THE THING IN THE ATTIC
By James Blish
Illustrated by Paul Orban
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of ScienceFiction July 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
It is written that after the Giants came to Tellura from the farstars, they abode a while, and looked upon the surface of the land,and found it wanting, and of evil omen. Therefore did they make mento live always in the air and in the sunlight, and in the light ofthe stars, that he would be reminded of them. And the Giants abodeyet a while, and taught men to speak, and to write, and to weave,and to do many things which are needful to do, of which thewritings speak. And thereafter they departed to the far stars,saying, Take this world as your own, and though we shall return,fear not, for it is yours.
—THE BOOK OF LAWS
Honath the Pursemaker was hauled from the nets an hour before the restof the prisoners, as befitted his role as the arch-doubter of them all.It was not yet dawn, but his captors led him in great bounds through theendless, musky-perfumed orchid gardens, small dark shapes with crookedlegs, hunched shoulders, slim hairless tails carried, like his, inconcentric spirals wound clockwise. Behind them sprang Honath on the endof a long tether, timing his leaps by theirs, since any slip would hanghim summarily.
He would of course be on his way to the surface, some 250 feet below theorchid gardens, shortly after dawn in any event. But not even thearch-doubter of them all wanted to begin the trip—not even at themerciful snap-spine end of a tether—a moment before the law said, Go.
The looping, interwoven network of vines beneath them, each cable asthick through as a man's body, bellied out and down sharply as theleapers reached the edge of the fern-tree forest which surrounded thecopse of fan-palms. The whole party stopped before beginning the descentand looked eastward, across the dim bowl. The stars were paling more andmore rapidly; only the bright constellation of the Parrot could still bepicked out without doubt.
"A fine day," one of the guards said, conversationally. "Better to gobelow on a sunny day than in the rain, pursemaker."
Honath shuddered and said nothing. Of course it was always raining downbelow in Hell, that much could be seen by a child. Even on sunny days,the endless pinpoint rain of transpiration, from the hundred millionleaves of the eternal trees, hazed the forest air and soaked the blackbog forever.
He looked around in the brightening, misty morning. The eastern horizonwas black against the limb of the great red sun, which had already risenabout a third of its diameter; it was almost time for the small,blue-white, furiously hot consort to follow. All the way to that brink,as to every other horizon, the woven ocean of the treetops flowed gentlyin long, unbreaking waves, featureless as some smooth oil. Only nearbycould the eye break that ocean into its details, into the world as itwas: a great, many-tiered network, thickly overgrown with small ferns,with air-drinking orchids, with a thousand varieties of fungi sproutingwherever vine crossed vine and collected a little humus for them, withthe vivid parasites sucking sap from the vines, the tr