Unearthly Neighbors by Chad Oliver Page A

culture at all—and that, my friend, doesn’t make sense. You know what this place looks like? It looks like an animal den.”
    “It would—but it feels wrong. Too clean, for one thing. No bones, no debris of any kind. And I’m not at all sure that this is a natural tree.”
    “Supernatural, maybe?”
    “I mean I think it has been shaped somehow.”
    Charlie sighed. “If they can make a tree grow the way they want it to, why can’t they chip out a hunk of flint? It’s crazy. This place gives me the creeps, Monte. Let’s get out of here before we poke our noses into something we really can’t handle.”
    Monte thought it over. It seemed obvious that the man would not return while they were in the tree. Nothing would be gained by parking here indefinitely. But he didn’t like the idea of just pulling out. He was beginning to feel a trifle futile, and it was a new experience for him. He didn’t like it.
    He reached into his pack and took out a good steel knife. He carried it over and placed it on the shelf with the meat and the berries.
    “Do you think that’s wise?”
    Monte rubbed at his beard, which was beginning to itch again. “I don’t know. Do you?”
    Charlie didn’t say anything.
    “We’ve got to do something. And I’d like to see what that guy will make of a real-for-sure tool. I’m going to get one of the boys in here and plant a scanner and a mike before he comes back. Then maybe we’ll see something. I’ll take the responsibility.”
    He cut in his radio and called the sphere. Ace sounded as though he were not exactly having the time of his life bucking the storm above the trees, but he wasn’t in any serious trouble. Monte carefully dictated a report of what had happened, and arranged a rendezvous point at the edge of the forest.
    “Come on,” he said, and stepped back into the rain.
    It was quite dark now, and the forest was hushed and gloomy. The rain had settled down into a gentle patter and the thunder seemed lonely and remote, as though it came from another world. They brushed their way through wet leaves and found the trail. The beams of their flashlights were small and lost in the wilderness of night.
    Monte walked wearily along the path, his damp clothes sticking to his body. He was bone-tired—not so much from physical exertion, he realized, as from the strain of failure. Still, the night air was fresh and cool after the muggy heat of the day, and that was something.
    All forests, he supposed, were pretty much the same at night. He knew that this one, at any rate, was less alien in the darkness. The trees were only trees, flat black shadows that dripped and stirred around him. Occasionally, he could even catch a glimpse of a cloud-streaked sky above him, and once he even saw a star. With only a slight effort of the imagination, he could feel that he was walking through the night-shrouded woods of Earth, perhaps coming home from a fishing trip, and soon he would walk into a village, where lights twinkled along the streets and magic music drifted out of a bar…
    He blinked his eyes and shifted the rifle on his shoulder.
    Steady boy. You’re a helluva long way from Earth.
    It was hard for him to get used to this world. Sirius Nine was just a name, and less than that; it seemed singularly inappropriate. He wondered what the natives called their world. He wished that he knew the names of things. A world was terribly alien, incredibly strange, until it was transformed with names. Names had the power of sorcery; they could change the unknown into the known.
    Tired as he was, Monte was filled with a hard determination he hadn’t known he possessed.
    One day, he’d know those names—or die trying.
     
    Extract from the Notebook of Monte Stewart:
    This is the fourteenth night I have spent on Sirius Nine. The camp is silent around me, and Louise is already asleep. God knows I’m tired, but I’m wide awake.
    All my life I’ve heard that old one to the effect that when you know the