Free Lord of the Trees by Philip José Farmer Page B

canopy, they could have overhauled me and gotten below me unless I was very lucky again. I did not want to stretch my good fortune too far.
    I did want to hear what they were saying. Slowly, I crawled through the canopy. This was necessary not only to prevent noise but to test the stuff holding me up. It is not always anchored securely. I have fallen several times when I was a youth living in this area, twice saving myself by hanging onto a liana that did not break and once managing to grab the end of a branch as I fell toward the ground a hundred feet below. I have seen three of The Folk who were not so fortunate when they went through the green trapdoor; they broke most of their bones.
    Every now and then the bright beam of a small searchlight fingered the tanglery where I was. The beam was being moved at random; it pierced the forest at ground level, lighting up the huge trunks of the trees, making them look like crudely carved pillars of a deep mine worked by gnomes. And then it would leap up onto the dark ceiling overhead, sometimes catching red in the eyes of the owls and bushbabies and servals.
    The men not on guard were eating the food they had cooked in their cans over the gas fires. Murtagh sat on a folding chair by a folding table just inside his tent with several of his officers. When I was directly overhead, I could hear a few words, but most of the conversation in the leader’s tent was lost. Itwould have been convenient if the tent had been under a tree with limbs sticking out only about twenty-five feet above.
    Nevertheless, I lay flat on a net of lianas and leaves supported by a thin branch and stared down through the net at the camp. Some of the men had loud voices, and I hoped to learn from them. Two, a French Canadian and a mulatto Congolese, spoke in French, presumably on the theory that Murtagh couldn’t understand them. Perhaps he didn’t, but I think that an educated and cosmopolitan man such as Murtagh would have been very fluent in this tongue. Perhaps they were depending on him not to comprehend their two types of French. They may have been correct in their assumptions. The Canadian’s French was only half-understood by me, and I doubt that a man skilled in Parisian French would understand the Congolese’s patois. The two had to repeat much to make their own words clear.
    The Congolese said, “If it is true that this white devil’s plane was blown up, and he fell a thousand feet without a parachute, and swam ashore and then he got through us and killed half of us... then what are we doing here?”
    “We are here because Murtagh said so, and because he is paying us very well,” the Canadian said. “That white devil as you call him, is insane. He would have to be to take the chances he did. As for his falling that far from a plane, I do not believe that. And...”
    “But I heard the report over the radio. I was standing behind Murtagh when the pilot reported. He said the plane exploded, and he saw Grandrith’s body falling. He watched it until it disappeared, and there was no parachute.”
    “I read once about a man who fell two thousand feet into a snowbank and lived,” the Canadian said. “It was a true story. Ithad to be, it was in the French edition of The Reader’s Digest. It happened during World War II. And I heard about a man who fell a thousand feet into the sea and lived. So, why shouldn’t this man live if others can?”
    “And how do you explain that he also survived us?” the Congolese said. “Does a man have that much luck, to live through a fall like that and through our firepower and then burn four helicopters and kill fifteen men on the ground? Some with a knife while many others were only ten feet away? And kill dogs, too?”
    While they were talking, moonlight fell on me. I was in the lower level of canopy, and above me was an opening in the upper level. I was not, of course, visible to those below me.
    I listened carefully. The two discussed Murtagh and their