Critical Threshold Read Online Free PDF Page B

right in, without giving ourselves a chance to recoil.
    Two by two, we went out through the safety lock. I came through last of all, the odd one out. The air outside was cool. There was a wind blowing from the south that cut a chill into me instantly. Three weeks in thermostatically controlled air leaves you vulnerable to a cold wind. But it wouldn’t take long to adjust.
    It was early morning, and the sun was just getting up to a modest height. There was some cloud about but it looked as if the weather was set fair.
    All that was left of the crowd were a handful of children. They retreated before we dispersed, but continued to watch us from a respectable distance. Nathan, Mariel and Conrad set off down the slope toward the little clot of houses. I led Linda off at right angles, along the side of the hill.
    Once we were clear of the ground that had been scorched by our back blast I knelt to inspect the grass. Tough Earth-type species brought to assist in claiming the land from the native forms grew in loose tussocks scattered here and there. There were Dendran grasses too. There were also potatoes, which had once enjoyed sole priority here but which now grew wild, vying with anything else the wind brought. There were other plants, too—Dendran plants which were already spreading clusters of spatulate leaves from tough, tall stalks to shade the ground, preparing the way for the return of the trees. For the forest to reclaim this land would take another forty or fifty years—two generations, in human terms—but it could be done, unless human intervention prevented it.
    Between the fields marked out by the original settlers were hedges of imported thorn-bushes, but the hedgerows had been invaded in no certain terms by native species. There were small birds nesting there, and a profusion of flowering plants dressing the fringes with colored blossoms. On most of the plants there were healthy blooms intermingled with new buds and dying inflorescences. On Dendra, the cycle of life was closed upon itself.
    We made our way through the gaps in the hedges over toward the eastern edge of the settlement, toward the rough wooden fence which marked the boundary of what was now the human domain. Because we were higher up the slope we could see over the fence into the youthful forest which was already well advanced in the process of regeneration over and around the wreckage of a long-abandoned attempt to extend that domain for miles and miles in every direction. The wood that had once been felled had been translated into buildings: from Dendran forest into human farmland, complete with houses, barns, silos. And then back again.
    Even in the small rectangle of land which remained, at least partly, under the domination of the extraplanetary invaders, there was no sign of domestic animals save for hens in wooden runs within the conglomerate of dwellings. Yet the forest contained creatures like pigs, flightless fowl of several native varieties, creatures like small goats, scavengers like dogs. If anything had ever been co-opted from the forest into the pattern of human life on Dendra, it had since been abandoned, sent back where it came from.
    â€œPerhaps,” said Linda, “this isn’t the only settlement. Perhaps they found better places, and abandoned this.” She couldn’t muster any real conviction.
    â€œAnd the people too?” I said. “Are the ones we find here just the abandoned and forsaken? The moronic and the insane? While elsewhere in the forest there’s a Utopian community where everything is beautiful?”
    I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t even want to believe it.
    We came to the barrier which sought, impotently, to keep the forest at bay. It was taller than it had seemed from the crest of the hill. It was also more solid, at least at the point where we stood. It had been built to last, its logs tightly knitted into a solid barricade seven feet high, strengthened every ten or