Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 41: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SYMBIOTICA with a savage whoop and brought him down. The other nudist joined in. Arm- strong, who never had been a ninety-pound weakling, promptly burst his bonds, came up dark-faced with the effort and roared into the fray. Fragments of his mangled hammock swung and bounced on his beefy back. All along the line the rest of us made mighty efforts to break free, but. in vain. Green ones centered on the scene of the struggle, brittle spheres plopped all around the three madly fighting Earthmen. The tail mechanic and Blaine collapsed together, going down as if in a sleep. Armstrong shuddered and roared, teetered and pulled himself to, held out long enough to toss two natives into the river and slug the daylights out of a third. Then he, too, dropped. V. THE green ones dragged their fellows from the river, dressed the slumber-wrapped Blaine and the other, added Armstrong, tied all three securely. Once more they conferred together. I couldn’t make head or tail of their canary talk, but I got the notion that, in their opinion, we had an_ uncertain quantity of gamish. = My bonds began to irk. I'd have given much for the chance to go into action and bash a few green heads. Twisting myself, I used a lackluster eye to survey a tiny shrub growing near the side of the hammock. The shrub jiggled its midget branches and emitted a smell of burned caramel. Local vegetation was all movement and stinks. Abruptly, the green ones ended their talk, crowded down to the bank of the river. A flotilla of long, narrow, shapely vessels swept around the bend, foamed under projecting branches of great trees, cut in to the bank. We were carted aboard, five prisoners to the boat. Thrusting away from the bank, our crew of twenty pulled and pushed rhythmic- ally at a row of ten wooden levers on each side of the boat, drove the vessel upstream. We went along at a fair pace, left a shallow wake on the surface of the sluggish river. “I had a grandfather who-was a mis- sionary,” I told Jepson. “He got himself in trouble like this.” “So what?” “He went to pot,” I said. “So can you,” snapped Jepson. strained futilely at his bonds. For lack of anything better to do, I watched the way in which our crew handled He 39 our vessel, came to the conclusion that the levers worked two large pumps or a battery of small ones, and that the vessel got along by sucking in water at the bow and blowing it out at the stern. Later, I found I was wrong. [heir method was much simpler than that. The levers connected with twenty split- bladed paddles jutting horizontally a foot or two below the water line. The two flaps of the blades closed together as each paddle drove forward, opened as it swept backward. By this means they got along a good deal faster than they could have done with oars since the subsurface paddles only moved ‘forward and back with their weight on the boat—they didn’t have to be raised turned and dipped by the muscles of the rowers. The sun climbed higher as we progressed steadily upriver. On the Second bend, the river split, its current moving more rapidly either side of a rocky islet about a hundred yards long. A group of four huge trees stood at the upstream end of the islet, their trunks and limbs a somber green that verged on black. Each of them had one horizontal spray of branches above which the trunk continued to a feathery crest forty feet higher. Every branch ended in half a dozen powerful twigs which curved downward like the fingers of a clutching hand. | Their crews speeding up the levers, the string of boats took the right-hand channel over which reached the largest of those great branches. As the first boats prow came underneath, the branch twitched its fingers hungrily. It was no illusion; I saw it as clearly as I can see my trip bonus when they slide it toward me across the mahagony. That limb was getting all set to grab, and from its size and spread I reckoned it could pluck the entire boatload out of the water and do things of which I didn’t care to But it didn’t do it. Just as that boat entered the danger area its helmsman stood up, bawled a string of gibberish at the tree. The fingers relaxed. The helmsman of the next boat did the same. And the next. Then mine. Flat on my back, as ready for action as a corpse, I gaped at that enormous neck- wringer while all too slowly it came on, passed above and fell behind. Our helmsman went silent; the one in the following boat took up the tale. There was dampness on my spine. Five miles farther on, we made for the shore. My head was toward that side. I didn’t get a view of the buildings until the greenies contemptuously tossed out my ham- comiclooks (©