Before the exploration ship dropped them off on Richter-7, Alan Collier and Mark Henderson counted their food packs, doublechecked their power sources, and scanned their envirosuits for microtears in the fabric. Everything was OK. They leapt out of the side of the starship and their parachutes deployed once they were in the middle atmosphere of the planet.

Richter-7 was Jungleland. It was all jungle, from pole to pole. Great trees stretched out to the sky, their branches fielding giant pea-shaped leaves in all shades of green.

Jungleland was dense, protected, and deep. Cloud cover dropped rain buckets from time to time, the upper canopy was always moist with yesterday’s rains, and water sluiced down tree bark to feed the roots of the giant trees. Alan and Mark got tangled up in the upper canopy, and had to jetpack-land their way through the tree cover to the ground. Once they got there, the jetpacks were exhausted — they were good only for one trip.

Now that they were on ground, Alan took command of the situation. He raised his binoculars to his eyes. A thousand meters away, a rock came into sharp focus — its striated outlines gray and brown, and cast in shadow. Alan clicked the lens one notch to the right with an audible snicking sound. The rock turned to infrared, and Alan saw lizards sunning themselves on it, blotches of color like blurry red salamanders.

“There,” Alan pointed, still looking through his binocs. “That’s where we want to go. There’s a rock about a klick away. We can use it as a point of orientation for all our future explorations on this world.”

Mark nodded wordlessly. He was not a talkative man, and brief gestures suited him just fine.

The binoculars that had spotted the rock were slipped into Alan’s vest pocket, where they folded into a compact form the size of a movie theater’s 3-D glasses.

Alan began forging through the jungle, taking long steps to avoid watery puddles on the jungle floor. He heard hoots and tweets in the air. It sounded like monkeys having a conversation with parakeets. But he knew the lifeforms here were not analogous to Earth’s animals. Some of them, the computer had guessed back on the starship, were dangerous, but it was not clear which were.

Now that the sun was at its zenith, sweat began to pour down their armpits and backs. Mark grunted as he stepped on a lotus. A cloud of spores danced in the air, forming a column 3 meters high that surrounded him. Mark sneezed. None of the spores got on Alan.

“God bless you,” Alan said distantly.

Mark nodded.

He emerged from the swirling column of green motes with a strange limp to his walk. Alan didn’t notice it, so absorbed was he on his surroundings.

A giant dragonfly buzzed over 3 flowers, its wings transparent with great blurring speed.

A lizard dropped from a tree, impaled by a natural dart from a hunter animal, and something raced through the underbrush to get to the meat before anything else could.

A butterfly weaved its way through the air, grazed Alan’s cheek, and landed on Mark’s pith helmet. Mark brushed it off absent-mindedly. He was still limping that strange limp, but it wasn’t impeding his speed sufficiently to be noticed.

Suddenly, Mark made a speech.

“Drums!” he exclaimed. “All around. I can hear ’em! They must be from natives!”

“That,” said Alan with a ponderous frown, “is absurd. I don’t hear a thing.”

“No, I’m telling you, they’re everywhere.” Mark’s face was rapturous with pleasure.

“You look like a guy jonesing over a live concert,” Alan observed coolly.

“Yes! It’s like that! They’re musical, but they’re communicating.” Mark took off his helmet and itched his hair. He tilted his head to one direction in particular, 60 degrees away from the rock they were heading towards.

Alan shrugged and continued walking on. He parted a giant fern with both hands. And drew in his breath.

A large herbivore was on the ground, its four legs splayed as it collapsed on its belly. Giant red razor-claw-marks were indented in its greenish-brown hide. Blood dripped to the ground, gathering what looked like flies. The killer of the herbivore stood on two hind legs, its hands claws of great length and superior cutting strength. The killer had a duck-like face and 3 glowing red eyes forming a triangle. Slowly, it turned to face them, still hidden behind the ferns. The killer animal made a coooroooo? questioning sound. Then it hopped toward them.

Alan took out his particle beam gun. It was set for the lowest setting, enough to agitate skin without doing real permanent damage. He fired a low spread of this setting, and the killer reared back, legs scrabbling at the earth to keep from toppling over. It hopped away, disappearing into the underbrush, leaving its prey bloody and dead in the clearing it had just vacated. Alan and Mark saw one last glimpse of the killer just in time to see its tail wrap around a tree trunk and propel it fast through the air. Then it was gone.

Alan and Mark walked over to the slain herbivore. Its mouth was open in a panting mode, but obviously unmoving. Its heart — a 6-chambered affair — was half-eaten and lay on the ground, a bloody purple-and-red pulp. Alan nudged the body with his foot. It was too heavy to move.

Mark said, “The drums are getting fierce.”

Alan was getting irritated. There were no drums, not that he could hear. The flies made a cloud of moving shapes around the dead herbivore so that no part of it was free of insect reveling.

They reached the rock by 3:00 in the afternoon, local time. This planet had a 26-hour rotation period. Night lasted 12 hours, twilight and dawn were an hour apiece, leaving 12 hours of sheer daylight to enjoy. Mark said in a hushed voice, “The drums are calling my name. They’re saying M-ar-Kuh M-ar-Kuh. Can’t you hear them?”

“No,” Alan said, annoyed, propping one foot on the orientation rock and taking a selfie photo of himself. “You’re nuts.”

“I’m not. Listen.”

And for just a second it seemed like Alan could hear something, but it faded before he could get a lock on it. He wondered why the stranger things that filled the universe were always noticed first by the lunatics and the religious maniacs. Perhaps Alan’s flaw was that he was too rational. Maybe he needed to hang loose like Mark.

For a moment an image of spores in a 3-meter-column, swirling around, filled his mind — then was abruptly forgotten, as if they were making themselves be forgotten.

“Yes, beat harder,” Mark murmured with unvarnished joy. “Play that beat for me.”

The underbrush was incredibly thick here, but when the leaves began rustling, Alan grew immediately paranoid and picked up his gun. He pointed it at the disturbances, but there were too many to keep covered — eight, nine locales of entering newcomers.

They had drums and humanoid faces. But their chins were like gray shovels and their eyes were like reddish coals — three of them. They were pounding on the drums, but the sound was muffled. Instead, coils of white plastic transmitted the sound from the drum heads to the space behind their ears, where they were telepathically rebroadcast.

“Yes!” Mark exclaimed, and dropped to his knees. He sneezed from the leftover spores that had given him telepathic abilities far beyond the ken of Man.

“Stay back!” Alan exclaimed. He waved the gun as the newcomers advanced closer. “No closer or I fire!”

They seemed to get the message. Mark gripped Alan’s shoulder feverishly. Some of the spores on his body went up Alan’s nostrils. Alan could hear faint drumbeats now.

Together, the 2 men were enraptured by the beat and the sound. Alan dropped his gun and fell to his knees, worshipping the sound. Mark followed suit, his knees squishing in the yielding earth full of worms and juicy trilobite-insects that scuttled away from them as his knees dug deeper, ever deeper.

The two men were carried away to an encampment, where female aliens performed strange sexual routines on them, shadows stretched long from a lengthy twilight, and spores shot all over their bodies from a row of harvested lotuses… Night was long, and mysterious.

the end