Killer Plants Of Binaark rb-33 Page 2

  When he looked west he stared. It hadn’t been a trick of the light! The trees there blazed golden-orange in the dawn. Were they flowering trees, like Home Dimension’s dogwoods or cherry trees? Blade doubted it. The color was too solid and there was too much of it. Blade tested his muscles, then crawled off his perch and began climbing down the tree.

  By the time he reached the ground the bird chorus was dying away. There was still a long day ahead of him and he could be sure of hitting the golden-orange trees sooner or later. They’d stretched halfway across the western horizon.

  Five hundred yards brought him to a small spring. He drank, then set off again. He was so eager to satisfy his curiosity about the trees that he had to force himself to slow down, so he wouldn’t work up a sweat or lose his direction. He remembered one of his early instructors in MI6A telling him, «Mr. Blade, you’ve got enough bloody curiosity for half a dozen cats. I only hope you’ve got as many lives!»

  Blade tramped past an endless succession of gnarled trunks. At last he came to a trunk that was thick and smooth, and he was sure that he had found the trees he’d been looking for. The gold-orange color was definitely in the leaves-and what leaves! Most were at least six feet long and half that wide, and some were twice as big. All of them stuck out from the branches as stiffly as if they’d been made of solid wood. The canopy they made overhead was so dense and so brightly colored that Blade felt as if he’d stepped into a vividly dyed circus tent.

  Once he’d got used to the spectacle of the leaves, Blade started noticing other details. The branches and trunks of the trees seemed to be covered with blue-black rubber rather than bark, and they twisted and curled in ways Blade didn’t like. Hanging from some of the branches were immense seed pods, larger than the KALI capsule. They seemed to be completely covered with short, bright green hair.

  From the bases of the blue-black trunks, a dense mass of creepers stretched toward Blade. They didn’t have any seed pods, but otherwise they looked like a ground-dwelling version of the trees. Halfway to Blade they thinned out and disappeared among the ferns and grass, but Blade suspected they stretched considerably farther.

  Suddenly he was very careful where he put his feet. There was something unnatural about the plants here. The colors, the leaves, the seed pods, the creepers Blade could have accepted any one of them, but together they gave him the impression of something dangerous.

  Something went chirrr among the creepers, and three shiny green beetles the size of Blade’s hand crept out into view. He took a cautious step, relieved to see something living among the trees. His relief vanished as he saw more beetles crawling over a whitened skeleton and chopping off pieces of bone with their pincers. The skeleton looked like a huge bird’s. Blade saw a curved beak and a four-clawed foot.

  Blade held out his club and prodded the undergrowth. He would almost have preferred something jumping out at him, but nothing happened. He took a step forward, prodded again, step, prod, step, prod…. He found each step a little harder than the one before, but he’d be damned if he was going to turn aside from a bunch of circus-colored plants!

  Seven steps, eight, nine. The club came down again-and with the speed of striking snakes, three of the creepers reared out of the undergrowth. They wavered in mid-air; then, before Blade could pull the club back, two wrapped themselves around it. When Blade pulled, the creepers pulled harder. The wood split with a sharp crack, the creepers curled back with half the club, and Blade lurched backward holding the other half.

  As he fought for balance, he couldn’t watch where he stepped. His foot came down on another of the creepers. It writhed like a drunken boa constrictor, then wound itself around Blade’s left leg. Another creeper lashed the air, then curled around his right thigh. Blade tried to pull free, but it was like trying to pull free from a pair of steel cables.

  Whatever came next, it would not be a quick escape.

  Chapter 3

  Creepers were writhing and twisting toward Blade from all directions. They seemed to move faster the more he struggled with the ones holding him. He tried standing still. The new creepers also stopped. Blade gave an experimental heave, and they came on again. This time he not only stopped moving but held his breath. The creepers stopped, and by the time Blade had to breathe again some of them were lying down. He stood motionless until all the creepers except the two wound around his legs were limp and quiet. Those two, however, still clung as if they’d been glued in place.

  Apparently the creepers judged their prey by the amount of resistance it put up. The more it struggled, the bigger it was, and the more creepers came to hold it. Hold it for what? If it was something that came at the prey so fast they had no chance to avoid it, there wouldn’t have been a need for the creepers. The creepers themselves were tight enough so that they might cut off his circulation if they held him long enough, but otherwise they weren’t particularly uncomfortable. Blade carefully kept his arms crossed high on his chest. The creepers didn’t reach more than four feet into the air, so his hands and arms were free.

  Out of the corner of one eye he saw ripples and twitches in the trunk of the nearest tree. Cautiously raising his head, he saw a branch as thick as his body starting to curve downward, lowering a seed pod at least eight feet long. As the pod descended, the leaves in its path moved out of the way. Some folded themselves double, others tilted up on edge or bent back.

  The seed pod was ten feet above the ground and twenty feet from Blade when it started to open like a pair of jaws.

  The stench of acid and rotten meat hit Blade like a blow. His eyes watered and he blinked. Then he saw that the edges of the pod’s jaws were lined with folding six-inch spikes, barbed and dripping with foul-smelling juices. As more and more of the spikes unfolded, the pod began to remind Blade of a shark’s mouth.

  He would rather have been facing the shark. Now he knew what the plants’ technique was: immobilize prey with the creepers, then bring the pods down to kill, swallow, and digest. He wasn’t sure he was going to survive to use this knowledge.

  Cautiously Blade flexed one leg. Four creepers jerked spasmodically. One lashed out and struck him in the chest, inches below his crossed arms. Obviously the pod’s being on the way wasn’t affecting the creepers’ reflexes. Even more obviously, the last thing he could afford to risk was having even one hand immobilized. If he could hold the jaws of the pod open long enough….

  The branch writhed, then thrust the pod slowly toward Blade. He wondered how many of the plants’ victims had sealed their fate at this point by panicking and arousing the creepers again. He forced himself to stand completely motionless, not blinking, barely breathing.

  As the pod drew closer, Blade wouldn’t have wanted to take a deep breath anyway. The stench from the open jaws was like that of a sewer crossed with a chemical plant. Blade was afraid he’d vomit and trigger more of the creepers into action.

  Still closer. The inside of the pod was lined with slimy gray-green tissue, speckled with whitish patches and gobbets of half-digested flesh. Blade couldn’t see anything like a throat. Apparently the nutrients were absorbed from the prey directly through the walls of the pod.

  If the pod continued its slow approach, Blade was now sure he could grip the jaws. If it dropped on him suddenly, he would need precise timing and also quick movement, which might send the creepers into action again at the worst possible time. Either way he needed to be ready. A joint at a time, Blade uncurled his fingers. A finger at a time, he raised his hands. A muscle at a time, he stretched his arms out to either side. Some of the creepers twitched faintly, but none of them went into action. Slowly he raised his arms above his head. He hoped the pod didn’t have any way of learning that its prey was abnormally large and quite ready to defend itself to the last.

  Apparently the pod depended completely on the net of creepers. It came on steadily, until it was no more than a yard out of Blade’s reach and a foot above him. A drop of its digestive juice fell on the back of Blade’s hand, sting
ing like a bee. The ghastly stench was all around him. Now the lower jaw was within reach, but Blade still waited. Grabbing the lower jaw alone might simply snap the upper jaw shut on his hands.

  Then the pod began a slow-motion lunge toward its prey and Blade went into action. With one hand he gripped the upper jaw and with the other he felt for a hold on the lower one. He found one of the spikes and snapped it off. The empty space gave him a firm handhold on the lower jaw, and just in time. The branch holding the pod jerked, but the slimy lining of the pod rippled and the jaws tried to snap shut.

  It took all of Blade’s strength to hold them open. Fortunately his two hundred and ten pounds was all muscle and bone, trained and conditioned, and his endurance was something of a legend even among the hardened field agents of MI6A. The jaws of the pod closed about four inches, then stopped. The sweat popped out on Blade’s forehead and chest. His muscles rose in ridges, but he held the jaws. His lungs cried for air until he had to inhale even the foul air from the pod, but he held it open.

  The jaws quivered and jerked, still trying to close, with more strength than Blade could have imagined in any plant. They still didn’t close, and finally the pod gave up the fight. The plant must have discovered that something wasn’t going right. Blade had won his first victory. He also realized that it was a temporary one. He had to get free of the plant before it found some new way of attacking him. It might pull the pod back, then bring it in again where he couldn’t turn to face it without triggering the creepers. It might order the creepers to drag him down, or bring in a second pod.

  He wondered if he was overestimating the intelligence of the plant. He also decided that even if he was, he was doing himself no harm. The combination of trunk, creeper, and pod was unlike any plant he’d ever seen or heard of, and so was its behavior. It was better to assume nothing.

  Blade now realized that although he’d been moving a good deal while holding the pod open, the creepers hadn’t responded. Did the pod’s apparently having a firm grip on the prey make them relax? Cautiously Blade wiggled one toe, then two. Next he shifted one foot, and finally he flexed one knee. He felt like a paralyzed man trying to move, but he didn’t dare risk anything more drastic. That would risk breaking his grip on the jaws of the pod.

  Still no sign of movement from the creepers. Blade repeated his whole series of movements, this time ending by flexing both knees. Both the creepers and the pod remained inactive. So far so good. The next step had to be disabling the pod, and the best way seemed to be sheer brute force. Blade took several deep breaths, then partly relaxed his arms without loosening his grip on the jaws. The pod closed another six inches. Then Blade put all his strength into one tremendous push.

  For a moment the pod resisted. It was like trying to tear open a safe’s door with his bare hands. Blade’s heart pounded against his ribs. Then something banged like an enormous shotgun. The two halves of the pod flew apart. The sudden release of all tension threw Blade forward into the creepers.

  He thought he’d jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. But the creepers around him were writhing and striking out wildly, not trying to reach and hold him. Even the two around his legs were loosening. Overhead the branch was writhing and thrashing, tossing the two dangling jaws.

  Blade dug both hands into the soft jungle earth, then jerked both legs. The right leg came free at once, and the left leg came free after a second jerk. Then he flung himself into a somersault that would have won him a medal in any gymnastics contest. Here it saved his life by landing him beyond the reach of the creepers.

  He landed hard, knocking the wind out of himself and once again slamming his head into a root. The roots in this jungle seemed to be jumping out at him. Then he heard a high-pitched whine in his ears. He shook his head gently, but the sound only grew louder. He’d just realized the whine wasn’t inside his head when it turned into a shrill scream, like a great animal crying out in pain.

  The scream faded briefly, then rose again until Blade wanted to clap his hands over his ears. All the creepers were writhing like a nest of maddened snakes, and one jaw of the pod dangled by only a few shreds of fiber. Yellowish fluid was dripping from the torn edges. Where it struck the leaves of the creepers below they turned black and brittle.

  The plant was screaming.

  The thought struck Blade with such force that he took two steps backward. This time he watched where he put his feet. He backed against the gnarled trunk of a normal, sensible tree, and leaned against it until the screaming finally died away. Then relief at his escape and memories of the stench from the pod finally hit Blade’s stomach. By the time his stomach was empty, even the creepers were still.

  None of Blade’s later encounters with the killer plants taught him quite as much as the first one. On the other hand, none of them were nearly as dangerous.

  The more he learned about the plants, the more Blade was certain that they were a unique order of living creatures, with some qualities of both plants and animals. They had trunks and branches and leaves, but no bark. They had leaf tissue and wood, but also fibers of something very like muscle and vessels filled with the yellowish acid that seemed more like blood than sap. They had none of the senses except touch, and that only in the creepers and the pods, but somewhere they had the vocal organs to produce those appalling screams. Only the mature plants screamed, and Blade never got close enough to one to find out how the plant did it. He got close enough to younger specimens to learn a good many other things.

  The plants seemed to go through three stages. Freshly sprouted, they were no more than a foot high, with creepers spreading out a yard or so to either side and killpods the size of walnuts. In this stage they seemed to get most of their food by photosynthesis and ate nothing larger than insects. They looked harmless, even cute; something to decorate a fashionable greenhouse or the lobby of an expensive hotel.

  In their second stage, the plants were still not dangerous to a full-grown human being, but anything smaller was safer staying away from them. The main stalks grew six feet high and as thick as Blade’s thigh. The creepers spread out forty or fifty feet in all directions, and the branches, which resembled giant tendrils, developed killpods the size of watermelons. Eventually these tendril-like branches reached upward and outward, growing the large, golden-orange leaves. At this stage also the plant developed a whole new set of pods and creepers to trap and eat birds. The creepers on the ground could be so nearly invisible that Blade walked into them several times and always worked up a sweat getting clear.

  In the third stage, the killer plants were perfectly capable of dealing with a man. They still had to get most of their nourishment like normal plants, because Blade couldn’t imagine that there were enough large animals in this jungle stupid enough to wander into the creepers. Nonetheless, the killer plants were superbly equipped to feed on any animal available. The creepers could restrain a horse and the pods could very nearly swallow one. If one pod couldn’t engulf the whole prey, a second or even a third would descend and go to work.

  The mature plants came in two forms. There were those that formed the solid groves like the one Blade had first entered. Some of these groves were a mile or more on a side. Then there were the solitary «rogue» plants-not as spectacular as those in the groves but a good deal more dangerous. They sometimes sent their creepers out as much as a hundred yards. Their climbing branches reached upward and outward for nearly as far, carrying the huge pods with them. One of the rogues could make a patch of jungle the size of a football field deadly, judging from the number of bones Blade saw. Nothing that got within reach of the creepers of a mature plant seemed to get out again, except for the bone-eating green beetles. They crawled around among the creepers as if they were ordinary grass.

  Other than the plants, Blade found nothing really dangerous in the jungle as he tramped west. Or at least he found nothing really dangerous to a large, strong man in top physical condition, continuously alert, and ready to eat or drink almost anything that
would keep him alive.

  Blade suspected that the average backpacker from Home Dimension might have lasted no more than two or three days.

  Three times Blade saw the animals that left the long-toed clawed footprints. They were catlike, with long tails, smooth grayish-blue coats, enormous tufted ears, and pale green eyes. The largest of them couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds, but half that weight seemed to be claws and teeth and the rest muscle and sinew. They still weren’t ready to attack something the size of a man unless provoked, and Blade was careful to avoid provoking them.

  The plants did make Blade’s progress much slower than it would have been without them. He didn’t dare travel by night, or even on cloudy days when there wasn’t enough sunlight to reveal lurking creepers. He also had to zigzag back and forth through the jungle among the groves and the rogues. On some days he covered ten or twelve miles on the ground to make a mile toward the west.

  Meanwhile his beard and hair grew, his skin turned black with dirt and plant sap, he collected a dozen insect bites and thorn pricks each day, and he lost enough weight so that his ribs began to show. By the time he saw the plants begin to thin out ahead, he knew he must look more like something escaped from the monkey house at the zoo than a human being. However, he didn’t plan to start worrying about how he might look to the people of this Dimension until he was safely out of reach of the killer plants.

  Chapter 4

  On the morning of his twelfth day in the Dimension of the killer plants, Richard Blade sat on the bank of a river washing his feet.

  Yesterday he’d seen what he hoped would be the last of the plants, and also the first signs of intelligent life in this Dimension. One sign was a trail beaten through the last of the jungle by hooves and bare feet. Another sign was a tumbled heap of moss-covered logs, once a fair-sized house. Blade was relieved. By temperament he was a rather solitary man, but there was a such a thing as being too solitary.