The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [102]
There was no escape from the awesome conclusion. Now Alvin knew what they had been flying over; it was something he had seen often enough in Lys, but until this moment the shocking change of scale had prevented recognition.
‘Hilvar,’ he said, still hardly daring to put his thoughts into words, ‘do you know what this is?’
‘It seems hard to believe, but we’ve been flying round the edge of a corral. This thing is a fence—a fence that hasn’t been strong enough.’
‘People who keep pets,’ said Alvin, with the nervous laugh 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 at the broken barricade, his brow furrowed with thought.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said at last. ‘Where could it have got food on a planet like this? And why did it break out of its pen? I’d give a lot to know what kind of animal it was.’
‘Perhaps it was left here, and broke out because it was hungry,’ Alvin surmised. ‘Or something may have made it annoyed.’
‘Let’s go lower,’ said Hilvar. ‘I want to have a look at the ground.’
They descended until the ship was almost touching the barren rock, and it was then that they noticed that the plain was pitted with innumerable small holes, no more than an inch or two wide. Outside the stockade, however, the ground was free from these mysterious pockmarks; they stopped abruptly at the line of the fence.
‘You are right,’ said Hilvar. ‘It was hungry. But it wasn’t an animal: it would be more accurate to call it a plant. It had exhausted the soil inside its pen, and had to find fresh food elsewhere. It probably moved quite slowly; perhaps it 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 Hilvar’s analysis was basically correct, and that some botanical monster, perhaps moving too slowly for the eye to see, had fought a sluggish but relentless battle against the barriers that hemmed it in.
It might still be alive, even after all these ages, roving at will over the face of the planet. To look for it, however, 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—if 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