The City and the Stars Page 0,96

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 animal: 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