Gods of Green Mountain (53 page)

Aboard the ship, Lamar had changed from her white lieutenant's uniform into a long gown. She danced up to Logan, pivoting around, smiling at him teasingly. "See, I brought along a wedding gown. I don't want to wait all those years just so we can have a grand royal wedding in the crystal palace. Let us marry here, today, and enjoy our trip home sharing the same room and bed, and perhaps, if we are lucky, by the time we reach El Dorraine, we will have a baby...or one started."

In a happy, playful mood, Logan reached for her, and she skipped away, luring him on while the other men on board laughed. Then, tripping on the long skirt of the gown, Lamar fell against the control panel. In her efforts to keep her balance, and keep from tearing her wedding gown, she clutched desperately for anything to support herself. A dozen or so switches were thrown out of position. Logan yelled, and Lamar screamed! All bedlam broke loose as the ship rocketed sideways, and with such tremendous force everyone not seated was thrown to the floor, and it seemed the forward propulsion might pull out their insides and splatter them on the walls.

"By the Gods, what have we done!" flared Logan, seeing everything go past him in a blur, while just to the side of their porthole window something whizzed by like a beam of light.

Very softly someone said: "Those people on Earth--they fired at us. We brought them the ultimate gift--and they sought to kill us." This soft-spoken young man came to assist Lamar to her feet, while Logan scrambled to his.

The fired rocket could be seen far to the side of them, blazing a long red tail as it faded into the distance. Logan put his arm around Lamar and drew her into his embrace, grateful once again she was such an everlasting tease and flirt, the eternal woman, taking this auspicious time to try on a dress and flit around. She managed in her innocence somehow to save them all from being but bits of disintegrated dust.

She was trembling, near tears, but she didn't cry even as the third in command spoke in a calm voice laid thinly over nervousness: "Captain, we have jettisoned far beyond our fuel capacity to reach home. Our navigators don't have the least idea of where we are."

Turning his attention to the charts, and comparing them with the complex system of dials on the panels, Logan glanced at Lamar, who was checking just as intensely as he was. He faced to address all of those who anxiously awaited his opinion: "Well, it seems we are now in the same position as the two gods when they ran before the passing of the red planet about to collide with their Earth. We have to find a place to set down, and quickly, or float around, forever adrift in space. But first, I'll contact El Dorraine and tell them of our situation."

Silently, attentively, his companions watched as he did all the right things, pushed all the right buttons, and activated the right levers--but nothing happened. He didn't panic. Logan was much too controlled for that. He repeated the procedure with more care given to details, and still no voice responded to his beamed messages. Now truly they were lost, out of touch with home base and those who waited there.

"All right, you know what this means as well as I. This communicator will have to be repaired as soon as we touch down somewhere. We will figure out something, and if we fail to contact El Dorraine, they will send a spaceship out to search for us. We don't have all the brains on this ship, thank the God that be, and at least we have accomplished our goal. We have given the greatest gift of all to the homelands of our gods. How many are there anywhere who can boast of that?"

Hours later, just as the last of their fuel was used, they found an unlikely planet to set down--isolated and desolate, presenting them with an eerie landscape when they peered to look out. No one was cheered: twenty young men in their prime and one young girl in hers. Someone laughed nervously and said they should have brought along more women so the time could pass more enjoyably.

Captain Logan snapped: "We will consider passing our time enjoyably after we have passed it constructively and repaired the damaged communicator."

When his men were working on this project, Logan drew Lamar aside. "I want you to keep out of sight as much as possible until we are again in contact with our leaders. I don't like some of the grumbling I've heard."

She whispered to him: "Darling, have you forgotten Es-Trall? Whether or not we contact home, he has his sky charts, and knows expertly how to read them. He will have followed our ship on his scanning machine."

Immediately Logan felt happier. She was right, one could depend on Es-Trall to do his job well, and jot it all down so less talented minds could see what only he could. "He's a marvel, isn't he, that old man? Let us pray that he hasn't gone into the deep sleep as yet, for some day he must." He regretted saying that the minute the words left his mouth, for Lamar's complacent look vanished, and she struggled to stay aloof. He quickly kissed her. "Silly girl, there are no fears for us. Back in that crystal palace are others who care very much about all of us, as much as Es-Trall, who kept himself alive so many years for our benefit. Someone else will take over when he dies."

"Is it death, then, the deep sleep?" she asked, violet eyes wide.

Logan gave to her then the only answer he could in honesty, with love, compassion, and understanding in his eyes as dark as the plum night sky that surrounded them: "For some it is."

The earthmen on the ground saw that they had missed, and frantically they fired again at the shimmering blue ship that shot erratically sideways like a sudden bolt of lightning, quickly out of range. Greatly disappointed, they turned their attention to the contaminated ground. They had another type of weapon to use here, and it was positioned and used with care. The seeded and planted ground was razed with fire until it was black and charred--for Lord knows what those strange little devils had put there!

When it was over, and not one green leaf or star-shaped white opalescent flower showed, some looked with satisfaction. A few doubted that it had been really necessary, the minority. But what is a minority when the majority has the louder voice? But when, in a few days, the blackened earth was checked, and tender yellow-green was seen peeking upward, even the doubters became assured. A normal plant wouldn't survive such severe treatment--growing there in the blackened earth was something uncanny, something weird, something devilish and unholy!

Once more the extinguisher was rolled into place, and this time they took greater pains to burn the ground thoroughly--and long.

Uniformed guards were stationed around the blackened, ruined earth to keep the sightseers away, the souvenir hunters who tried to salvage a dead or burned leaf, and one man was sent to jail for stealing a flower that was immediately destroyed.

Now they waited, not really too confident the darn things were defeated. And they weren't! In another few days, they were peeking up again, seeking the sun, and rapidly growing toward it.

This was a real contingency to send even the most skeptical into a flux of frightening, fearful speculations! Why, the damned things must have long, long, indestructible roots! Why, they could overtake the desert, and eventually the whole continent from the rapid pace at which they grew!

The president met with his cabinet and other world leaders, and a few of the more daring scientists risked suggesting a few of the plants be saved for specimens. "Why not? We don't know if they are harmful."

"But they are blooming already with eerie little white flowers that glow luminously in the night!"

"Is that such a dreadful thing?"

Apparently it was. Perhaps if they hadn't grown so rapidly, so determinedly, so beautifully luminous and opalescent, giving them an unworldly appearance that was too ghostly different from anything seen before, someone would have looked closely and seen the clustering center seeds as sparkling as any jewel that decorated a lady's finger. But no one was given this chance. Who could feel secure in a world where such as that grew? Stubborn, tenacious plants like that had to be wiped out, exterminated, eradicated, no matter how deeply those roots extended down into the earth! Of course, that would mean sacrificing the surrounding cities, and destroying millions of dollars' worth of someone else's property, and the land would be spoiled for decades--but cities and homes and land were expendable.

The people were ordered from the cities, given just enough time to pack a few personal belongings. Patients were rushed out of the hospitals in ambulances; factories closed forever, and a dam just newly constructed at the cost of millions would be destroyed too, along with all the cheap electrical energy it would supply.

"My God, would you look?" said one guard to another, his eyes wide in fear--for as unbelievable as it sounded, those flowering plants were already producing fruit, curled-up small pinkish gourds, or crescent melons.

"Look at the forms," whispered one of the higher officials, "that little peachy melon--it almost looks like a luminous human fetus."

"What an imagination!" someone else laughed, though he too stared. "What say we back off some?"

This time a plane was sent high into the air. Over their target, a bomb was dropped. It detonated directly on target. Good drop. A mammoth crater was bitten into the desert floor, causing a cloud to mushroom up into the bright sunny sky, and for a moment, it blacked out the sun.

The danger of radiation fallout was immense, but it had to be risked. Now, everyone agreed, there wasn't a plant anywhere in this world, or any other, that could resist or survive that! This time they were right. This time they had done a superb job.

The star-flowering plants had liked that rich desert floor waiting for millions of years to receive something like them. That single hot sun blazing down would have been so much more nourishing than the tiny twin orbs of El Dorraine. The pufars would have given so much, much more, if but allowed the chance. They were only plants, but they knew they weren't wanted; the dim-despairs overtook them, and they didn't struggle to live this time. They were extinguished, gone down in defeat. Every molecule, every atom, every spore.

They would not grow here under this sun again.