Free Margaret St. Clair by The Best of Margaret St. Clair

power.
    Hobbs took the portable saw from the ‘copter and slung it over his shoulder. He hesitated a fraction of a second longer. A sudden gust of wind set the long leaves of the Butandras to rustling mockingly. Hobbs felt a nearly blind ing surge of hate. His jaw set. He opened the gate and entered the grove.
    The power saw was not heavy and he decided to begin his felling operations beside the sapling he had first cut down. He found the stump without difficulty and was pleased to see that it had not put up any shoots. But somebody had dug a deep hole in the ground beside it, and Hobbs frowned over this.
    He set the saw down on the turf and knelt to adjust it. He co uld find out about the hole later. He touched a switch. The saw’s motor began to purr.
    The Gardener came out from behind a tree and smiled at him.
    Hobbs gave a strangled, inarticulate shriek. He scrambled to his knees and started to run. The Gardener s tretched out its lanky arms and caught him easily.
    With its little pink mole hands it stripped his clothing away. His shoes came off. With ten separate chops of its strong white teeth the Gardener bit away his toes. While Hobbs struggled and shrieked and shrieked and shrieked, the Gardener peeled away the skin on the inner surfaces of his legs and thighs and bound these members together with a length of vine.
    It drew scratches all over the surface of his body with its long sharp mole claws and rubbed a gritty grayish powder carefully into each gash. Then it carried Hobbs over to the hole it had made and, still smiling, planted him.
    When the Gardener came back an hour or so later from its tasks of cultivation in another part of the grove, a thin crust o f bark had already begun to form over Hobbs’ human frame. It would not be long, the Gardener knew, before Hobbs would become a quite satisfactory Butandra tree.
    The Gardener smiled benignly. It looked with approval at the graft on the trunk of the tree t o the right, where what had once been Eins Thorwald’s index finger was burgeoning luxuriantly.
    The Gardener nodded. “A leaf for a leaf,” it said.
    1949. Thrilling Wonder Stories
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    Child Of Void
    Ischeenar is his name, and he lives in the big toe of my left foot. He’s fairly quiet during the day, except that now and then he makes my foot twitch. But at night he comes out and sits on my knee and says all sorts of hateful things. Once he suggested-But I didn’t mean to tell about Ischeenar yet. I suppose I got off on him thinking about the fire and all that. It was after the fire that he got into my foot. But I want to tell this in order, the way it happened, and I ought to begin at the beginning. I suppose that means telling about how we happened to go to Hidden Valley to live.
    Uncle Albert killed himself and left Hidden Valley to Mom in his will. I didn’t want to go there. We had visited Hidden Valley once or twice when I was little, and I hated it. It gave me the creeps. It was the kind of place you see articles about in the Sunday supplement —a place where water flows uphill and half the time the laws of gravity don’t work, a place where sometimes a rubber ball will weigh three or four pounds a nd you can look out the upstairs window and see a big blue lake where the vegetable garden ought to be. You never could depend on things being normal and right.
    But Mom wanted to go. She said there was a nice little house we could live in, an artesian we ll with the best water in the world, and good rich soil for growing our own vegetables. There were even a cow and some chickens. Mom said we could be a lot more comfortable there than in the city, and live better. She said we’d get used to the funny thing s and they wouldn’t bother us. And though she didn’t say so, I knew she thought I’d be happier away from people, on a farm.
    Mom’s been awfully good to me. She kept on with the massage and exercises for my back for years after the doctors said it was no us e. I wish I could do more for