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him to death... . "It's real. It's--you know Ewen Ross. You know he's had careful, complete Medic training-and he lay in the woods fooling around with Heather and MacLeod while a dying patient ran right past him and collapsed with a burst aorta. Camilla--Lieutenant Del Rey--threw away her telescope and ran off to chase butterflies."

"And you think this--this epidemic is going to strike here?"

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"Captain, I
 
know
 
it," MacAran pleaded, "I'm--I'm fighting it off now--"

Leicester had not become Captain of a starship by being unimaginative or by refusing to meetemergencies. As the sound of a second shot erupted in the space before the clearing, he ran for the door,hitting an alarm button as he ran. When no one answered he shouted, running across the clearing.

MacAran, at his heels, sized up the situation in the flicker of an eye. The girl shot by the officer wasstill lying on the ground, writhing in pain; as they burst into the area Security men and the young people ofthe Commune were grappling hand to hand, shouting wild obscenities. A third shot rang out; one of the Security officers howled in pain and fell, clutching his kneecap.

"Danforth!" the Captain bellowed.

Danforth swung round, gun leveled, and for a split second MacAran thought he would pull thetrigger again, but the years-long habit of obedience to the Captain made the berserk officer hesitate. Onlya minute, but by that time MacAran's flying body struck him in a rough tackle; the man came crashing tothe ground and the gun rolled away. Leicester dived for it, broke it, thrust the cartridges in his pocket.

Danforth struggled like a mad thing, clawing at MacAran, grappling for his throat; MacAran felt thesurge of wild rage rising in him too, with spinning red colors before his eyes. He wanted to claw, to bite,to gouge out the man's eyes…with savage effort, remembering what had happened before, he broughthimself back to reality and let the man rise to his feet. Danforth stared at the Captain and began toblubber, wiping his streaming eyes with doubled fists and muttering incoherently.

Captain Leicester snarled, "I'll break you for this, Danforth! Get to quarters'!'

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Danforth gave a final gulp. He relaxed and smiled lazily at his superior officer. "Captain," hemurmured tenderly, "did anybody ever tell you that you got beautiful big blue eyes? Listen, why don'twe--"straight-faced, smiling, in perfect seriousness, he made an obscene suggestion that made Leicestergasp, turn purple with rage, and draw breath to bellow at him again. MacAran grabbed the Captain's armurgently.

"Captain, don't do anything you'll be sorry for. Can't you see he doesn't know what he's doing or

saying?"

Danforth had already lost interest and ambled off, idly kicking at pebbles. Around them the nucleusof the fight had lost momentum; half the combatants were sitting on the ground crooning; the others hadseparated into little clumps of two and three. Some were simply stroking one another with total animalabsorption and a complete lack of inhibitions, lying on the rough grass; others had already proceeded,totally without discrimination--man and woman, woman and woman, man and man--to more direct andactive satisfactions. Captain Leicester stared at the daylight orgy in consternation and began to weep.

A surge of disgust flared up in MacAran, blotting out his early concern and compassion for the man. Simultaneously he was torn between reeling, struggling emotions; a rising surge of lust, so that he wantedto fall to the ground with the crowded, entwined bodies, a last scrap of compunction for the Captain--
 
he

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doesn't know what he's doing, not even as much as I do…
 
and a wave of rising sickness. Abruptly he

bolted, sick panic blotting out everything else, stumbled and ran from the scene.

Behind him a long-haired girl, little more than a child, came up to the Captain, urged him down with

his head on her lap, and rocked him like a baby, crooning softly in Gaelic…

Ewen Ross saw and felt the first wave of rising unreason…it hit him as panic….and simultaneously,inside the hospital building, a patient still shrouded in bandages and comatose for days rose, ripped off hisbandages and, while Ewen and a nurse stared in horrified consternation, tore his wounds open andlaughing, bled to death. The nurse hurled a huge carboy of green soap at the dying man; then Ewen,fighting wildly for control of the

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waves of madness that threatened to overcome him (
 
the ground was rocking in earthquake, wild vertigo rippled his guts and head with nausea, insane colors spun before his eyes…
) leaped for the nurse and after a moment's struggle, took away the scalpel with which she was ripping at her wrists. He resisted her entwining arms (
 
throw her down on the bed now, tear her dress off
…) and ran for Dr. Di Asturien, to gasp out a terrified plea to lock up all poisons, narcotics and surgical instruments. Hastily drafting Heather (she had, after all, some memory of her own first attack) they managed to get more of them locked away and the key safely hidden before the whole hospital went berserk…

Deep in the forest, the unaccustomed sunlight glazed the forest lawns and clearings with flowers and

filled the air with pollen sweeping down from the heights on the wind.

Insects hurried from flower to flower, from leaf to leaf; birds mated, built nests of warm feathers withtheir eggs encased in insulating mud-and-straw walls, to hatch enclosed and feed on stored nectars andresins until the next warm spell. Grasses and grains scattered their seed, which the next snows wouldfertilize and moisten to sprout.

On the plains, the stag-like beasts ran riot, stampeding, fighting, coupling in broad daylight, as thepollen-laden winds sent their curious scents deep into the brain. And in the trees of the lower slopes, thesmall furred humanoids ran wild, venturing to the ground--some of them for the only time in theirlives--feasting on the abruptly-ripening fruits, bursting through the clearings in maddened disregard of theprowling beasts. Generations and millennia of memory, in their genes and brains, had taught them that atthis time, even their natural enemies were unable to sustain the long effort of chase.

Night settled over the world of the four moons; the dark sun sank in a strange clear twilight and therare stars appeared. One after another, the moons climbed the sky; the great violet-gleaming moon, thepaler green and blue gemlike discs, the small one like a white pearl. In the clearing where the greatstarship, alien to this world, lay huge and strange and menacing, the men from Earth breathed the strangewind and the strange pollen borne

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on its breath, and curious impulses straggled and erupted in their forebrains.

Father Valentine and half a dozen strange crewmen sprawled in a thicket, exhausted and satiated.

In the hospital, fevered patients moaned untended, or ran wildly into the clearing and into the forest,in search of they knew not what. A man with a broken leg ran a mile through the trees before his leg gaveway beneath him and he lay laughing in the moonlight while a tigerlike beast licked his face and fawned onhim.

Judith Lovat lay quietly in her quarters, swinging the great blue jewel on the chain around her throat;she had kept it, all this time, concealed beneath her clothing. Now she drew it out, as if the strangestarlike patterns within it exerted some hypnotic influence on her. Memories swirled in her mind, of thestrange smiling madness that had been on her before. After a time, following some invisible call, she rose,dressed warmly, calmly appropriating her room-mate's warmest clothing (her room-mate, a girl named Eloise, who had been a communications officer on shipboard, was sitting under a longleafed tree, listeningto the strange sounds of the wind in its leaves and singing wordlessly). Judy went calmly through theclearing, and struck into the forest. She was not sure where she was going, but she knew she would beguided when the time came, so she followed the upward trail, never deviating, listening to the music in thewind.

Phrases heard on another planet echoed dimly in her mind,
 
by woman wailing for her demon lover…

No, not a demon
, she thought,
 
but too bright, too strange and beautiful to be human
 
… sheheard herself sob as she walked, remembering the music, the shimmering winds and flowers, and thestrange, glowing eyes of the half-remembered being, the clutch of fear that had quickly turned toenchantment and then to a happiness, a sense of closeness more intense than anything she had everknown.

Had it been something like this, then, those old Earth-legends of a wanderer lured away by the

fairy-folk, the poet who had cried out in his enchantment:

I met a Lady in the wood,

A fairy's child

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Her hair was long, her foot was light

And her eyes were wild…

Was it like that? Or was it--
 
And the Son of God looked on the daughters of men, and beheld

they were fair
…

Judy was enough of a disciplined scientist to be aware that in the curious actions of this time therewas something of madness. She was certain that some of her memories were colored and changed by thestrange state of consciousness she had been in then. Yet experience and reality testing counted forsomething, too. If there was a touch of madness in it, behind the madness lay something real, and it wasas real as the tangible touch on her mind now, that said, "
 
Come. You will be led, and you will not beharmed
."

She heard the curious rustle in the leaves over her head, and stopped, looking up, her breathcatching in anticipation. So deep was her hope and longing to see the strange unforgotten face that shecould have wept when it was only one of the little ones, the small red-eyed aliens, who peered at her shyand wild through the leaves, then slid down the trunk and stood before her, trembling and yet confident,holding out his hands.

She could not entirely reach his mind. She knew the little ones were far less developed than she, andthe language barrier was great. Yet, somehow, they communicated. The small tree-man knew that shewas the one he sought, and why; Judy knew that he had been sent for her, and that he bore a messageshe desperately hungered to hear. In the trees she saw other strange and shy faces, and in anothermoment, once they were aware of her good will, they slipped down and were all around her. One ofthem slid a small cool hand into her fingers; another garlanded her with bright leaves and flowers. Theirmanner was almost reverent as they bore her along, and she went with them without protest, knowingthat this was only a prologue to the real meeting she longed for.

High in the wrecked ship an explosion thundered. The ground shook, and the echoes rolled throughthe forest, frightening the birds from the trees. They flew up in a cloud that darkened the sun for amoment, but no one in the clearing of the Earthmen heard .. . .

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Moray lay outstretched on the soft ploughed soil of the garden unit, listening with a deep innerknowledge to the soft ways of growth of the plants embedded in the soil. It seemed to him, in thoseexpanding moments, that he could hear the grass and leaves growing, that some of the alien Earth-plantswere complaining, weeping, dying, while others, in this strange ground, throve and changed, their innercells altering and changing as they must to adapt and survive. He could not have put any of this intowords, and, a practical and materialistic man, he would never rationally believe in ESP. Yet, with theunused centers of his brain stimulated by the strange madness of this time, he did not try to rationalize orbelieve. He simply knew, and accepted the knowledge, and knew it would never leave him.

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Father Valentine was awakened by the rising sun over the clearing. At first, dazed, and still floodedwith the strange awarenesses, he sat staring in wonder at the sun and the four moons which, by sometrick of the light or his curiously heightened senses, he could see quite clearly in the deep-violet sunrise;green, violet, alabaster-pearl, peacock-blue. Then memory came flooding in, and horror, as he saw thecrewmen scattered around him, still deep in sleep, exhausted. The full hideous horror of what he haddone, in those last hours of darkness and animal hungers, bore in on a mind too confused andhyperstimulated even to be aware of its own madness.

One of the crewmen had a knife in his belt. The little priest, his face streaming with tears, snatched itout and began very seriously expunging all the witnesses to his sin, muttering to himself the phrases of thelast rites as he watched the streaming blood…

It was the wind
, MacAran thought. Heather had been right; it was something in the wind. Somesubstance, airborne, dust or pollen, which caused this madness to run riot. He had known it before, andthis time he had had some idea what was happening; enough to work all through the early stages, sweptonly by recurrent attacks of sudden panic or euphoria, at locking up weapons, ammunition, poisons fromthe hospital or the chemistry lab. He knew that Heather and Ewen were doing the same thing, to somelimited extent, in the hospital. But even

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so he was numbed with horror at the events of the last day and night, and when night fell, knowing rationally that one semi-sane man could do little against two hundred completely crazed men and women, he had simply hidden in the woods, desperately clinging to sanity against the recurrent waves of madness that clutched at him. This damned planet! This damned world, with the winds of madness that crept like ghosts from the towering hills, ravening madness that touched men and beasts alike. An encompassing, devouring, ghost wind of madness and terror!