“The rest are public buildings, storehouses and processing plants and so on,” said Tembesi with an obvious desire to turn the conversation elsewhere. “Let us climb further, to where people dwell.”

  The higher they ascended, the more light and airy it became. There the buildings were smaller, often gaily patterned. They stood in clusters where boughs forked; a few were attached to the main trunk. The dwellers were about, running barefoot along even the thin and quivering outermost parts as if this were solid ground. Only very young children were restricted, by leash or wattle fence. Physically, this tribe was no different from any other on Unan Besar; their costume varied in mere details of batik; even most of the homely household tasks their women carried out, or the simple furniture glimpsed through uncurtained doorways, was familiar. Their uniqueness was at once more subtle and more striking. It lay in dignified courtesy, which glanced at the newcomers with frank interest but did not nudge or stare, which softened speech and made way for a neighbor coming down a narrow limb. It lay in the attitude toward leaders like Tembesi, respectful but not subservient; in laughter more frequent and less shrill than elsewhere; in the plunk of a samisen, as a boy sat vine-crowned, swinging his feet over windy nothingness and serenading his girl.

  “I see flats of vegetables here and there,” Flandry remarked. “Where are the big crops you spoke of, Djuanda?”

  “You can see one of our harvesting crews a few more boughs up, Captain.”

  Flandry groaned.

  The sight was picturesque, though. From the outer twigs hung lichenoid beards, not unlike Spanish moss. Groups of men went precariously near, using hooks and nets to gather it in. Flandry felt queasy just watching them, but they seemed merry enough at their appalling work. The stuff was carried down by other men to a processing shed, where it would yield the antipyretic drug (Unan Besar had more than one disease!) which was the chief local cash crop.

  There were other sources of food, fiber, and income. Entire species of lesser trees and bushes grew on the big ones; mutation and selection had made them useful to man. Semi-domesticated fowl nestled where a share of eggs could be taken. Eventually, branches turned sick; pruning them, cutting them up, treating the residues, amounted to an entire lumber and plastics industry. Bark worms and burrowing insects were a good source of protein, Flandry was assured—though admittedly hunting and fishing down on the ground was more popular.

  It was obvious why the planet had only this one stand of titans. The species was moribund, succumbing to a hundred parasitic forms which evolved faster than its own defenses. Now man had established a kind of symbiosis, preserving these last few: one of the rare cases where he had actually helped out nature. And so, thought Flandry, even if I’m not much for bucolic surroundings myself, I’ve that reason also to like the people of Ranau.

  Near the very top, where branches were more sparse and even the bole swayed a little, Tembesi halted. A plank platform supported a reed hut overgrown with purple-blooming creepers. “This is for the use of newly wed couples, who need some days’ privacy,” he said. “But I trust you and your wife will consider it your own, Captain, for as long as you honor our clan with your presence.”

  “Wife?” Flandry blinked. Luang suppressed a grin. Well…solid citizens like these doubtless had equally well-timbered family lives. No reason to disillusion them. “I thank you,” he bowed. “Will you not enter with me?”

  Tembesi smiled and shook his head. “You are tired and wish to rest, Captain. There are food and drink within for your use. Later we will pester you with formal invitations. Shall we say tonight, an hour after sunset—you will dine at my house? Anyone can guide you there.”

  “And we’ll hear your plans!” cried Djuanda.

  Tembesi remained calm; but it flamed in his eyes. “If the Captain so desires.”

  He bowed. “Good rest, then. Ah—friend Kemul—you are invited to stay with me.”

  The mugger looked around. “Why not here?” he said belligerently.

  “This cabin only has one room.”

  Kemul stood hunched, legs planted wide apart, arms dangling. He swung his hideous face back and forth, as if watching for an attack. “Luang,” he said, “why did we ever snag the Terran?”

  The girl struck a light to her cigarette. “I thought it would be interesting,” she shrugged. “Now do run along.”

  A moment more Kemul stood, then shuffled to the platform’s edge and down the ladder.

  Flandry entered the cabin with Luang. It was cheerfully furnished. The floorboards rocked and vibrated; leaves filled it with an ocean noise.

  “Cosmos, how I can sleep!” he said.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” asked Luang. She approached an electric brazier next to a pantry. “I could make you some dinner.” With a curiously shy smile: “We wives have to learn cooking.”

  “I suspect I’m a better cook than you are,” he laughed, and went to wash up. Running water was available, though at this height it must be pumped from a cistern thirty meters below. There was even a hot tap. Djuanda had mentioned an extensive use of solar cells in this community as its prime energy source. The Terran stripped off his bedraggled finery, scrubbed, flopped on the bed, and tumbled into sleep.

  Luang shook him awake hours later. “Get up, we’ll be late for supper.” He yawned and slipped on a kilt laid out for him. To hell with anything else. She was equally informal, except for a blossom in her hair. They walked out on the platform.

  A moment they paused, then, to look. There weren’t many more branches above them; they could see through the now faintly shining leaves to a deep blue-black sky and the earliest stars. The Tree foamed with foliage on either hand and below. It was like standing above a lake and hearing the waters move. Once in a while Flandry glimpsed phosphor globes, hung on twigs far underfoot. But such lighting was more visible on the next Tree, whose vast shadowy mass twinkled with a hundred firefly lanterns. Beyond was the night.

  Luang slipped close to him. He felt her shoulder as a silken touch along his arm. “Give me a smoke, will you?” she asked. “I am out.”

  “ ’Fraid I am too.”

  “Damn!” Her curse was fervent.

  “Want one that bad?”

  “Yes. I do not like this place.”

  “Why, I think it’s pleasant.”

  “Too much sky. Not enough people. None of them my kind of people. Gods! Why did I ever tell Kemul to intercept you?”

  “Sorry now?”

  “Oh…no…I suppose not. In a way. Dominic—” She caught his hand. Her own fingers were cold. He wished he could make out her expression in the dusk. “Dominic, have you any plans at all? Any hopes?”

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “yes.”

  “You must be crazy. We can’t fight a planet. Not even with this ape-folk to help. I know a city, in the opposite hemisphere—or even old Swamp Town, I can hide you there forever, I swear I can—”

  “No,” he said. “It’s good of you, kid, but I’m going ahead with my project. We won’t need you, though, so feel free to take off.”

  Fear edged her tone, for the first time since he had met her: “I do not want to die of the sickness.”

  “You won’t. I’ll get clean away, with no suspicion of the fact—”

  “Impossible! Every spaceship on this planet is watched!”

  “—or else I’ll be recaptured. Or, more likely, killed. I’d prefer being killed, I think. But either way, Luang, you’ve done your share and there’s no reason for you to take further risks. I’ll speak to Tembesi. You can get a car out of here tomorrow morning.”

  “And leave you?”

  “Uh—”

  “No,” she said.

  They stood unspeaking a while. The Tree soughed and thrummed.

  Finally she asked, “Must you act tomorrow already, Dominic?”

  “Soon,” he replied. “I’d better not give Warouw much time. He’s almost as intelligent as I am.”

  “But tomorrow?” she insisted.

  “Well—no. No, I suppose it could wait another day or two. Why?”

  “Then wait. Tell Tembesi you have to work out the details of your scheme. But not with him. Let’s be alone up here. This wretched planet can spare an extra few hours till it is free—without any idea how to use freedom—can it not?”

  “I reckon so.”

  Flandry dared not be too eager about it, or he might never get up courage for the final hazard. But he couldn’t help agreeing with the girl. One more short day and night? Why not? Wasn’t a man entitled to a few hours entirely his own, out of the niggardly total granted him?

  -14-

  Among other measures, Nias Warouw had had a confidential alarm sent all dispensers, to watch for a fugitive of such and such a description and listen (with judicious pumping of the clientele) for any rumors about him. Despite a considerable reward offered, the chief was in no hopes of netting his bird with anything so elementary.

  When the personal call arrived for him, he had trouble believing it. “Are you certain?”

  “Yes, tuan, quite,” answered the young man in the telecom screen. He had identified himself by radio-scanned fingerprints and secret number as well as by name; in the past, hijacker gangs seeking pills for the black market had sometimes used false dispensers. This was absolutely Siak, stationed in Ranau. “He is right in this community. Being as isolated as we are, the average person here knows him only as a visitor from across the sea. So he walks about freely.”

  “How did he happen to come, do you know?” asked Warouw, elaborately casual.

  “Yes, tuan, I have been told. He befriended a youth of our clan in Gunung Utara. The boy released some prisoners of yours; then, with the help of certain local people, they contrived Flandry’s escape from Biocontrol Central.”

  Warouw suppressed a wince at being thus reminded of two successive contretemps. He went on the offensive with a snap: “How do you know all this, dispenser?”

  Siak wet his lips before answering nervously, “It seems Flandry hypnotized the boy with gaudy daydreams of seeing Mother Terra. Through the boy, then, Flandry’s criminal friends met several other youths of Ranau—restless and reckless—and organized them into a sort of band for the purpose of liberating Flandry and getting him off this planet. Of course, it would be immensely helpful to have me as part of their conspiracy. The first boy, who is a kinsman of mine, sounded me out. I realized something was amiss and responded as he hoped to his hints, in order to draw him out. As soon as I appeared to be of one mind with them, they produced Flandry from the woods and established him in a house here. They claim he is an overseas trader scouting for new markets…Tuan, we must hurry. They have something afoot already. I do not know what. Neither do most of the conspirators. Flandry says that no man can reveal, by accident or treachery, what he has not been told. I only know they do have some means, some device, which they expect to prepare within a very short time. Hurry!”

  Warouw controlled a shudder. He had never heard of any interstellar equivalent of radio. But Terra might have her military secrets. Was that Flandry’s trump card? He forced himself to speak softly: “I shall.”

  “But tuan, you must arrive unobserved. Flandry is alert to the chance of being betrayed. With the help of his rebel friends, he must have established a dozen boltholes. If something goes wrong, they will blast down the vault, take a large stock of antitoxin, and escape through the wilderness to complete their apparatus elsewhere. In that case, I am supposed to cooperate with them and pretend to you that I was overpowered. But it would make no difference if I resisted, would it, tuan?”

  “I suppose not.” Warouw stared out a window, unheeding of the bright gardens. “Judging from your account, a few well-armed men could take him. Can you invite him to your house at a given time, where we will be in ambush?”

  “I can do better than that, tuan. I can lead your men to his own house, to await his return. He has been working constantly at the Tree of the Gnarly Boughs, which has a little electronic shop. But in his guise as a trader, he has been asked to dine at noon with my uncle Tembesi. So he will come back to his guest house shortly before, to bathe and change clothes.”

  “Hm. The problem is to get my people in secretly.” Warouw considered the planetary map which filled one wall of his office. “Suppose I land a car in the woods this very day, far enough out from your settlement not to be seen. My men and I will march in afoot, reaching your dispensary at night. Can you then smuggle us by byways to his house?”

  “I…I think so, tuan, if there are only a few of you. Certain paths, directly from limb to limb rather than along the trunk, are poorly lighted and little frequented after dark. The cabin he uses is high up on the Tree Where the Ketjils Nest, isolated from any others… But tuan, if there can merely be three or four men with you…it seems dangerous.”

  “Bah! Not when each man has a blaster. I do not want a pitched battle with your local rebels, though; the more quietly this affair is handled, the better. So I will leave most of my crew with the aircar. When we have Flandry secured, I will call the pilot to come get us. The rest of the conspiracy can await my leisure. I doubt if anyone but the Terran himself represents any real danger.”

  “Oh, no, tuan!” exclaimed Siak. “I was hoping you would understand that, and spare the boys. They are only hot-headed, there is no real harm in them—”

  “We shall see about that, when all the facts become known,” said Warouw bleakly. “You may expect reward and promotion, dispenser…unless you bungle something so he escapes again, in which case there will be no sparing of you.”

  Siak gulped. Sweat glistened on his forehead.

  “I wish to all the gods there were time to think out a decent plan,” said Warouw. He smiled in wryness. “But as it is, I have not even time to complain about the shortness of time.” Leaning forward, like a cat at a mousehole: “Now, there are certain details I must know, the layout of your community and—”

  -15-

  As they neared the heights, the sun—low above gleaming crowns—struck through an opening in those leaves which surrounded her and turned Luang’s body to molten gold. Flandry stopped.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Just admiring, my sweet.” He drew a lungful of dawn air and savored the sad trilling of a ketjil. There may not be another chance.

  “Enough,” grumbled Kemul. “On your way, Terran.”

  “Be still!” The girl stamped her foot.

  Kemul dropped a hand to his blaster and glared out of red eyes. “You have had plenty of time with her, Terran,” he said. “Any more stalling now, and Kemul will know for a fact you are afraid.”

  “Oh, I am,” said Flandry, lightly but quite honestly. His pulse hammered; he saw the great branch, the leaves that flickered around it, the score of men who stood close by, with an unnatural sharpness. “Scared spitless.”

  Luang snarled at the mugger: “You do not have to go up there and face blaster fire!”

  Seeing the ugly face, as if she had struck it and broken something within, Flandry knew a moment’s pain for Kemul. He said in haste: “That’s my own orders, darling. I thought you knew. Since you insisted on waiting this close to the scene of action, I told him to stand by and protect you in case things got nasty. I won’t hear otherwise, either.”

  She bridled. “Look here, I have always taken care of myself and—”

  He stopped her words with a kiss. After a moment’s rigidity, she melted against him.

  Letting her go, he swung on his heel, grabbed a rung, and went up the bole as fast as he could. Her eyes pursued him until the leaves curtained her off. Then he climbed alone, among murmurous mysterious grottos.

  Not quite alone, he told his fears. Tembesi, Siak, young Djuanda, and their comrades came behind. They were lifetime hunters, today on a tiger hunt. But their number and their archaic chemical rifles were of small account against blaster flames.

  Well, a man could only die once.

  Unfortunately.

  The taste of Luang lingered on his mouth. Flandry mounted a final ladder to the platform, which swayed in morning wind. Before him was the cabin. It looked like one arbor of purple flowers. He stepped to the doorway, twitched the drape aside, and entered.

  Because the truncheons whacking from either side were not unexpected, he dodged them. His movement threw him to the floor. He rolled over, sat up, and looked into the nozzles of energy guns.

  “Be still,” hissed Warouw, “or I will boil your eyes with a low beam.”

  A disgruntled club wielder peered out a vine-screened window. “Nobody else,” he said.

  “You!” Another Guard kicked Flandry in the ribs. “Was there not a woman with you?”

  “No—no—” The Terran picked himself up, very carefully, keeping hands folded atop his head. His gray eyes darted around the hut. Siak had given him a report on the situation, after leaving Warouw here to wait, but Flandry required precise detail.

  Two surly Guards posted at the door, sticks still in hand and blasters holstered. Two more, one in each corner, out of jump range, their own guns drawn and converging on him. Warouw close to the center of the room, and to Flandry: a small, deft, compact man with a smile flickering on his lips, wearing only the green kilt and medallion, a blaster in his clutch. The brand of Biocontrol smoldered on his brow like yellow fire.

  It was now necessary to hold all their attention for a few seconds. Tembesi’s men could climb over the supporting branches rather than up the ladder, and so attain this platform unobserved from the front of the cabin. But it had a rear window too.

  “No,” said Flandry, “there isn’t anyone with me. Not just now. I left her at— Never mind. How in the name of all devils and tax collectors did you locate me so fast? Who tipped you?”

  “I think I shall ask the questions,” said Warouw. His free hand reached into a pocket and drew forth the flat case of a short-range radiocom. “The girl does not matter, though. If she arrives in the next several minutes, before the car does, we can pick her up too. Otherwise she can wait. Which will not be for long, Captain. A car full of well-armed men is out in the jungle. When they arrive, I will leave them in charge of the local airstrip—and dispensary, in case your noble young morons retain any ideas about raiding it. Then she can give herself up, or wait for a search party to flush her out of hiding, or run into the jungle and die. That last would be a cruel waste of so much beauty, but I do not care immensely.”