A note on the original editing: The magazine editors have a habit of inserting meaningless spaces in the author's text. Maybe blank lines make them feel more at home. So when you see these in the remainder of this volume, don't blame me; there are no blanks in my narrative, or pointless untitled chapters.
It lay there, an indentation in the soil, two inches deep and nine feet in diameter. It was flat, it was smooth, and the sand and the dirt were twined with rotted leaves and stems in a marbled pattern. The edge, cut sharp and clean, exposed a miniature stratum leading up to the impressed forest floor, and spoke of the weight that had stood on that spot, molding the earth into the shape of its fundament.
It was the mark of a foot, or a hoof, or whatever it is that touches the ground when an animal ambulates. One print—
Charles Tinnerman shook his head somberly. A single print could have been a freak of nature. This was one of many: a definite trail. They were spaced twenty or thirty feet apart, huge and level; ridges of spadiceous earth narrowed toward the center of each, rounded and smooth, as though squirted liquidly up between half-yard toes. Some were broken, toppled worms lying skew, scuffed when the hoof moved on.
Around the spoor rose the forest, in Gargantuan splendor; each trunk ascending gauntly into a mass of foliage so high and solid that the ground was cast into an almost nocturnal shadow.
At dusk the three men halted. "We could set up an arc," Tinnerman said, reaching behind to pat his harness.
Don Abel grunted negatively. "Use a light, and everything on the planet will know where we are. We don't want the thing that made that," he gestured toward the trail, "to start hunting us."
The third man spoke impatiently. "It rains at night, remember? If we don't get close pretty soon, the water'll wash out the prints."
Tinnerman looked up. "Too late," he said. There was no thunder, but abruptly it was raining solidly, as it must to support a forest of this type. They could hear the steady deluge flaying the dense leaves far above. Not a drop reached the ground.
"The trees won't hold it back forever," Abel remarked. "We'd better break out the pup tent in a hurry—"
"Hey!" Fritz Slaker's voice sang out ahead. "There's a banyan or something up here. Shelter!"
Columns of water hissed into the ground as the great leaves far above overflowed at last. The men galloped for cover, packs thumping as they dodged the sudden waterfalls.
They stripped their packs and broke out rations silently. The dry leaves and spongy loam made a comfortable seat, and after a day of hiking the relaxation was bliss. Tinnerman leaned back against the base of the nearest trunk, chewing and gazing up into the bole of the tree. It was dark; but he could make out a giant spherical opacity from which multiple stems projected downward, bending and swelling for a hundred feet until they touched the ground as trunks twelve feet in diameter.
Don Abel's voice came out of the shadow. "The monster passed right under here. I'm sitting on the edge of a print. What if it comes back?"
Slaker laughed, but not loudly. "Mebbe we're in its nest? We'd hear it. A critter like that—just the shaking of the ground would knock us all a foot into the air." There was a sustained rustle.
"What are you doing?" Abel asked querulously.
"Making a bed," Slaker snapped.
"Do you think it's safe?" Abel asked, though his tone indicated that he suspected one place was as unsafe as another. After a moment, the rustle signified that he too was making a bed.
Tinnerman smiled in the dark, amused. He really did not know the other men well; the three had organized an AWOL party on the spur of the moment, knowing that the survey ship would be planetbound for several days.
The bark of the tree was thick and rubbery, and Tinnerman found it oddly comfortable. He put his ear against it, hearing a faint melodic humming that seemed to emanate from the interior. It was as though he was auditing the actual life-processes of the alien vegetation—although on this world, he was the alien—and this fascinated him.
The other two were soon asleep. Sitting there in silence, the absolute blackness of a strange world's umbra pressing against his eyeballs, Tinnerman realized that this outing, dangerous as it was, offered him a satisfaction he had seldom known. Slaker and Abel had accepted him for what he was not: one of the fellows.
Those footprints. Obviously animal—yet so large. Would a pressure of a hundred pounds per square inch depress the earth that much? How much would the total creature weigh?
Tinnerman found his pack in the dark and rummaged for his miniature slide rule. The tiny numbers fluoresced as he set up his problem: 144 times the square of 4.5 times pi divided by 20. It came to about 460 tons per print. And how many feet did it have, and how much weight did each carry when at rest?
He had heard that creatures substantially larger than the dinosaurs of ancient Earth could not exist on land. On an Earth type planet, which this one was with regard to gravity, atmosphere and climate, the limits were not so much biological as physical. A diminutive insect required many legs, not to support its weight, but to preserve balance. Brontosaurus, with legs many times as sturdy as those of an insect, even in proportion to its size, had to seek the swamp to ease the overbearing weight. A larger animal, in order to walk at all, would have to have disproportionately larger legs and feet. Mass cubed with increasing size while the cross section of the legs squared; to maintain a feasible ratio, most of the mass above a certain point would have to go to the feet.
Four hundred and sixty tons? The weight on each foot exceeded that of a family of whales. Bones should shatter and flesh tear free with every step.
The rain had ceased and the forest was quiet now. Tinnerman scraped up a belated bed of his own and lay down. But his mind refused to be pacified. Bright and clear and ominous the thoughts paraded, posing questions for which he had no answer. What thing had they blundered across?
A jumping animal! Tinnerman sat up, too excited to sleep. Like an overgrown showshoe rabbit, he thought—bounding high, hundreds of feet to nip the lofty greenery, then landing with terrific impact. It could be quite small—less than a ton, perhaps, with one grossly splayed balancing foot. At night it might sail into a selected roost... or onto....