Part 2

Ghor broke off suddenly. His head turned toward a grove of the enemy stalks directly below. Two of the stalks had bent close to the ground, placing their bulbs beneath the roots of a third. Suddenly the bent stalks straightened, catapulting the third stalk into the air, like an arrow toward the three floating men.

Mick's gun blasted the stalk and it withered in flame in mid-air.

But other stalks were shooting toward them now.

Ghor was struggling desperately.

"Let me go!" he whispered. "Turn loose of my arm. Remember, the gravity here will not let me fall faster than you."

Ghor suddenly wrenched loose. From a pocket of his spacesuit flashed a knife.

"Stop!" It was Alf who first sensed Ghor's intention, but his action was too slow to stop what followed.

The knife slashed through the fabroid spacesuit, deep into the neck of the asteroid man. A spray of red blood shot into the airless sky.

A curious sort of tremor seemed to shake the stalks below. The reddish spray seemed to strike fear into the waving buds. The living forest pushed back away from the spray of human blood.

When the men dropped to the ground the Ngyes were retreating.

But Ghor lay lifeless beside them.

"That was the poison that killed the Ngyes--and that killed his father," Mick said. "Human blood! It's ghastly."

"We'll put him on the ledge," Alf said. "I think he'd like that. Lord! To think that we didn't trust him at first. He's a hero, Mick! A hero as great as any in the history of mankind!"

A day later the two terrestrials, protected by the degaussers, completed the repairs on their space ship.

"I think we ought to go back to the cabin, Alf," Mick suggested.

"Yeah. We ought to pay our respects to Ghor. We owe him more than he'll ever know."

Once more they stumbled up the gulley. They kicked aside a few dead Ngye stalks that had been killed by the lifeblood of Ghor as they followed the turns of the pathway. At last they reached the locks.

"Mick!"

Alf was pointing to the ledge above the locks. Only one human figure, its arms akimbo, eyes staring down the gulley, stood on the ledge. Ghor was gone.

Slowly the locks opened. Through the door, unhelmeted, unprotected by a spacesuit, came Ghor.

"He's alive!"

Ghor smiled--that same crooked, half mysterious smile. He lifted his hand and held a microphone close to his lips.

"I hoped you wouldn't come back. I didn't want you to know I was a failure."

"A failure! Man, you're a hero!" Mick said.

"I'm not a man. If I had been a man, I would have died. But, you see, I am not a man. I am a product of my father's botany. You see, I, like all of the things that look like terrestrial things on this planet, was developed from the lowly Ngye. It had been my hope that I was no longer a plant, but a man. I had read men's books; studied his pictures; learned his arts. But I am not a man. I am a failure."

From the door came another being--an identical image of Ghor.

"This," Ghor said, "is my son. The result of my wound yesterday."

Mick walked forward and took the hands of the two asteroid men.

"If you're not men," he said, "you're something greater."