Nessman stepped into the doorway to separate the parties. "You all right, snake?" he asked.
"Yeah," said Meyer. "We'll just wait till they're on the lift, okay?"
Her eyes were aware of the compartment's normal lighting, but the lonely darkness squeezed tight on her mind.
Responses
Blohm stopped at the edge of a creek or elongated pond. The water seemed to be a sheet of black glass. Leaves and what looked like a berry floated on the surface. There was no discernible current.
Gabe picked up a pebble. "Don't," Blohm said, but the pebble was already in the air, flipped from the back of the sergeant's thumb.
It plopped into the water. Ripples spread evenly.
"What was wrong with that?" Gabrilovitch said in a wounded tone. He didn't object to his nominal subordinate being in charge whenever the two of them were alone on a mission, but he didn't like being treated like a half-witted child.
"Maybe nothing," Blohm said. "Look, just . . . I want to sit and look things over, Gabe. I don't want . . . if you touch something, make something happen . . . look, I want to understand this, do you see?"
Gabe didn't understand that there was anything to understand. The trees were dangerous—so far in over fifty different ways only a quarter mile into the forest. There were probably animals—otherwise how explain the berserk vegetation?—and they'd be dangerous too, though large predators weren't likely in the apparent absence of large prey animals. The sergeant didn't believe that there was anything to know, however; as opposed to things to avoid, to destroy and to survive.
"There's something moving on the trunk of that tree across the creek," Gabrilovitch said. "Mark."
"I got it," Blohm said.
He'd seen the movement already. A creeper was unwinding from the smooth black bark of a tree ten feet in diameter above the buttress roots. As plants move the activity was blindingly fast, but it would still be minutes before the vine had completely straightened from its original helical grip on the tree.
At that point, Blohm guessed the upper end of the vine would come spearing down in his direction like a snake's head. Caius Blohm had no intention of being in the target area long enough for that to happen.
"Look, I got a bad feeling about it," Gabrilovitch said. "I don't think we ought to be standing around waiting for something to whack us. This place is bad news, snake."
"Gabe," Blohm said softly. Frustration at being interrupted was a raging red glow in his mind, but his voice was mild and colorless. "Why don't you get into your null sack for a bit. Leave the RF port open and you can watch everything through my helmet. You'll be as safe as if you were back on Stalleybrass."
"Shitfire, Blohm," the sergeant said. "I just thought you ought to know about that thing across the creek. Who the hell do you think you are?"
"Gabe . . ." Blohm said. "If you don't get into your sack and let me concentrate on this, I'll drop a stitch and the forest'll grease me sure. If that happens, you may as well eat your stinger right now, because I tell you, snake, you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of making it back to the clearing without me."
Blohm's visor was set on panorama with movements highlighted. Twenty yards back in the direction the scouts had come, the upper half of a tree with a coarse, scaly surface was rotating. The entire bole moved. It was visible only through a notch between the interlaced branches of two nearer trees.
"Yeah, sure, snake," Gabrilovitch said. He pulled the tube-shaped roll of his null sack from its pouch. "The place gets on my nerves, that's all."
Blohm shifted his position a step and a half to the left so that another treetrunk separated him from the one in motion. He had no idea what would have happened if he'd remained where he was; just that it would have been fatal.
Plants don't chase down prey. Neither do web spiders. But spiders grow fat on animals which move without thinking.
Gabe stepped into the mouth of his null sack, pulled the sides over his head, and lay down. There was a faint sigh as he operated the closures; then nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The sack's outer surface was the black of powdered carbon, not shadow. Shadow has color and shows the outline of the surface on which it lies. The null sack absorbed energy right across the spectrum from heat to microwave. The inner and outer surfaces were of identical material, but the layer between was a high-efficiency heat sink that expanded slightly as it stored energy.
Micropores in the sack passed oxygen molecules through to the interior. The slightly larger carbon dioxide molecules filtered through the inner surface but were trapped in the middle layer until flushed when the sack was serviced after use.