sat passively, not volunteering anything, not looking at anything in particular.
Brand swallowed. “Do you remember being out of your body?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What was it like?”
Wessel answered in a dull monotone. “All right.”
“Is that all you can say about it?”
Wessel was silent.
“Would you like anything to eat or drink?”
“No.”
“You do recognise us, don’t you?”
“Sure I do.”
Brand looked worriedly at Ruiger, then tossed his head, indicating the door.
Leaving Wessel, they withdrew to the control cabin. “Well, I don’t know,” Brand said. “Perhaps he’s going to be all right.”
“All right!” Ruiger was incredulous, his face red with anger. “Christ, just look at what’s happened!”
“He’s dazed right now. But the brain has already knitted itself to the body. It’s in complete control. Did you notice?—no scar, no seam. Fantastic.”
“It’s hideous, grotesque, perverted—” Ruiger slumped. “I don’t get you. You’re actually taking it in your stride.”
“We were warned about the Chid,” Brand pointed out. “Their ways aren’t our ways. Perhaps to them this sort of thing is some little joke, without any malicious intent. And after all, Wessel is in one piece now. He’s whole, mended.”
Ruiger sighed. He seemed defeated. “If you say so. Me, I can’t even believe what I’ve seen. It’s not possible.”
“You mean you can’t accept that a brain could lead a freelance existence outside its body?”
Ruiger nodded.
“That isn’t really so very extraordinary. I’ve seen a brain kept alive in a hospital on Earth, in a glass tank.”
“Yes, but that’s in hospital conditions, with every kind of backup. Here…”
“Here,” said Brand, smiling crookedly, “it’s done by two aliens in a straw hut, surrounded by dirt and garbage. And the brain actually crawls about.”
“That’s what gets me. Maybe it isn’t Wessel’s brain at all. Maybe the Chid are tricking us.”
“I think it’s Wessel all right. And I think we’ve got to accept the strangeness of it. The Chid don’t need a hospital or sterile conditions because they’ve solved all kinds of technical problems we haven’t. As for a brain that can move—a few simple muscles, an arrangement to keep it oxygenated—it’s probably not as hard as it sounds, once you’re crazy enough to want to do it.” He paused reflectively. “You know, I don’t think the Chid view the body as a unit the same way we do. That wood we went into—I got the idea there were brains, stomachs, digestive systems, all kinds of parts moving about on their own. It’s as if the Chid like giving bodily organs autonomy.”
“Part-animals,” Ruiger grunted. “Sick, isn’t it?”
“To us it is.”
There was a long silence between them. Finally Ruiger said: “Well, what do we do?”
“Our safest move would probably be to take off right away. But I think we ought to wait for a while to see if Wessel improves. He’s probably suffering from postoperative shock. What I’m hoping is that he wasn’t really conscious while he was out of his body. Try to imagine that.”
“I absolutely won’t hear of our taking off until he shows signs of recovery.”
“We shouldn’t leave it too late. It won’t be long before the Chid come to collect their side of the bargain. After all, they have saved his life. Our own people can probably deal with any future problems.”
“Oh, no.” Ruiger tapped his gun. “If the Chid have done us wrong, they’re going to be taken care of.”
“Let’s hope we can take off by sunset,” Brand said.
—
That afternoon, Wessel came out of his skull again.
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 127