“There seem to be abnormalities of bone deposition,” he said.
Then on questioning, he admitted that the effects might be entirely owing to a hundred years exposure to damp soil.
Fawkes had constructed a fantasy that followed him even into his waking hours. It concerned an elusive race of intelligent beings dwelling underground, never being seen but haunting that first settlement a century back with a deadly perseverance.
He pictured a silent bacteriological warfare. He could see them in laboratories beneath the tree roots, culturing their molds and spores, waiting for one that could live on human beings. Perhaps they captured children to experiment upon.
And when they found what they were looking for, spores drifted silently out over the settlement in venomous clouds—
Fawkes knew all this to be fantasy. He had made it up in the wakeful nights out of no evidence but that of his quivering stomach. Yet alone in the forest, he whirled more than once in a sudden horror-filled conviction that bright eyes were staring out of the duskiness of a tree’s Lagrange I shadow.
Fawkes’ botanist’s eye did not miss the vegetation he passed, absorbed as he was. He had deliberately struck out from camp in a new direction, but what he saw was what he had already seen. Junior’s forests were neither thick nor tangled. They were scarcely a barrier to travel. The small trees—few were higher than ten feet, although their trunks were nearly as thick as the average Terrestrial tree—grew with considerable room between them.
Fawkes had constructed a rough scheme for arranging the plant-life of Junior into some sort of taxonomic order. He was not unaware of the fact that he might be arranging for his own immortality.
There was the scarlet “bayonet tree,” for instance. Its huge, scarlet flowers attracted insectlike creatures that built small nests within it. Then—at what signal or what impulse Fawkes had not divined—all the flowers on some one given tree would grow a glistening white pistil over night. Each pistil stood two feet high, as though every bloom had been suddenly equipped with a bayonet.
By the next day, the flower had been fertilized, and the petals closed shut—about pistil, insects and all. The explorer, Makoyama, had named it the “bayonet tree,” but Fawkes had made so bold as to rename it Migrania Fawkesii.