It could, conceivably, be intended purely for ornament to provide a moon in the sky of its giant companion. Even in that case, however, it seemed likely that it would be put to some use.
«Look, said Hilvar, pointing to the screen. «Over there, on the right.»
Alvin changed the ship’s course, and the landscape tilted around them. The red-lit rocks blurred with the speed of their motion; then the image stabilized, and sweeping below was the unmistakable evidence of life.
Unmistakable-yet also baffling. It took the form of a wide-spaced row of slender columns, each a hundred feet from its neighbor and twice as high. They stretched into the distance, dwindling in hypnotic perspective, until the far horizon swallowed them up.
Alvin swung the ship to the right, and began to race along the line of columns, wondering as he did so what purpose they could ever have served. They were absolutely uniform, marching in an unbroken file over hills and down into valleys. There was no sign that they had ever supported anything; they were smooth and featureless, tapering very slightly toward the top.
Quite abruptly, the line changed its course, turning sharply through a right angle. Alvin overshot by several miles before he reacted and was able to swing the ship around in the new direction.
The columns continued with the same unbroken stride across the landscape, their spacing perfectly regular. Then, fifty miles from the last change of course, they turned abruptly through another right angle. At this rate, thought Alvin, we will soon be back where we started.
The endless sequence of columns had so mesmerized them fat when it was broken they were miles past the discontinuity before Hilvar cried out and made Alvin, who had noticed nothing, turn the ship back. They descended slowly, and they circled above what Hilvar had found, a fantastic picion began to dawn in their minds-though at first neither dared mention it to the other. Two of the columns had been broken off near their base and lay stretched out upon the rocks where they had fallen. Nor was that all; the two columns adjoining the gap had bent outward by some irresistible force.
There was no escape from the awesome conclusion. Alvin knew what they had been flying over; it was so thing he had seen often enough in Lys, but until this mom the shocking change of scale had prevented recognition.
«Hilvar,» he said, still hardly daring to put his thou into words, «do you know what this is?»
«It seems hard to believe, but we’ve been flying aro the edge of a corral. This thing is a fence-a fence l hasn’t been strong enough.»
«People who keep pets,» said Alvin, with the nervous lain men sometimes use to conceal their awe, «should make sure they know how to keep them under control.»
Hilvar did not react to his forced levity; he was staring the broken barricade, his brow furrowed with thought.
«I don’t understand it,» he said at last. «Where could have got food on a planet like this? And why did it bred out of its pen? I’d give a lot to know what kind of animal was.»
«Perhaps it was left here, and broke out because it ail hungry,» Alvin surmised. «Or something may have made it annoyed.»
«Let’s go lower,» said Hilvar. «I want to have a look the ground.»
They decended until the ship was almost touching barren rock, and it was then that they noticed that the ply was pitted with innumerable small holes no more than an inch or two wide. Outside the stockade, however, the groud was free from these mysterious pockmarks; they stopped ruptly at the line of the fence.
«You are right,» said Hilvar. «It was hungry. But it wash an animaclass="underline" it would be more accurate to call it a plant. had exhausted the soil inside its pen, and had to find fry food elsewhere. It probably moved quite slowly; perhaps took years to break down those posts.»
Alvin’s imagination swiftly filled in the details he could never know with certainty. He did not doubt that Hilvars analysis was basically correct, and that some botanical monster, perhaps moving too slowly for the eye to see, had foul a sluggish but relentless battle against the barriers that hemmed it in.
It might still be alive, even after all these ages, rovin will over the face of this planet. To look for it, now, would be a hopeless task, since it would mean quartering the surface of an entire globe. They made a desultory search in the few square miles around the gap, and located one great circular patch of pockmarks almost five hundred feet across. where the creature had obviously stopped to feed one could apply that word to an organism that somehow drew its nourishment from solid rock.
As they lifted once more into space, Alvin felt a strange weariness come over him. He had seen so much, yet learned so little. There were many wonders on all these planets, but what he sought had fled them long ago. It would be useless, he knew, to visit the other worlds of the Seven Suns. Even if there was still intelligence in the Universe, where could he seek it now? He looked at the stars scattered like dust across the vision screen, and knew that what was left of time was not enough to explore them all.
A feeling of loneliness and oppression such as he had never before experienced seemed to overwhelm him. He could understand now the fear of Diaspar for the great spaces of the Universe, the terror that had made his people gather in the little microcosm of their city. It was hard to believe that, after all, they had been right.
He turned to Hilvar for support. But Hilvar was standing, fists tightly clenched and with a glazed look in his eyes. His head was tilted on one side; he seemed to be listening, straining every sense into the emptiness around them.
«What is it?» said Alvin urgently. He had to repeat the question before Hilvar showed any sign of hearing it. He was still staring into nothingness when he finally replied.
«There’s something coming,» he said slowly. «Something that I don’t understand.»
It seemed to Alvin that the cabin had suddenly become very cold, and the racial nightmare of the Invaders reared up to confront him in all its terror. With an effort of will that sapped his strength, he forced his mind away from panic.
«Is it friendly?» he asked. «Shall I run for Earth?»
Hilvar did not answer the first question-only the second. His voice was very faint, but showed no sign of alarm or fear. It held rather a vast astonishment and curiosity, as if he had encountered something so surprising that he could not be bothered to deal with Alvin’s anxious query.
«You’re too late,» he said. «It’s already here.»
The Galaxy had turned many times on its axis since consciousnness first came to Vanamonde. He could recall little of those first aeons and the creatures who had tended him then-but he could remember still his desolation when they had gone and left him alone among the stars. Down the ages since, he had wandered from sun to sun, slowly evolving and increasing Iiis Powers. Once he had dreamed of finding again those who had attended his birth, and though the dream had faded it had never wholly died.
On countless worlds he had found the wreckage that it had left behind, but intelligence he had discovered only once -and from the Black Sun he had fled in terror. Yet the Universe was very large, and the search had scarcely begun.
Far away though it was in space and time, the great burst of power from the heart of the Galaxy beckoned to Vas monde across the light-years. It was utterly unlike the radiation of the stars, and it had appeared in his field of a consciousness as suddenly as a meteor trail across a cloudy sky. He moved through space and time toward it, to the lab moment of its existence, sloughing from him in the way he knew the dead, unchanging pattern of the past.
The long metal shape, with its infinite complexities structure, he could not understand, for it was as strap to him as almost all the things of the physical world. Arou it still clung the aura of power that had drawn him acct the Universe, but that was of no interest to him now. Cap fully, with the delicate nervousness of a wild beast half poi for flight, he reached out toward the two minds he had, covered. And then he knew that his long search was ended.