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massive stump came into view. At the time I had used the laser I had been facing north and had
aimed at the tree's western face, then had raked the laser down, cutting the stump on a sharp
diagonal, making the tree fall eastward. If I had used my head, I told myself, I could have started on
the eastern edge and made the tree fall to the west. That way it would not have blocked the trail. It
beat all hell, I told myself, how a man never thinks of a better way to do a thing until he'd already
done it.
Finally we reached the ridge-top and from where we stood looked down upon the stump, the first
time we had really seen it in its entirety. And the stump was just a stump, although a big one, but in
a neatly drawn circle about it was a carpeting of green. A mile or more in diameter, it stretched out
from the stump, an oasis of green-lawn neatness set in the middle of a red and yellow wilderness. It
made one ache to look at it, it looked so much like home, so much like the meticulously cared-for
lawns that the human race had carried with it and had cultivated or had tried to cultivate on every
planet where they had settled down. I'd never thought of it before, but now I thought about it,
wondering what it was about it, wondering what it was about the trimmed neatness of a greensward
that made the humanoids of Earth carry the concept of it deep into outer space when they left so
much else behind.
The hobbies spread out in a thin line on the ridge-top and Hoot came scrambling up the slope to
stand beside me.
"What is it, captain?" Sara asked.
"I don't know," I said.
And that was strange, I thought. For I could have said it was a lawn and let it go at that. But there
was something about it that told me, instinctively, that it was no simple lawn.
Looking at it, a man wanted to walk down on it and stretch out full length upon it, putting his hands
behind his bead, tilting his hat over his eyes, and settle down for an easy afternoon. Even with the
tree no longer standing to provide the shade, it would have been a pleasant spot to take a midday
nap.
That was the trouble with it. It looked too inviting and too cool, too familiar.
"Let's move on," I said.
Swinging a little to the left to give the circular patch of green plenty of room, I set off down the
ridge. As I walked I kept a weather eye cocked to the right and nothing happened, absolutely
nothing. I was prepared to have some great and fearsome shape burst upward from an expanse of
sward and come charging out at us. I imagined that the grass might roll up like a rug and reveal an
infernal pit out of which horrors would come pouncing.
But the lawn continued to be a lawn. The massive stump speared up into the sky and just beyond it
lay the mighty bulk of the shattered trunk-the ruined home of the humping little shapes that had
cried out their anguish to us.
Ahead of us lay the trail, a slender, dusty thread that wound out into the tortured landscape, leading
into a dim unknown. And looming over the horizon other massive trees that towered into the sky.
I found that I was tottering on my feet. Now that we were past the tree and swinging back onto the
trail, the nervous tension that had held me together was swiftly running out. I set myself the task of
first one foot, then the other, fighting to stay erect, mentally measuring the slowly decreasing
distance until we should reach the trail.
We finally did reach it and I sat down on a boulder and let myself come unstuck.
The hobbies stopped, spread out in a line, and I saw that Tuck was looking down at me with a look
of hatred that seemed distinctly out of place. There he sat atop Dobbin, a scarecrow tricked out in a
ragged robe of brown and with the ridiculous doll-like artifact clutched against his chest. He looked
like a sulky, overgrown girl, but with a strange wistfulness about him, if you left out his face. If
he'd stuck his thumb into his mouth and settled down to sucking it, the picture would have been
entirely rounded out. But the face was the trouble, the impression of the ragged little girl stopped
when you saw that hatchet face, almost as brown as the robe he wore, the great, pool-like eyes
glazed with the hatred in them.
"You are, I presume," he said, with his rat-trap mouth biting off the words, "quite proud of
yourself."
"I don't understand you, Tuck," I said. And that was the solemn truth; I didn't understand what he
had in mind with that sort of talk. I had never understood the man and I supposed I never would.
He gestured with his hand, back toward the cut-down tree.
"That," he said.
"I suppose you think I should have left it there, taking shots at us."
I had no yen to argue with him; I was too beat out. And it was beyond me why he should be up in
arms about the tree. Hell, it had been taking shots at him as well as the rest of us.
"You destroyed all those creatures," he said. "The ones living in the tree. Think of it, captain! What
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