He took her by the shoulders. “Lys, don’t lose your nerve. What’s happened is that we’re hunati now. Your brother did it — drugged us at dinner, then injected the chlorophyll compound into us.”
“But why?” she cried.
“Don’t you see? He was going hunati himself again, going back up to the forest. And we could easily overtake and bring him back, if we remained normal. So he changed us too, to prevent that.”
Farris went into Berreau’s room. It was as he had expected. The Frenchman was gone.
“I’ll go after him,” he said tightly. “He’s got to come back, for he may have an antidote to that hellish stuff. You wait here.”
Lys clung to him. “No! I’d go mad, here by myself, like this.”
She was, he saw, on the brink of hysterics. He didn’t wonder. The slow, pulsing beat of day and night alone was enough to unseat one’s reason.
He acceded. “All right. But wait till I get something.”
He went back to Berreau’s room and took a big bolo-knife he had seen leaning in a corner. Then he saw something else, something glittering in the pulsing light, on the botanist’s laboratory-table.
Farris stuffed that into his pocket. If force couldn’t bring Berreau back, the threat of this other thing might influence him.