"It's not murder; it's self-defense."
"No!" said Joel and refused to hear any more about it.
The succession of days crept past as alike as beads on a string. Joel
tried to draw Tamis out about the Ganelons, but she had been too badly
frightened by Liedl's death.
She was afraid of him, too; he could see it in her eyes and it worried
him. One sleeping period he asked her about it with characteristic
bluntness.
Tamis bit her lip. "I--I never saw a man killed before. I can't get it
out of my mind. It's not you, Joel." And then she began to tell him
about her early life in the Ganelon village.
It was a life without sham--a simple joyous pagan existence close to
the primal forces of nature. Tamis' voice trembled with nostalgia.
Joel was fascinated. He was on fire with impatience to reach Asgard.
On the forty-third day the _Zenith_ came out of the Stellar Drive and
began to fire her braking tubes.
Down, down she settled towards the surface of Asgard, second planet of
Alpha Centauri A. An electric excitement ran like flames through the
Unfit.
Joel couldn't eat. "How much longer?" he asked Thorp for the hundredth
time.
"For Saturn's sake, sit down," the ex-spaceman exploded.
Joel dropped into a relaxer, lit a cigarette. His green eyes glittered
with anticipation. Tamis gave him an amused glance, but Joel sensed
that the Ganelon girl was as excited as himself.
"We should be landing in an hour," she informed him.
Joel felt the _Zenith_ shiver from the violence of her braking blasts.
Minutes ticked past like hours. Then a bell began to ring and went on
ringing.
After an interminable wait, Joel was shaken by a heavy jar. The
_Zenith_ rocked sickeningly. There was another blast of the jets.
Another jar.
The roar dwindled and fell silent. A strange hush pervaded the ship.
"Asgard!" Thorp shouted, leaping to his feet and slapping Joel on the
shoulder. "We're down!"
* * * * *
The prisoners were led straight from the Star Ship into the spaceport
where a robot surface bus was waiting to carry them into Eden. The bus
was constructed after a design strange to Joel. It was a half-track
with heavy mesh screens at the windows.
When he accidentally touched the screen, he received a jarring electric
shock. Tamis, who was seated beside him, giggled.
"Where do they think we'd escape to?" he demanded bitterly.
"They're not to keep us from escaping, Joel."
Just then the bus started smoothly, gathered momentum, burst out into
the brilliant light of Asgard's twin suns.
Joel forgot the electrified screens, craning his neck, trying to see
everything at once. The spaceport, he realized, must be located at some
distance from Eden. The road ran straight ahead--a glittering plastic
ribbon cutting a channel through the fantastic jungle.
It was monstrous, that jungle. It writhed, twisted, swayed in great
swaths although there wasn't the faintest breeze. Suddenly the bus
stopped with a jerk to allow a herd of huge tree-like plants to swarm
across the road.
Joel gaped at them in amazement. They had thick flesh-like trunks from
which writhing tentacles sprouted like the arms of an octopus. A mass
of wriggling squirming thread-like roots propelled the plants forward
with startling speed.
"Ugh!" Joel shuddered, turned to Tamis. "What are those?"
"Nigel trees."
Joel wrenched back suddenly from the window. One of the nigel trees had
lashed out with a tentacle. It touched the screen. There was a green
spark. The tentacle jerked back.
"Now do you see why the screens are electrified?" Tamis asked. "The
nigel trees are carnivorous."
The bus started to move again. Joel was regarding the Ganelon girl with
a frown. "You actually live in the jungle with those things roaming
about?"
"Yes. They don't bother us."