The Tree of Life Page 7

the Tree's branches snatched him from its priestess' hands. Thefire-colored blossoms burnt his flesh as they closed round him, the hotbranches gripping like the touch of ravenous fingers. The whole Tree washot and throbbing with a dreadful travesty of fleshly life as it whippedhim aloft into the hovering bulk of incarnate horror above.

  In the instantaneous upward leap of the flower-tipped limbs Smith foughtlike a demon to free his gun-hand from the gripping coils. For the firsttime Thag knew rebellion in his very clutches, and the ecstasy of thatmusic which had dinned in Smith's ears so strongly that by now it seemedalmost silence was swooping down a long arc into wrath, and the branchestightened with hot insistency, lifting the rebellious offering intoThag's monstrous, indescribable bulk.

  But even as they rose, Smith was twisting in their clutch to maneuverhis hand into a position from which he could blast that undulant treetrunk into nothingness. He knew intuitively the futility of firing upinto Thag's imponderable mass. Thag was not of the world he knew; theflame blast might well be harmless to that mighty hoverer in thetwilight. But at the Tree's root, where Thag's essential being mergedfrom the imponderable to the material, rooting in earthly soil, heshould be vulnerable if he were vulnerable at all. Struggling in thetight, hot coils, breathing the nameless essence of horror, Smith foughtto free his hand.

  The music that had rung so long in his ears was changing as the brancheslifted him higher, losing its melody and merging by swift degrees into ahum of vast and vibrant power that deepened in intensity as the limbsdrew him upward into Thag's monstrous bulk, the singing force of a thingmightier than any dynamo ever built. Blinded and dazed by the forcethundering through every atom of his body, he twisted his hand in onelast, convulsive effort, and fired.

  He saw the flame leap in a dazzling gush straight for the trunk below.It struck. He heard the sizzle of annihilated matter. He saw the trunkquiver convulsively from the very roots, and the whole fabulous Treeshook once with an ominous tremor. But before that tremor could shiverup the branches to him the hum of the living dynamo which was closinground his body shrilled up arcs of pure intensity into a thunderingsilence.

  Then without a moment's warning the world exploded. So instantaneouslydid all this happen that the gun-blast's roar had not yet echoed intosilence before a mightier sound than the brain could bear explodedoutward from the very center of his own being. Before the awful power ofit everything reeled into a shaken oblivion. He felt himself falling....

  * * * * *

  A queer, penetrating light shining upon his closed eyes roused Smith bydegrees into wakefulness again. He lifted heavy lids and stared upwardinto the unwinking eye of Mars' racing nearer moon. He lay thereblinking dazedly for a while before enough of memory returned to rousehim. Then he sat up painfully, for every fiber of him ached, and staredround on a scene of the wildest destruction. He lay in the midst of awide, rough circle which held nothing but powdered stone. About it,rising raggedly in the moving moonlight, the blocks of time-forgottenIllar loomed.

  But they were no longer piled one upon another in a rough travesty ofthe city they once had shaped. Some force mightier than any of man'sexplosives seemed to have hurled them with such violence from their bedsthat their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumblingthem into dust. And in the very center of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.

  He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence itseemed to him that the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations.And as he stared he realized that no force save one could have wroughtsuch destruction upon the ancient stones. Nor was there any explosiveknown to man which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havocupon the blocks of Illar. That force had hummed unbearably through theliving dynamo of Thag, a force so powerful that space itself had bent toenclose it. Suddenly he realized what must have happened.

  Not Illar, but Thag himself had warped the walls of space to enfold thetwilit world, and nothing but Thag's living power could have held it sobent to segregate the little, terror-ridden land inviolate.

  Then when the Tree's roots parted, Thag's anchorage in the materialworld failed and in one great gust of unthinkable energy the warpedspace-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid space had snappedback into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellersinto--into----His mind balked in the effort to picture what must havehappened, into what ultimate dimension those denizens must havevanished.

  Only himself, enfolded deep in Thag's very essence, the intolerablepower of the explosion had not touched. So when the warped space-curveceased to be, and Thag's hold upon reality failed, he must have beendropped back out of the dissolving folds upon the spot where the Treehad stood in the space-circled world, through that vanished world-floorinto the spot he had been snatched from in the instant of the dim land'sdissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force of theexplosion had spent itself, before Thag dared move even himself throughthe walls of changing energy into his own far land again.

  Smith sighed and lifted a hand to his throbbing head, rising slowly tohis feet. What time had elapsed he could not guess, but he must assumethat the Patrol still searched for him. Wearily he set out across thecircle of havoc toward the nearest shelter which Illar offered. The dustrose in ghostly, moonlit clouds under his feet.