Part 2

He thought, wildly, _she doesn't know!_ He thought, she is inexperienced. He thought again, she would _never_ know, unless...."

He slipped an arm around her bare shoulders and drew her to him.

"Like this," he said, looking down into her tip-tilted eyes.

Then he kissed her. Her sarong slipped....

* * * * *

"I am unhappy with you, Cliff," Commander Spliid said with chilly formality. Rowley leaned back in his chair in Spliid's office aboard the Survey ship. Spliid laid his pipe in the tray on his desk. He said, "What happened to your daily reports?"

Rowley stuffed his own pipe, lit it.

"I thought you knew. I didn't make any."

Spliid's look of exasperation wavered and dimmed through the swirls of blue smoke. It was all over now, and Rowley felt no sense of hurry. Hume was a pinpoint of light in the star-carpeted vestibules of space behind them. In another hour, they would shift into overdrive. Hume would vanish from their lives forever.

"I assume," he said, "that Hume is now officially closed."

Spliid nodded. He fixed questioning gray eyes on Rowley.

"Good," said Rowley. "That's the way it will always be."

"Always?" Spliid fumbled with his pipe. "For our life-times, maybe...."

"Always," Rowley repeated. He drew on his pipe, enjoying the luxury of keeping the Commander's curiosity at bay. "Human beings have no place on Hume. I found that out the day after you dropped in on me. That's why I made no reports. I just sat around, waiting for the pilot boat."

Spliid held a lighter to the dark-stained bowl of his pipe.

"So you're satisfied now, too?"

Rowley nodded noncommittally. "At first," he said distantly, "I imagined crazy things--like a super-advanced race living underground, giving us the bum's rush with a play-show they had rigged up."

"And you found out you were wrong," suggested Spliid.

"I found out I was partly right."

"I won't buy supermen living in caves, Cliff."

"Neither would I. The next crazy thing I thought was that the natives were immortals and they didn't want us to share in it. Silly, huh?"

"Pretty silly," Spliid agreed drily.

"I knew they wanted to get rid of us," Rowley went on earnestly. "I could feel it. But why? Most inferior races we run against _want_ contact with the galaxy...."

"They want refrigerators and washing machines, tractors, railroad trains and automobiles," Spliid interrupted. "If we gave them, their culture would go to pot in a generation. There's a reason for our methods."

"A lot of little things about Hume didn't jibe," Rowley continued. "Bathrooms, for instance."

"No bathrooms on Hume?" Spliid grinned.

"_Bath_ rooms, yes. Just bathing went on in there. And outside, where the little house in back ought to be ... nothing." Rowley tamped the ashes in his pipe, withdrew a blackened finger. "We take that sort of thing for granted, you know. We assume proper facilities are around someplace and don't give them a second thought. They weren't present in the stage setting because they weren't needed."

"Come, now...!"

"Fact. Another fact: grass growing in the streets. The way those kids played on it, it would have been worn away in a week. Slim evidence, but it's part of the picture."

* * * * *

"What I'm interested in," said Spliid, "is the death. Did you learn what they did with the body?"

"You were right," Rowley said. "There wasn't any. I saw Torl the next day, alive and kicking. That's what put me off on the immortality tangent."

Spliid grunted. "Another act in the play?"

"Yes, and badly directed. The director didn't understand death as we do."

Spliid shook himself. "Now, wait...!"

"Honest and truly. How do we think of death--most of us? We believe in somehow living on after death takes place--immortality of the soul. Can you visualize how a stage director who didn't understand that concept would cast it?"

"What do you think I am, a percie? Get on with it."

"Consider this, then. I gambled with my emotional adjustment conditioning. There was one angle I hadn't exploited, because of that conditioning. Sex."

"If you are trying to tell me you unloaded the conditioning _we_ give you," Spliid interrupted, "I won't believe it!"

"No--I wouldn't. But, in the interest of ethnological investigation, I _could_ grab a kiss. So I did."

"I see," drily.

"Not yet, you don't. I got no reaction. Like embracing a tree. Anyway, I kissed her. Somehow...." He hesitated. "Her garment...."

"No wonder you made no report," growled Spliid. "Believe me, Cliff, I'm going to have that conditioning process looked into!"

Rowley laughed, briefly. "No need for that. It's sound. You'll be interested in what that slipping garment revealed."

"Another time, another place...."

"I saw a perfect, living statue!"

Spliid's eyes alerted. "A what?"

Spliid relaxed. "I think I know what you mean. Go on."

Rowley drew heavily on his pipe. A brooding look shadowed his lean face.

"I learned about Yanek then. I learned about Tsu and Smarin and Torl and all the rest of them. If we weren't such damned prudes, Commander, and I had flipped a sarong sooner, we'd have found everything out long ago. You've heard about the sinner who was told he could remain in Heaven only on condition he could pick Adam out of the crowd? He chose the only man he could find ... without a navel."

"Maybe they lay eggs," Spliid suggested. "Oviparous."

Rowley gave him a look of humorous scorn. "Do statues lay eggs?"

Spliid's expression cleared. "By God! Now I _really_ understand you!"

"The natives of Hume couldn't reproduce in any manner. Naturally, I wanted to know why. And the answer came to me--protective coloration ... camouflage!"

"Apparent. Camouflage for what?"

"You've heard the expression, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em...?"

"Sure, but...."

"But suppose you can't join 'em, either?" Rowley laughed, excitedly. "You make like something they want to protect!... Know anything about dryads, Commander?"

Spliid snorted. "Supernatural creatures that live in trees? Dryads don't exist!"

"Neither do the people of Hume."

Spliid looked at him in such a way Rowley felt his sanity was being weighed.

* * * * *

"Suppose you were a native of Hume, and some alien beings came along. You could read their minds. You'd know right off they wouldn't recognize you as a life-form like themselves. They might move right in and destroy you without knowing it, and you would be unable to defend yourself. That was actually the situation on Hume, and we were the aliens. So the natives pretended they were a type of life-form we want to protect."

"How was it done?" Spliid wanted to know.

"Mental projection. After the directors of the play read our minds, they tried to reproduce what they found there. They slipped on the points I mentioned, because those things meant little or nothing to them. But they were enough to rob the play of its semblance of reality.

"Tsu, Smarin, Torl ... even the village itself ... were all imaginary--not something we _thought_ we saw, but solidified mental projections of the thoughts the natives had gleaned from our minds."

"I'm just beginning to see the real value of your talents, Cliff."

"Thanks," Rowley acknowledged briefly. "If _we_ have the right to exclude inferior cultures from contact with us, a superior culture must certainly have an equal right to exclude us from contact with theirs."

Spliid wagged his head, half smiling. His pipe had gone out and he puffed at it without effect.

"I've been waiting for you to tell me who these 'directors' are," he said.

Rowley grinned. "You won't believe this. The directors needed something to keep their play actors busy ... some logical occupation of their time. What could they find more logical--to them--than taking care of trees? Because the directors themselves are the trees--the living, intelligent forest of Hume. Fantastic, isn't it?"

Spliid sighed as if deeply gratified.

"If it weren't for one thing even more so, I'd say it was the most fantastic thing I ever heard of."

"What's more fantastic than intelligent trees?"

"Human beings," said Spliid.

THE END