Chlorophyll | Stephen Tall | Podcast - Nightshade Diary

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Do you feel a shiver up your spine from fear. Yes,
it's another story from the Night's Shade Diary. You know
what that means. Check under the bed and make sure
no one or nothing is there. Is the closet door
securely shut. Then leave your disbelief behind aamp up your
imagination and hang on tight for another ride into terror

(00:22):
and mystery. And like all good horror stories, just imagine
it's a dark and stormy night, and remember screaming like
a little girl is permitted chlorophyll by Stephen Tall. It
sat alone, mighty and shaggy, on the hilltop, and the

(00:45):
warm breeze swayed for four billion years, step by step.
It had been a morning. Now it was finished. Complete.
It considered these things with pleasure.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
And was content.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
It watched not with eyes, but with an awareness far
more acute. The slow procession toiling up the long slope.
It watched with faint scorn, with a strain scarcely felt pity,
and also with anticipation. It believed that it was due
this pleasure, this indulgence and hate. There was strength in

(01:19):
it and a deep, self pervading satisfaction. In memory, it
murmured of all the countless billions of us that have
gone to feed the parasites. I administer justice. It is
only right.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
It's many.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Thousands of leaves grew crisp, their stamata opened, and a warm,
seductive fragrance poured from them. It drifted downward through the
light air, like a river that flowed along the slope,
swirling around and over the rocky outcrops, inundating the short
lived flowering plants and the many grasses. These closed their stamato,

(02:00):
folded their leaves, and waited. The fragrance was not for them.
Mobility and sound. For millenniums, these had been the marks
of superiority, of dominance, and had taken the ages finally
to show that they were primitive distractive. They prevented progress.
Only in silence and reflection could life reach its true potential.

(02:24):
Thus the green giants reasoned, and they believed in the
validity of their reasoning. The sea of fragrance reached the
beings of the procession, and they polluted the air with cries,
with strange whales of ecstasy. They dropped their burdens, rolled
on the grass, and uncontrollable paroxysms come on the great
Green being in the hill communicated, there is greater bliss

(02:47):
to come. You pay the debt of all your ancestors,
a debt long owe to us. The energy fixes come on,
and the creatures picked up their burdens again, cases and
boxes and earths. Some had sharp cutting instruments. Over the
many centuries, cutting tools had been among their proudest boasts,

(03:08):
they had had hundreds of kinds. Now they were reduced
to these few, and in the thinking of the green giants,
they had but one useful purpose, a final purpose.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
It was just on.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
They came, laughing, singing, and swinging their edge tools. The
burdens seemed to have no weight. They danced and capered
and ran eagerly under the deep shade of the beam's
wide flung branches. Carefully they laid down the boxes, the cases,
and the urns. Then they turned on each other with
the metal blades, the axes, and the pigs, hacking, stabbing, clubbing.

(03:42):
In all the while they laughed and sang. In a
short time it was over, torn and battered and crushed
and dismembered. Bodies lay everywhere among the offerings, and every
tool ran red with blood. None escaped. A few lay
twitching feebly for them. A heavy, colorless gas spread over

(04:03):
the ground, and they gasped and suffocated. Then the wide,
sweeping branches lowered. Rootlets began to squirm up out of
the cool soil. Pale and moracious, they emerged by thousands,
by millions. Enzymes flowed from them, and glistening all enveloping films.

(04:23):
First went the blood, the luscious live streams of the
dead and dying. It was broken down, dissolved, and swiftly
transported up through the axylum, the woody channels to give
delight to marrast them. Over each body, the roots crawled
like worms, digging into each break and cavity, exploring, decomposing, absorbing.

(04:45):
It did not take long before the next sunrise the
bodies were gone. The anguished soil had been smooth, but
only the bodies had vanished. The watching beings in the
valley below knew what had happened to them, and they
had gone to God. And everywhere under the white flung
branches and the whispering leaves lay the clothing they had worn,

(05:06):
and the cutting tools, and the offerings in the urns
and boxes. These could be reclaimed and used. They had
been blessed by God. The great green being then sat
peacefully and spread its many thousands of leaf surfaces, its
masses of chlorophyll to the warm sun. Energy flowed into it,
trapped and held by the mysterious green particles. Oxygen poured

(05:29):
from millions of stomata. The air was fresh and renewed.
And because it was at peace, the widely flowering plants,
the many grasses, and all the cultivated growing things in
the valley below expanded and photosynthesized and grew. Not only
was the green being filled with food for brief while,

(05:52):
satisfaction flowed through it. Vengeance had been accomplished once more.
But it was a vengeance that could not must not
ever end, for the crimes would never end. The parasites,
the predators, all the beings that were the animal world,
would continue to eat the lesser green things. They must,

(06:12):
or they would die. They must have the food fixed
by chlorophyll by themselves. They could not survive. But they were,
most of them mindless. They cannot be aware of vengeance.
So it was on the thinking forms, the beings that
called themselves men, that the green giants focused their cold hate.

(06:32):
The exquisite never ending harassment. Where the creatures had come from,
what their origins had been was still often speculated, thought about,
hypothesized in communications between Green Giant and Green Giant, for
they were not native to this world. Only a brief
time passed scarcely a thousand migrations of the sun. They

(06:56):
had descended into the valley on long streamers of flame
and great containers that spewed out deadly fire. At first
there was great dread, but soon it was seen that
these were simple beings in many ways. They were simply
parasites that thought, and the containers in which they came
never made flames again. Gradually it was realized that the

(07:19):
men were here because they could not leave. They spread
out in the valley and made themselves shelters of stone
and caused unknown green forms to grow in rows and
patterns behind the low walls of stone. Always they built
with stones, but that was not their first intent. When
they had just arrived in three flaming metal masses, the

(07:42):
green beings on the hilltops were angered and puzzled, yes,
and because of the fire, a little afraid that they
watched and made no signs to the creatures. The beings
that called themselves men. The green giants of the hilltops
were one with the sh rubbery growths of the slopes
and with the grasses. It was only when they attempted

(08:05):
to destroy that they learned the truth. They had come
a small number of them with edge pieces of metals,
axes and saws. They had picked the greatest giant of
all of being sold that it had seen the valley formed.
The memory of their intent was still clear in each
hill top being on this day a thousand years later. Man,

(08:26):
what a tree? If the wood is good and dense,
at least will have timber for building twenty thousand board
feet in this fellow, Even though it could read their intent,
the green giant was slow to believe. Not until their
axes actually bit into its bark and the pulse of
hert tissues vibrated through it did it really know that

(08:47):
they were there to destroy. Then its leaves had grown rigid,
its white branches turned downward. A heavy, noxious gas enveloped
the men. The branches touched the ground and hid them
from view. It was seen from the valley. Other men
swarmed up the slopes, but the flood of gases met them.
They fell senseless, but they did not die. That was

(09:11):
not the intent of the green being. It was never
governed by its anger. It intended to be feared. So
the men who fell on the slope were allowed to
wake again and to go back down the hillside. But
under the drooping branches, the axemen and the sawyers never
breathed again. For the first time, the white, swarming rootlets
crept into and over the bodies of men, coning them

(09:34):
with themsigns, dissolving them, absorbing them, pulling them under the soil.
When finally the branches lifted, there was nothing there but
the saws, the axes, the pruners, and the knives. For years,
the tools lay there, they did not rust carefully. The
green being preserved them while they probed and monitored and

(09:56):
explored the thinking of the motial aliens. Finally it managed
to insert itself into their thoughts, to infiltrate the minds
of men. The tools were blessed a message. They could
be reclaimed. They could be used, but not against omnipotence,
not against the gods. For the great green beings on

(10:19):
the hill about were God. It had taken generations, but
finally men believed more and more God communicated told them
what to do. God was the source of good. It
was God who made it possible for growing things to live,
for green things to grow. Man remained alive by the
tolerance of the Great Green Beings, and for this tolerance

(10:42):
man would forever pay homage. Each growing season, they would
be a blessing and a dying, But dying would be
the ultimate, and joy the final great ecstasy. None could
resist the call to blessing, nor to the final sacrifice.
But the benevolence was bitter vengeance, never ending. Vengeance was

(11:05):
the real theme, the real motive. The cold intellects of
the Great Green Beings knew only one sentiment, hate. From
the beginning, they might easily have destroyed the invading men,
but then the vengeance would be over, would be finished.
This hate was the only emotion possible to them. It
was the only emotion they could know. They cherished it

(11:28):
so that it could go on and on forever. Only
with thinking forms, with the were beings, living things that
could know and respond, could they really be satisfied with
their hate. The anguish, the agony, the knowing pain, these
were necessary for that satisfaction. So they cherished men and

(11:50):
used them after year, making them pay endlessly for the
eating of green things, of chlorophylled beings by all the
mindless living things that could not trap energy from the
glowing sun. The man who is called Sam did not
know that he was remarkable, that in truth he was unique.

(12:10):
He only knew that he was lucky. You are young
and strong, Old Henry said, God will let you live
a long life. Whenever you feel God's mind in your head,
you must be grateful and glad. Then perhaps your pilgrimage
will be far off. I've never felt God in my head.
Sam said, I do not understand how men receive the

(12:33):
call each spring. I see them go laughing and singing.
To me, it seemed strange and evil. I hear nothing.
I feel no call. The old man was horrified. Never speak,
never think such things again. If you do not hear,
it is because God is not ready to speak to you. Meanwhile,

(12:55):
do not anger him. To Sam, living was good. He
had grown up in the lustious part of the valley.
His father's house was near the stream. There were fields
of grass and long slopes covered with thickets and vines
and fast growing, big leaved herbs. Some of the fields
were cultivated so that corn and wheat and vegetables were grown.

(13:18):
All the people ate well. All houses were stoned, daubed,
and cemented with clay. Cattle and horses and sheep fed
in the fields, kept in by stone fences. Metal was
used over and over. There was power from the wind
and from waterfalls in the stream. But there was no wood,

(13:39):
though the earth records spoke of it often. Here wood
was the flesh of God. In view of the valley,
all along its length were high, round top hills, a
toppy chill, A single grate green being sat and grew,
majestic and beautiful and ancient. Thus God was always with
the people, It was always in view. He was a

(14:01):
jealous God, and he demanded obedience. To go to God
was eventually every man's fate. It was his ultimate ecstasy,
It was his final glory. From the time he was small,
Sam had helped to prepare the gifts, the offerings to
the great green beings on the hills. He knew full

(14:22):
well that all the tools that he used in his work,
the hoes and the rakes, the sgithes and mattocks and chisels,
all had made the pilgrimage up the nearest hill, that
they might be blessed by the Green God, and he
knew that each blessing had cost lives. Men had later
trudged up the hill, gathered to goods and implements, blessed

(14:43):
for use, and brought them soberly down. It is wrong,
he would mutter, it is wicked, and he would add darkly,
one of these days, I'll prove it. Sam could not
hear the voice of the Green God in his head,
but he could feel the life, the conscious life, in
grass and grain and herb. He felt the strongest in

(15:03):
the woody shrubs of the brushy pasture when he plied
axe and brush hook. When he mowed the grains, he
was conscious of theirs soundless screams. Each time he ate,
he remembered that his food was the bodies of slain
beings that had once been green. When he slaughtered the cattle,
the hogs, the fowls, it was the same, but it
disturbed him less. They never knew their fate. They had

(15:25):
no anticipation, they had no resentments, they had no memories.
But somehow he knew that the grasses were more aware.
Even the vegetables of his gardens seemed to cringe at
their inevitable fates. Hal Sam did not understand, but he
felt that it was so, and he divined that it

(15:46):
was for this that the great beings on the hills
hated and exacted vengeance. They never fitted his concept of God.

Speaker 2 (15:55):
The time came.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
When Sam was one of a party that went up
the hill after a pilgrimage to retrieved the edge tools
and all the articles that had been blessed. He had
stood close and looked carefully at the green God. He
had examined the rough bark, the wide flung complex of
leafy branches. He felt the latent, the liveness of it,
but he was conscious of no awe, no desire to

(16:18):
do its bidding, and after why he felt that it
knew he was studying it, thinking about it because he
thought much. Sam could see a kind of justice in
the continuing vengeance of God. He knew that the people
and sometimes the lesser beings that climbed the hills and beaten,
clod and slew each other, were used as he and
the people used the cabbages and the beans, as the

(16:40):
animals used the grasses and the brows they were eaten.
He never voiced it, but he could see no merit,
and no point to the blessings. They were an excuse,
a stratagem. They made man more accepting, more content with
his doom. In short, Sam's thoughts were sacrilege. That great

(17:02):
being on the hill, he felt, was not something that
would go on forever. Like everything else. It could die,
but it held a wisdom that gave it dominance. There
seemed no way to thwart it. Inside its body, it
could carry on a chemistry more complex than man could
ever remember, mastering what it needed.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
It could synthesize.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
Sam had experimented cautiously and furtatively. He suspected that though
they did not communicate, the green gods might still be
able to probe his brain know his thoughts, and what
they could read would not please them. So far, he
had never been affected by the call, but he recognized
that the green beings might, if they felt need, prepare

(17:47):
a special attraction, a special call for him. When winter
came to the valley, the green beings became Christian. Their
leaves colored spun in the autumn breezes and broke away
and floated down the line drifts and sheets under the
wide spread branches, and all through the cold time, the

(18:08):
Great beings that where God stood, bleak and unmoving, no
odors of delight floated down the steps. There were no pilgrimages,
no frenzied killings. But when the wind softened, when the
warm rains began, then each green God had its first
meal of the new season, its own leaves. The many

(18:30):
thousands of white rootlets, like pale voracious worms, swarmed to
the surface. Overnight the leaf cover vanish Then the buds
on the tips of the married bare twigs swelled large bursts,
and the first of the many seductive fragrances began to
drift across the countryside. There was an idea that lurked

(18:52):
in Sam's brain, just out of the reach of his consciousness,
for though he kept it hidden, he was continually groping
for something to count the horror.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
Of the sacrifices.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Even his subconscious he searched for a way to thwart God.
Men cooked their food as they always had done. Warmth
was needed in winter and all the dwellings, wherever they
were located in the valley, Fires were used, but wood
was never burned, though the histories of Earth were often
showed its use. Thus wood was sacred. Wood was the

(19:29):
flesh of God. Instead, oil and gas from deep in
the planet's cross provided heat, and two there was coal.
The cook fires and farmhouses were most often coal fires.
When Sam cut the brushy growths in his pasture, then
he got the strongest sense of the murders he was committing.

(19:50):
So when the dead bodies had dried, he burned them.
He was the only man in the valley to do this.
His neighbors were afraid, for the brushes to shrug were woody.
Since the early history of the valley, no one had
burned the bodies of green things. And that something bubbled
and fermented in Sam's brain, that idea just beyond his awareness.

(20:14):
The great Green being on the nearest hill, knew that
the idea was there. It was something that had to
be considered. It was a menace, though the Green God
could not determine exactly what it was that threatened so Sam,
though he did not know it, was especially appointed to
come soon with the worshippers who brought the gifts and

(20:34):
the things to be blessed by God. He would not
be allowed to grow old. How he was to be
brought was a problem yet unsolved. Because of the strange
accident of inheritance. He had never responded to communication. God
had never spoken to him. But the Being promised itself
there would be a way. It only required contemplation and reflection.

(21:00):
Time would provide an answer. Time passed. Sam worked and
thought and learned and become a man full grown. Once again.
It was springtime. A great green being had awakened, bestirred itself,
absorbed the leaf cover that had laid on its roots
and around its mighty column all winter, and Sam was

(21:23):
burning the brush piles in his field. The smoke billowed
up and was caught by the winds and was blown
over the hill and among the budding branches of God.
Anger grew in the being. The hate that was always
there welled up. This will be a sweet vengeance, it
told itself coldly. Not from many hundreds of season have

(21:45):
they dared this, and only this one does it. He
is different. But there was more than vengeance. In the
strange thought centers of the being. There was a memory,
an ancestral memory, And there was, though it would not
admit it even to itself, there was fear.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
So different.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
Wave of gases, heavy without fragrance, flowed down the slopes
to whard Sam's brush fires glowed in the wake of it.
All motile creatures gasped and floundered and fell. But the
green things raised their branch tips higher and opened their
so tomato and the chlorophyll worked in the sun. The

(22:27):
waves of gases enveloped.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
The brush fires.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
Even though these were hot and leaping, they flickered and
waned and died. Sam, fighting for breath, struggled to his windmill.
He climbed, and the heavy layer of gas lay below him.
His cattle lay choking, and his pigs. The two heavy
footed horses stretched their necks high. The fowls flew to

(22:51):
housetops and barn top. The gas was thence close to
the ground, rippling along like water, but only the animal
type being suffocated and died. The green herbs, the grasses,
the plants, and the fields all spread their leaves and
welcomed to the invisible flow. Its time was brief. When
the fires were gone, the deadly flood no longer poured

(23:13):
down the hill. It thins spread through the atmosphere, and
the air was good again. That is what I have
been trying to discover. Sand said to himself. God is
afraid of fire, and he hid the thought away in
his mind, lest the being know what he had learned.
For Sam now believed that he had a mission, a

(23:36):
reason for being that no one else had. Only he
resented and hated God. Only he felt that the benevolent,
deadly beings on the hilltops had no right to control
and order the lives of things that moved. They had
no right to destroy the lives of men. And somehow,
somehow he intended to bring it to an end. When

(23:59):
the time of the next blessing comes, I will go,
Sam spoke to the one being with whom he shared
his thoughts.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
She was a.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
Slender, lissome girl, with great white eyes, fine slender, clever hands,
and a body that exuded a delicate fragrance, like a
clover field or a bank of honeysuckle. She was just
past being a child, while Sam was wide and tall.
Now the great eyes clouded, don't she said, simply, you

(24:30):
won't come back. No one ever has, and who would
I have? Then? I've never felt the call, Sam said,
I don't believe it can come to me. I think
I'm different. Remember old Alfred, she reminded him. He said
he would never die. He said that he was favored

(24:51):
of God and would live forever. He went so that
God might bless him, as it blessed the gifts and
the tools.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
But he never came back.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
He buried his small knife in his own breast when
he was near the top of the hill. This I saw.
Old Alfred was a sena old man. His mind was
not sound. He had no reason for the beliefs he mouthed.
And you have I have, Sam said. I have thought

(25:22):
and dreamed, and watched and learned, and this I know.
The beings are not God. They understand much. Their bodies
are marvels of chemical production. They somehow are hypnotic. They
can produce gases that remove man's reason. But they are

(25:42):
only creatures, just as we are. She shuddered and laided
one of the slender hands on his big arm. Please,
she pleaded, They will hear. They will look into your
mind and see the blasphemy there, and then they will
destroy you. They will no longer allow you to live.

(26:03):
Sam smiled grimly. The blasphemy has been there for years.
I think that has always been there. I even think
they know it. She looked toward the distant hill, over
its entire rolling summit, the great green Being spread its wide,
symmetrical whirlds of branches, graceful, majestic, godlike. There was a

(26:25):
feel of power, of omnipotence, of inevitability that seemed to
waft from it. As she looked. She didn't doubt the
great Being, its many thousands of buds now bursting in
the mild sun of April. It was God, you will
be called, she murmured, soon, I think, and I can

(26:48):
never come to share your house with you, and to
kiss you at night and wake in the morning. I
know that God will not allow it.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
Now.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
The call is telepathic hypnotism, Sam said, and somehow it
doesn't work on me. The frenzy, the ecstasy, the self
destruction on the hill's summit within reach of the Green Being,
all are caused by gases that the being makes in
its own tissues. I think I've found a way to
prevent their effects, so that the next blessing I will go,

(27:22):
she stood, slender and grave and beautiful and tragic. If
you don't come back, and I know you will not,
I will go up alone without the call. I will
revolve God in the shade of his own branches and
make him destroy me. I will not share a house
with a lesser man. The time for the call came

(27:47):
when spring was at its height. Then the many thousands
of leaves, each with its many thousands of stomotol mouths,
spread themselves its majestic mosaics in them. The chlorophyll together
the simple components of air power built up in them,
but no more, no less than it builded in the herbs,

(28:07):
the grasses, the cultivated green things of the field. All
this the great green beings understood. They knew that only
chlorophyll could give to living beings the energy that made
them live. And in their strange thinking, only the beings
with chlorophyll had a right to live. Only the green

(28:28):
beings and the little destroyers of cellulose that existed on
the bodies of the dead. They made the cycle complete.
There was no need for the beings that moved the
predator parasites, the killer of living things. Especially, was no
need for these creatures that could think, no purpose. They

(28:49):
could serve except provide a means of vengeance, and that means.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
Had been perfected.

Speaker 1 (28:56):
After a thousand years, all men now believed God was
not a mystic concept. God was real. God spread his
branches over the rolling summit of every hill. God blessed,
God rewarded, God punished, and God provided a blissful and
to life. Sam did not again burn his brush piles

(29:17):
in the pasture lands. He had learned any plan, and
he thought more deeply than ever. A thousand years ago,
Sam said to the girl, to a slender ginger of
the great Eyes, our ancestors came here from another world,
a world dung in heat and flame, a world called Earth.

(29:37):
And they said that God had destroyed the world. There
could be no going back to it ever again.

Speaker 2 (29:45):
We are taught.

Speaker 1 (29:45):
This Ginger agreed, and they came here by chance with
the last energy possible to their spaceships, and they landed
in the valley. Everyone knows this. Ginger said. She was puzzled.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
You feared for Sam.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
He always thought strange thoughts, blasphemous thoughts. They've found God already,
hear Sam said. But now he sat on every hilltop
and hated fire. God had changed, but he was still God.
Ginger shuddered. If the green beings are God, why have

(30:21):
I never felt the call? Why am I different? God
would not allow it. He destroyed your fires. He killed
many creatures in destroying them, and only his kindness let
everything continue to live. We have been warned. We have
coal fires to cook our food and to work our metals.

(30:42):
We burn gases from deep in the crust of the planet,
and the beings do not mind. They want us to live,
but for their pleasure. They are not gods. They are evil,
intelligent creatures, and they hate us. Now, said Ginger with resignation.
They will surely destroy you. They know your deepest thoughts.

(31:06):
I plan to tell them, Sam said. They can make gases,
but they cannot move from the hill. They are intelligent,
but they must live as cabbages live. And they not
only hate fire, they are afraid of it. You will die,
the girl said. And when you die, I die. Perhaps
it has all been planned. You think as you do

(31:28):
because it is the will of God, and I will
die because I love you. I don't think that they
have planned anything. I have done the planning. They keep
us here in this valley like I keep pigs in
a pen. Perhaps to the pigs, I am God. Ginger
shuddered and hid her face in her hands. Sam smiled.

(31:51):
He gently touched her hair. If you are going to
die anyway, why fear hold up your head and face
the truth. People have made the horror pilgrimage for a
thousand years. They should not have to make it any more. Slowly,
the girl raised her fine head straight in her slender
neck above shapely shoulders. Across the valley atop the bordering hill,

(32:16):
the great green being lifted a symmetrical outline against the
sunlit sky. It was beautiful, but to the girl it
was now becoming a horrid thing. Perhaps, as Sam said,
it was not God at all, but it could do
again what had done many times in the past. It
could commend to itself, and they would go gladly, carrying

(32:36):
things to be blessed for use, and giving themselves as
the fee for the carriers never came back. You cannot
stop the pilgrimages, Ginger said, I can try. Sam said,
come let me show you in his house. He brought
out a small box, a box kept hidden, and a
little cupboard, and an inside room. He poured its contents

(32:59):
on to a table. Do you know what these are?

Speaker 2 (33:02):
Thaves?

Speaker 1 (33:02):
The girl said, pieces of dried leaves. I do not
know the shrub that grew them. They are a strange shape.
Feel them. Sam directed Ginger's slender fingers held the leaf,
rubbed it gently, oily. She said, slippery. I have never
felt a leaf like it. Watch Sam said, he struck

(33:25):
fire and held a burning candle to the leaf. It flared,
The flame devoured it. A peculiar smoke and odor drifted.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
In the room.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
Sam smiled. It took a year to gather that small
box of leaves. They guard them well and never allow
the winds to blow them from the hilltop. Only once
in a great wall is one overlooked. I know them,
and I have searched wherever leaves are drifted. You have
never been close enough to know these leaves, for these

(33:54):
are the flesh of God.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
You burnt it. God felt pain.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
He will not overlook what you have done. I am terrified,
Sam said grimly. And know that I have burned a
number of the leaves. They burn especially well, as you saw.
They are full of volatile oils of analyze them. I
know why they burn, and they are white. The green
beings hate fire, but they can put out the fire.

(34:23):
Your burning brush piles were snuffed out. No mystery, Sam said,
carbon dioxide. They must have reservoirs of it. Probably there
would their bark, all their flush is especially susceptible to fire.
No wonder they fear it. The girl slumped in a chair,
as though the life had suddenly gone out of her.

(34:45):
She looked at Sam with eyes that were slowly glazing.
She seemed to look beyond him, look into the distance
of which he could not be aware. God is watching,
she whispered. He knows what you have done. He is
calling a and I must go to him, and I
must bring you, for that is his command. She held
out her hand. God calls us, he says, she must

(35:08):
come with me, because you love me. Sam grasped the
slender fingers. Don't hate me, he said, gently, for what
I am going to do. Suddenly, with swift, strong hands,
he twisted her arms behind her. Before she could struggle.
She was bound to the chair, bound with soft strips
and chords that had.

Speaker 2 (35:29):
Been ready for days.

Speaker 1 (35:31):
A will of anguish was quickly stopped by a folded gag.
Then he roped the chair tightly to the heavy table,
so that she was powerless to injure herself. Its hypnotic
power is very gray, he said, but.

Speaker 2 (35:42):
I must risk it. It knows that she is its
only hold on me.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
If her reason goes it will be no worse than
if I had left her free. He strode to the
doorway opened. He stood there, facing the challenge of the
being on the hilltop, and he felt nothing. Somehow he
was different from any man on this planet, different from
any of the small remnant of the human race that

(36:10):
was penned in the long valley, surrounded by the great
green beings on top of every hill. They could not
call him behind them. The girl wreathed and struggled in
the chair, her eyes wild and terrified. Sam stroked her hair,
soothed there with soft, meaningless crooning words. He knew that
the beings would do its worst to make her suffer.

(36:31):
She was its only path to him. Only her pain
would hurt him, would perhaps make him.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Cease to resist.

Speaker 1 (36:40):
But Sam knew what he must do. He had thought long,
reason things as they had to be. He had seen
his own father make the joyous, deadly march up that hill,
across the valley, gaily carrying the axe with which, near
the shadow of those wide flung branches, he had hacked
and mangled the people near him, laughing, singing a till.

(37:00):
A pitchfork in the hands of one of his friends
destroyed him. Those tools carefully brightened, and according to belief blust,
Sam himself had recovered. He used them every day. The
time had come and Sam was ready. He strapped to
his back the gleaming cylinder, tested and adjusted once more.
The new harness he himself had made it rode his

(37:22):
shoulders easily comfortably. He tested the tubes that ran from it.
He fitted the strange mask over his face, attached the tubes,
satisfied himself that all was as it was meant to be.
With the mask in place, he no longer looked like
a man. The wild eyes of the struggling girl fixed
on him, and for a moment they seemed almost sane.

(37:44):
The being on the hill, concentrating its control, saw inside
the house with the girl's eyes and knew that it
must meet a problem it had never faced before. And
because it could not since what was in Sam's mind,
it failed to know the nature of the problem. Coldly,
it considered for a thousand years it and its fellow

(38:04):
beings had controlled the race of parasites that had come
out of the sky on calms of flames. For a
thousand years, they had wreaked a continuing, satisfying vengeance on
beings that could understand that they were being punished. And
now finally had come one who was not susceptible to control,
one whose thoughts it could not divine, one who did

(38:25):
not believe in the blessings, one who knew Sema himself
was thinking much the same of all men. He alone
did not feel the call of God. He knew that
God was not God at all. He was the only
hope of this pitiful remnant of the human race. He
was Moses. Perhaps he was even Messiah, though he spoke

(38:46):
no wisdom and made no proclamations. Instead, he simply settled
the clenlinder on his back, swung another pack from his shoulder.
From the second pack, a long, flexible hose ran, and
on its end was a slender, tapered cylinder of metal.
A simple movement could put the mask over his face

(39:06):
again and again. He had practiced the thing that he
meant to do. Unlike the green being, he knew the
problem he faced, and unlike the green being, he knew
how he intended to solve them. Sam solutions were not
his own. They had been provided by history, by the
tapes and microfilms and records that were the accumulated wisdom

(39:28):
of old Earth, all that could be brought up on
the ships that just escaped the last atomic flare. Few
studied the tapes, few looked at the pictures, Few practiced
the experiments. Explored the nature of physical things, learned from
the records of a great world that had destroyed itself.
Not that many would not have liked to do these things,

(39:50):
but it early was found not to be wise. Somehow,
those who learned and thought had short lives. They became
the people of the pilgrimag Those who simply builded shelters,
tended their food supplies, made more of their kind, and
believed in God. Those lived longest, But they all went
to the great green Being.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
In the end.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
Sam strode out across the valley. The green being that
sat on the hill opposite his home site was the
largest ofvose that rimmed the restricted home of man. This
was the being that was tearing at the girl's mind,
issuing again and again the god commands that she could
not obey. Sam felt its rage, though it did not

(40:34):
could not speak to his mind. Its tantalizing, beguiling fragrance
had no effect on him. He detected them indeed, but
they were only plant smells. The honeysuckle pleased them more,
and the clover and the wild rose. He crossed the
stream by the stone bridge, not splashing wildly through as
the pilgrims did, and the ecstasies induced by those same fragrances.

(40:59):
Sam moved that out purposely. He followed the path of
a thousand pilgrimages, breasting the first rolling slopes that led
to the steep of the hills, and the green being
watched them not with fear, but certainty, with an intelligent
wonder How came this one to be different? It should

(41:22):
have given him its complete attention earlier, But no parasite,
no eater of the bodies of chlorophyll beings had ever
been able to resist it. Before its leaves stiffens. They
stood crisply out from the twig and small branches that
bore them. Their stomata opened from them poured the heavy,

(41:42):
odorless gas on which no breathing being could live. The
suffocating carbon dioxide swathed the green being its invisible cloud,
and flowed colorless and deadly down down the slope towards
the advancing man.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
Oxygen.

Speaker 1 (41:57):
He must have, like his fires and his cattle. Without it,
he would die. But this Sam expected. He understood that
it was thus that his brush fires had been extinguished.
He suspected that this was the only physical thing the
green being could do to cause him harm. True, it
had killed many men, many animals, but they did not

(42:19):
do the actual act of killing, oh as it caused
them to kill each other. So when he saw the
insects falling from the small plants, saw the field mice
come frantically out of their burrows, and like gasping on
the ground, he knew it was time. Sam pulled the
mask over his face, opened the tubes that came from
the cylinder, and breathed the oxygen laced there. He carried

(42:42):
the river of carbon dioxide flight over him, but he
strowed steadily on up the steep slope. The being watched
them come, and for the first time without pleasure. It
could have comprehended, It could have realized the truth, but
it refused to face what it did not wish to believe.

(43:03):
To believe, it would have had to recognize its own peril.
Recognizing it would have felt fear, and this it would
not do relentlessly. The man came on the green God
looked closely at his strange appearance. Those artifacts that he
borne his back, carried in his hand, and with which

(43:23):
he covered his head, those were the reasons that gases
caused him no grief. Savagely with waves of energy, it
hammered at his mind, commanding him to remove them, to
lay them down, but it could not reach his awareness.
It suspected that the man divined that he was being ordered,
that inside himself he was singing a song of triumph.

(43:44):
This the being could not hear. Yet somehow it felt
that it was so. Once again, it tried what it
had tried before. If anything anyone could touch his awareness,
it would be the creature he loved. Coldly, incisively, it
projected some into the mind of the bound girl in
the house in the valley, and again it news shock,

(44:06):
It met resistance. Speak to him, it ordered, make him
know that he cannot offend God.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
Speak to him, or.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
I will remove your reason and you will never know
him again. The response blurted back, you would destroy him,
you are not God, or you could command him yourself.
Oh you are evil now I know. But I couldn't
reach him if I wished, and if I could, I
would only urge him on destroy my mind, kill me,

(44:37):
for you will never command me again. For a moment,
it was tempted. Then it wondered could it render the
being mindless? Would the resistance prevented? It realized that it
did not know. But the man was close now, and
its stride never faltered. It was a problem that would
have to wait further, decided the girl should keeper reasoned

(45:00):
to see with her mind when the man met his fate.
Sam reached the top of the hill, just outside the
shade cast by the great green god.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
He stopped.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
He stood at ease, looking up and down the valley,
knowing that the being could move little and slowly, and
that it was anchored by its own roots like any
other planet. Quietly, he studied his world, the only world
he had ever known, the only space the green beings
had allowed his race to occupy. It was just a
valley fifty earth miles long, nine or ten miles wide,

(45:35):
stream watered, green covered, pleasant, and sun warmed. On either side,
the hills rose, each top by a great green being
like the one he stood beside, and he suspected that
they were all watching with their combined awareness, the crisis
that his uncontrolled presence here had caused from complete dominance

(45:55):
of an entire planet ended by a god of wrath
and fire. The rays of man had come to this,
and now the fire that destroyed his homeworld must liberate
this one. Sam moved under the shade of the great
branches strode up to the huge, rough bark bowl. Slowly,
the branches lowered around him until their tips touched the ground.

(46:18):
He stood in a shadowy circular hall with one great
pillar in its center, holding the sloping walls in place.
He knew that the atmosphere around him would have suffocated
him in seconds. Yet he smiled inside his mask, into
which the oxygen charged air was flowing smoothly, and he smoke,
hoping that the green being would understand him. Do you

(46:39):
realize the man said that you are going to die
in a few moments. I am going to prove that
God can die. You have preyed on man for a
thousand years using a hideous mind control that I don't understand,
but I know it for what it is, for some reason,
probably genetic mutation.

Speaker 2 (46:59):
I am immune.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
Thus I can defy you somewhere in the universe, or
perhaps pervading all the space there may be there, probably
is something that can be called god, but it is
an evil. Probably it can't die, but you can. The
being understood. It did not agree, but it understood. It

(47:21):
could see that the man had countered its suffocating air
could not be effected by its thought projections. But over
the centuries it had anticipated even this. It was prepared,
and the man knew it. When the first drop of
acid plummeted from above and spattered on his skin, the
drops became an acid rain. Sam shrank against the green trunk,

(47:43):
as much concerned for the metal of his artifacts as
for his burning skin. Time had run out. He had
been foolish to come under the drip line of the branches.
The satisfaction of proclaiming his vengeance might even deprive him
of it. And far down in the valley, tied in
her chair the inside room, the girl felt its danger
and cried out and wordless warning. But Sam had planned well.

(48:06):
He swung the long nozzle of the hose in his hand,
pressed a switch on the back. Swinging from his shoulders,
there was a sibilant hiss, like the voice of a reptile.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
A long, livid.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
Flame spurted, and the green being shuttered along its entire length.
The branches moved upward faster than any green being ever
had moved before. Dense clouds of carbon dioxide billowed downward.
But the flamethrower had within it everything it needed for combustion,
the refined oil, the oxygen supply, the carefully designated mixing cylinder.

(48:41):
Sam had worked from an ancient earth diagram found during
his recent studies of the tapes and records of the
ancestors of Man. It did what he had believed it
would do, what his test had shown it would do.
There was no more acid. The branches were raised as
high as their structures would allow. The tops turned inward

(49:03):
towards the huge, tapering trunk, packing themselves together tightly and
all long. The valley men were astonished to see that
each green being held its branches high, and that all
were shuddering as though in a cold wind. Sam was
swiftly away from the giant trunk. The nozzle of the

(49:23):
flame thrower held it ready, but for the moment he
cut off the flame, he stood and looked up at
the monstrous being, and wished that he could communicate directly
with it. It was strange, grotesque, cringing before him, with
its hundreds of arms upraised and had lost. It had
used its last resource. But Sam remembered that under the

(49:44):
soul on which he stood, many scores of human and
animal bodies had gone to nourish. That pleading, cowering height,
its tyranny had covered a thousand years. Threat was not enough.
He must speak plainly to the entire race of great
green beings, whose term as God was over. Now you
die in your turn, Sam said. The long red flame

(50:05):
lashed against the lower branches, the oils and resins that
were stored everywhere, and even the smallest twigs and green
leaves exploded and combusted In the ever increasing heat. The
being could no longer smother the fire. Upward and upward,
the flames licked. Columns of black, oily smoke rolled. Sam

(50:26):
was forced further and further down the hill as the
wall of heat beat at him. The very fat of
the body of the Green Being was now the field
that destroyed it, and Sam knew that this had always
been its fear. In the valley, the people stared with disbelief,
a disbelief that slowly became joy. Where the great Green

(50:46):
Being had always been a leaping, raging ready, torch wavered
upward many hundreds of feet. Some were frightened and bewildered.
They thought that the wrath of God had assumed a
new form. But the more intelligent knew God was never God,
and somehow Sam had destroyed him. It is gone, Old
Henry said, there will be no more pilgrimages, no more blessings.

(51:11):
We can grow old and die and be buried in
the soil of our farms, like our ancestors were said
to have done back on the world called Earth. Only
one is gone. Young Ralph pointed out, God still lives
on the next hill, and the next and the next.
The old man shook his head, But can happen to one?
Can happen to them?

Speaker 2 (51:31):
All? The others stand? Never again?

Speaker 1 (51:33):
Will they call us? I feel it? And Sam knew.
Sam is wiser than any man. Old Ella said he
was never afraid of God. Henry nodded, we will do
well to listen when he speaks. Then we will be
wise as well. Leaders have always praised God, Ala said,
Sam has destroyed him. Is that a different wisdom? If

(51:56):
God were God, Sam could not have caused them to burn.
Sam will know what is best for man, he is
not like the rest of us. This is the way
a litter should be, Old l admitted. Sam's thoughts were different,
more far ranging. As he came striding down the hill
behind them, the torch gradually crumbled into a funeral pyre,

(52:19):
which in turn became glowing piled masses of red coal,
and then a great circular mound of ashes. For the
first time in many years, man's thoughts ranged beyond the valley.
Sam had studied the records from Earth, and he knew
that the valley was not a world beyond. The land
must stretch on and on space for man to spread

(52:40):
over and live and enjoy. No man need pay for
blessings with their lives. Everyone could learn all the wisdom
of earth and discover more for themselves, for there would
be no God to prevent these things. Sam crossed the
stone bridge. Old Henry came through the fields to meet him.

(53:01):
There were Henry's fields, those that lay next to the bridge.
He had known that they would not be his much longer,
that soon God would call.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
He was old.

Speaker 1 (53:10):
The old were always called. You have killed God, he
said to Sam. He looked at the young man with
respect and in admiration he had never shown to anything before.
I want to be the first to tell you the
world is glad. Sam pushed up the mask and smile.
I have not killed God, he said, who or what
God may be, I do not know. What I have

(53:33):
killed is a being that used and fed on man
as we use and feet on our pigs, but not
for the same reason. It hated us because we ate
the plants, the green things that grow on though soil
and make tissue out of air and energy. It felt
that we had no right to live since we do
not trap our own sunshine. So it and all its

(53:55):
fellow beings intended to punish us forever. He looked across
the fields reflectively on earth. Many would have called this hell.
The illusion was lost on old Henry. I've never heard
the word, he said. I only know that now I
will never have to make the pilgrimage. My tools will

(54:16):
never again have to be blessed. I won't have to
fear fear. Suddenly, Sam remembered ginger. He ran the oxygen
tank and the flamethrower, clanging together with each bounding step.
He did not check his speed until he reached his
own porch. Then he walked calmly and slowly. Inside. She
sat quietly in the chair. The gag distorted her mouth,

(54:39):
but her eyes were steady, insane. Sam's knife slashed the
binding tapes gently.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
He removed the gag. The bruised lip smiled.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Thank providence, He smiled softly, and thus unthinkingly spoke to
God unknown. I thought it might have destroyed you, but
I knew it would if.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
I had let you fee.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
I had no choice. I fought it, she said proudly.
I fought it with my mind. It would have taken
away my sanity, but it wanted me to see you die.
She flecked fingers and toes, stretched her slender body to
ease the pane of returning circulation. She wrinkled her nose.

(55:20):
Did you have to tie me so tightly? That wasn't
the pain I feared for you, Sam said, I was
afraid that it would make you break your own body.
Enjoy your hurt. It won't come again. The being is dead,
I know, she said, I felt to die. She looked
at him curiously. You never called it God?

Speaker 2 (55:40):
Why?

Speaker 1 (55:41):
Because I knew it wasn't. He was removing the mouse,
unstrapping the tank from his back. Unslinging the flamethrower from
his shoulder. I can be given no credit. It could
never speak to me, never affect me in any way.
I have read all the stories of God in the
earth histories. I knew that there was no exception to
the power of God. Also did not think that the

(56:03):
God of man would pray on men. You can be
given credit for courage. Many men have courage. No something
happened in the body of my father, or of my mother,
or in the cell that they made together. AM only
what I was born to be. She held up her arms,

(56:25):
lift me. She commanded, There's something else you were born
to be. Thus men had been halted for a thousand years,
but his race did not die. The grim and deadly
tyranny of the great Green Beings was the purging it
needed and required. The weak, the incompetent, All those who

(56:45):
could not endure were pruned out. What remained was still
the most intelligent, the most adaptable, the most resilient species
the galaxy had produced. From the records, this world is
much like Earth. Sam said. They hate and fierce, but
the green beings have kept it well since they have chlorophylled.
Their needs are not ours, Since they are sasile, angered

(57:09):
always to one spot. They have developed in a different way.
They probably became able to think in the same way
that I was able to resist them genetic change, mutation,
and once able to think that endless stretches of time
in which to contemplate, without the hate from which our
point of view is not a rational hate. I suspect

(57:31):
that they are very wise freed from bondage. Men spread
from the valley. They explored southward to the hot lands northward,
until they came to perpetual snow. And in between there
were great stretches of land open to the sun, and
chains of high mountains, and finally, beyond them all an endless,

(57:53):
mighty sea, and always crowning each imminence, each hill a
high spot with a great green beings the only chlorophylled
beings that could think. But there was no danger now
They could indeed have influenced the minds of many, though
men now knew them for what they were, but they

(58:13):
dared not Men used fire. The knowledge of what Sam
had done spread to the limits of the species, and
the green things knew that they could be destroyed, their resinous,
oily bodies where or could be the favorite food of fire.
Sam traveled far. He saw the hot lands, the lee

(58:35):
ice fields, the prairies, the mountains, and the sea. He
saw the people he had freed, spreading over the planet,
setting up their home sits in many locations, and he
found that he was not welcome among them. Puzzled and
hurt at first, he did not understand.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Then he was bitter.

Speaker 1 (58:53):
I released all men from a hideous oppression, he said,
and they hate me for it. Why it was Ginger
who answered him, and with a wisdom none would have
suspected from that wide eyed, flower petaled face. You have
freed us all, she agreed. But by taking something away,
you have taken our God and left an emptiness. Where

(59:16):
will we turn? What will we worship? You know that
the green beings were not God, but our need remains.
There must be something greater than man.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
Who is it? What is it? Where? Confused? Deserted?

Speaker 1 (59:32):
That is why their faces are turned away from you,
But not your face, Sam pleaded. The girl shook her
head and smiled, Never my face, she said, it is
not your fault that we have no God. You only
showed us what was already true. She looked away out
across the earth, like landscape. She was slender and small,

(59:53):
but to Sam she was greater than the greatest of
the beings that showed on every hill. I suspect, She
said slowly, that every man will have to fill up
the emptiness for himself, and sometimes somehow we will find
what we mean by God. Still, most men regarded Sam
with suspicion and doubt. And finally he knew what he
must do when he must go home. After all, was

(01:00:17):
the open, sunny valley where he had been born. There,
at least the neighbors, what suffered from the very being
he had destroyed, would still be friendly, still be grateful.
And it was there that he and the white eyed
ginger finally built their home. In the building, Sam proved
valley why he was different. He was still a man

(01:00:37):
like other men, as in the green beings. The need
for vengeance lay deep in him.

Speaker 2 (01:00:44):
Men of earth used.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
These materials, said he, and so will I. So first
he built a grayhouse of stone. Then, late in the autumn,
after their leaves had fallen, and each green being stood
baron stark against the cold sky, he led a crew
of white shouldered young men up the nearest hill. They

(01:01:06):
carried edge tools saws and axes, as another crew of
earthmen had done a thousand years before. The green, being
almost unconscious in dormancy, watched them come. There was nothing
it could do. It would feel no pain, but it
knew its fate, and it knew that it would be
the first of many. An earth house, Sam said, paneled floored,

(01:01:26):
and with stairways and porches of fine grain wood. The
resins and oils give protection from decay and allow of
fine finish. He smiled, And no earth men ever before
had a home trimmed with a flush of God. And
he never suspected that the green beings, as their numbers
grew fewer year by year, also had their dream of God.

(01:01:47):
They spread their leaves to the warm sun. Their chloroplasts
trapped the rays, and they built them into the substances.
They kept all things alive. But they knew that their
son was not God. To the great green beings, God,
the ultimate God was Energy.

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Chlorophyll | Stephen Tall | Podcast

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