The Word for World is Forest (15 page)

“Now listen, Davidson, I order you to hand your command over to Lt. Temba at once and report to me here,” said the distant whining voice, and Davidson suddenly cut off the radio, sickened. They were all spla, playing at still being soldiers, in full retreat from reality. There were actually very few men who could face reality when the going got tough.

As he expected, the local creechies did absolutely nothing about his raids on the warrens. The only way to handle them, as he’d known from the start, was to terrorize them and never let up on them. If you did that, they knew who was boss, and knuckled under. A lot of the villages within a thirty-kilo radius seemed to be deserted now before he got to them, but he kept his men going out to burn them up every few days.

The fellows were getting rather jumpy. He had kept them logging, since that’s what forty-eight of the fifty-five loyal survivors were, loggers. But they knew that the robo-freighters from Earth wouldn’t be called down to load up the lumber, but would just keep coming in and circling in orbit waiting for the signal that didn’t come. No use cutting trees just for the hell of it; it was hard work. Might as
well burn them. He exercised the men in teams, developing fire-setting techniques. It was still too rainy for them to do much, but it kept their minds busy. If only he had the other three hoppers, he’d really be able to hit and run. He considered a raid on Central to liberate the hoppers, but did not yet mention this idea even to Aabi and Temba, his best men. Some of the boys would get cold feet at the idea of an armed raid on their own HQ. They kept talking about “when we get back with the others.” They didn’t know those others had abandoned them, betrayed them, sold their skins to the creechies. He didn’t tell them that, they couldn’t take it.

One day he and Aabi and Temba and another good sound man would just take the hopper over, then three of them jump out with machine guns, take a hopper apiece, and so home again, home again, jiggety jog. With four nice egg-beaters to beat eggs with. Can’t make an omelet without beating eggs. Davidson laughed aloud, in the darkness of his bungalow. He kept that plan hidden just a little longer, because it tickled him so much to think about it.

After two more weeks they had pretty well closed out the creechie warrens within walking distance, and the forest was neat and tidy. No vermin. No smoke-puffs over the trees. Nobody hopping out of bushes and flopping down on the ground with their eyes shut, waiting for you to
stomp them. No little green men. Just a mess of trees and some burned places. The boys were getting really edgy and mean; it was time to make the hopper-raid. He told his plan one night to Aabi, Temba, and Post.

None of them said anything for a minute, then Aabi said, “What about fuel, Captain?”

“We got enough fuel.”

“Not for four hoppers; wouldn’t last a week.”

“You mean there’s only a month’s supply left for this one?”

Aabi nodded.

“Well then, we pick up a little fuel too, looks like.”

“How?”

“Put your minds to it.”

They all sat there looking stupid. It annoyed him. They looked to him for everything. He was a natural leader, but he liked men who thought for themselves too. “Figure it out, it’s your line of work, Aabi,” he said, and went out for a smoke, sick of the way everybody acted, like they’d lost their nerve. They just couldn’t face the cold hard facts.

They were low on maryjanes now and he hadn’t had one for a couple of days. It didn’t do anything for him. The night was overcast and black, damp, warm, smelling like spring. Ngenene went by walking like an ice-skater, or almost like a robot on treads; he turned slowly through
a gliding step and gazed at Davidson, who stood on the bungalow porch in the dim light from the doorway. He was a power-saw operator, a huge man. “The source of my energy is connected to the Great Generator I cannot be switched off,” he said in a level tone, gazing at Davidson.

“Get to your barracks and sleep it off!” Davidson said in the whipcrack voice that nobody ever disobeyed, and after a moment Ngenene skated carefully on, ponderous and graceful. Too many of the men were using hallies more and more heavily. There was plenty, but the stuff was for loggers relaxing on Sundays, not for soldiers of a tiny outpost marooned on a hostile world. They had no time for getting high, for dreaming. He’d have to lock the stuff up. Then some of the boys might crack. Well, let ’em crack. Can’t make an omelet without cracking eggs. Maybe he could send them back to Central in exchange for some fuel. You give me two, three tanks of gas and I’ll give you two, three warm bodies, loyal soldiers, good loggers, just your type, a little far gone in bye-bye dreamland. . . .

He grinned, and was going back inside to try this one out on Temba and the others, when the guard posted up on the lumberyard smoke stack yelled. “They’re coming!” he screeched out in a high voice, like a kid playing Blacks and Rhodesians. Somebody else over on the west side of the stockade began yelling too. A gun went off.

And they came. Christ, they came. It was incredible. There were thousands of them, thousands. No sound, no noise at all, until that screech from the guard; then one gunshot; then an explosion—a land mine going up—and another, one after another, and hundreds and hundreds of torches flaring up lit one from another and being thrown and soaring through the black wet air like rockets, and the walls of the stockade coming alive with creechies, pouring in, pouring over, pushing, swarming, thousands of them. It was like an army of rats Davidson had seen once when he was a little kid, in the last Famine, in the streets of Cleveland, Ohio, where he grew up. Something had driven the rats out of their holes and they had come up in daylight, seething up over the wall, a pulsing blanket of fur and eyes and little hands and teeth, and he had yelled for his mom and run like crazy, or was that only a dream he’d had when he was a kid? It was important to keep cool. The hopper was parked in the creechie-pen; it was still dark over on that side and he got there at once. The gate was locked, he always kept it locked in case one of the weak sisters got a notion of flying off to Papa Ding Dong some dark night. It seemed to take a long time to get the key out and fit it in the lock and turn it right, but it was just a matter of keeping cool, and then it took a long time to sprint to the hopper and unlock it. Post and
Aabi were with him now. At last came the huge rattle of the rotors, beating eggs, covering up all the weird noises, the high voices yelling and screeching and singing. Up they went, and hell dropped away below them: a pen full of rats, burning.

“It takes a cool head to size up an emergency situation quickly,” Davidson said. “You men thought fast and acted fast. Good work. Where’s Temba?”

“Got a spear in his belly,” Post said.

Aabi, the pilot, seemed to want to fly the hopper, so Davidson let him. He clambered into one of the rear seats and sat back, letting his muscles relax. The forest flowed beneath them, black under black.

“Where you heading, Aabi?”

“Central.”

“No. We don’t want to go to Central.”

“Where do we want to go to?” Aabi said with a kid of womanish giggle. “New York? Peking?”

“Just keep her up a while, Aabi, and circle camp. Big circles. Out of earshot.”

“Captain, there isn’t any Java Camp any more by now,” said Post, a logging-crew foreman, a stocky, steady man.

“When the creechies are through burning the camp, we’ll come in and burn creechies. There must be four thousand of them all in one place there. There’s six
flamethrowers in the back of this helicopter. Let’s give ’em about twenty minutes. Start with the jelly bombs and then catch the ones that run with the flamethrowers.”

“Christ,” Aabi said violently, “some of our guys might be there, the creechies might take prisoners, we don’t know. I’m not going back there and burn up humans, maybe.” He had not turned the hopper.

Davidson put the nose of his revolver against the back of Aabi’s skull and said, “Yes, we’re going back; so pull yourself together, baby, and don’t give me a lot of trouble.”

“There’s enough fuel in the tank to get us to Central, Captain,” the pilot said. He kept trying to duck his head away from the touch of the gun, like it was a fly bothering him. “But that’s all. That’s all we got.”

“Then we’ll get a lot of mileage out of it. Turn her, Aabi.”

“I think we better go on to Central, Captain,” Post said in his stolid voice, and this ganging up against him enraged Davidson so much that reversing the gun in his hand he struck out fast as a snake and clipped Post over the ear with the gunbutt. The logger just folded over like a Christmas card, and sat there in the front seat with his head between his knees and his hands hanging to the floor. “Turn her, Aabi,” Davidson said, the whiplash in his voice. The helicopter swung around in a wide arc. “Hell, where’s camp, I never had this hopper up at night without
any signal to follow,” Aabi said, sounding dull and snuffly like he had a cold.

“Go east and look for the fire,” Davidson said, cold and quiet. None of them had any real stamina, not even Temba. None of them had stood by him when the going got really tough. Sooner or later they all joined up against him, because they just couldn’t take it the way he could. The weak conspire against the strong, the strong man has to stand alone and look out for himself. It just happened to be the way things are. Where was the camp?

They should have been able to see the burning buildings for miles in this blank dark, even in the rain. Nothing showed. Gray-black sky, black ground. The fires must have gone out. Been put out. Could the humans have driven off the creechies? After he’d escaped? The thought went like a spray of icewater through his mind. No, of course not, not fifty against thousands. But by God there must be a lot of pieces of blown-up creechie lying around on the minefields, anyway. It was just that they’d come so damned thick. Nothing could have stopped them. He couldn’t have planned for that. Where had they come from? There hadn’t been any creechies in the forest anywhere around for days and days. They must have poured in from somewhere, from all directions, sneaking along in the woods, coming up out of their holes like rats. There wasn’t any way to stop thousands and thousands of them
like that. Where the hell was camp? Aabi was tricking, faking course. “Find the camp, Aabi,” he said softly.

“For Christ’s sake I’m trying to,” the boy said.

Post never moved, folded over there by the pilot.

“It couldn’t just disappear, could it, Aabi. You got seven minutes to find it.”

“Find it yourself,” Aabi said, shrill and sullen.

“Not till you and Post get in line, baby. Take her down lower.”

After a minute Aabi said, “That looks like the river.”

There was a river, and a big clearing; but where was Java Camp? It didn’t show up as they flew north over the clearing. “This must be it, there isn’t any other big clearing is there,” Aabi said, coming back over the treeless area. Their landing-lights glared but you couldn’t see anything outside the tunnels of the lights; it would be better to have them off. Davidson reached over the pilot’s shoulder and switched the lights off. Blank wet dark was like black towels slapped on their eyes. “For Christ’s sake!” Aabi screamed, and flipping the lights back on slewed the hopper left and up, but not fast enough. Trees leaned hugely out of the night and caught the machine.

The vanes screamed, hurling leaves and twigs in a cyclone through the bright lanes of the lights, but the boles of the trees were very old and strong. The little winged machine plunged, seemed to lurch and tear itself free,
and went down sideways into the trees. The lights went out. The noise stopped.

“I don’t feel so good,” Davidson said. He said it again. Then he stopped saying it, for there was nobody to say it to. Then he realized he hadn’t said it anyway. He felt groggy. Must have hit his head. Aabi wasn’t there. Where was he? This was the hopper. It was all slewed around, but he was still in his seat. It was so dark, like being blind. He felt around, and so found Post, inert, still doubled up, crammed in between the front seat and the control panel. The hopper trembled whenever Davidson moved, and he figured out at last that it wasn’t on the ground but wedged in between trees, stuck like a kite. His head was feeling better, and he wanted more and more to get out of the black, tilted-over cabin. He squirmed over into the pilot’s seat and got his legs out, hung by his hands, and could not feel ground, only branches scraping his dangling legs. Finally he let go, not knowing how far he’d fall, but he had to get out of that cabin. It was only a few feet down. It jolted his head, but he felt better standing up. If only it wasn’t so dark, so black. He had a torch in his belt, he always carried one at night around camp. But it wasn’t there. That was funny. It must have fallen out. He’d better get back into the hopper and get it. Maybe Aabi had taken it. Aabi had intentionally crashed the hopper, taken Davidson’s torch, and made a break for it. The slimy little bastard, he was like all the rest
of them. The air was black and full of moisture, and you couldn’t tell where to put your feet, it was all roots and bushes and tangles. There were noises all around, water dripping, rustling, tiny noises, little things sneaking around in the darkness. He’d better get back up into the hopper, get his torch. But he couldn’t see how to climb back up. The bottom edge of the doorway was just out of reach of his fingers.

There was a light, a faint gleam seen and gone away off in the trees. Aabi had taken the torch and gone off to reconnoiter, get orientated, smart boy. “Aabi!” he called in a piercing whisper. He stepped on something queer while he was trying to see the light among the trees again. He kicked at it with his boots, then put a hand down on it, cautiously, for it wasn’t wise to go feeling things you couldn’t see. A lot of wet stuff, slick, like a dead rat. He withdrew his hand quickly. He felt in another place after a while; it was a boot under his hand, he could feel the crossings of the laces. It must be Aabi lying there right under his feet. He’d got thrown out of the hopper when it came down. Well, he’d deserved it with his Judas trick, trying to run off to Central. Davidson did not like the wet feel of the unseen clothes and hair. He straightened up. There was the light again, black-barred by near and distant tree-trunks, a distant glow that moved.