Read Ebook: Quinquepedalian by Anthony Piers Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 144 lines and 9972 words, and 3 pages

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: December 16, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1963

QUINQUEPEDALIAN

Illustrated by FINLAY

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 unpressed 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 touched 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, skuffed 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 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?

He turned his eyes up to the impenetrable canopy above. In the flattened upper reaches of the banyan ... a nest?

Tinnerman stood, moving silently away from the bodies of his companions. Locating his pack a second time he dug out cleats and hand spikes, fitting them to his body by feel. He found his trunk, shaping its firm curvature with both hands; then he began to ascent.

He climbed, digging the spikes into the heavy bark and gaining altitude in the blackness. The surface gradually became softer, more even, but remained firm; if it were to pull away from the inner wood the fall would kill him. He felt the curvature increase and knew that the diameter of the trunk was shrinking; but still there was no light at all.

His muscles tensed as his body seemed to become heavier, more precariously exposed. Something was pulling him away from the trunk, weakening his purchase; but he could not yet circle any major portion of the column with his arms. Something was wrong; he would have to descend before being torn loose.

Relief washed over him as he realized the nature of the problem. He was near the top; the stem was bending in to join the main body of the tree, and he was on the underside. He worked his way to the outside and the strain eased; now gravity was pulling him into the trunk, helping him instead of leaving him hanging. Quickly he completed the ascent and stood at last against the massive nexus where limb melded into bole.

Here there was light, a dim glow from overhead. He mounted the vast gnarled bulk, a globular shape thirty feet in diameter covered with swellings and scars. It was difficult to picture it as it was, a hundred feet above the ground, for nothing at all could be seen beyond its damp mound. Although it was part of a living or once-living thing, there was no evidence of foliage. There was no nest.

The center of the crude sphere rose onto another trunk or stalk, a column about ten feet in diameter, pointing straight up as far as he could see. He was not at the top at all. The bark here was smooth and not very thick; it would be difficult to scale, even with the cleats.

Tinnerman rested for about ten minutes, lying down and putting his ear to the wood. Again the melody of the interior came to him, gentle yet deep. It brought a vision of many layers, pulsing and interweaving; of tumescence and flow, rich sap in the fibers. There was life of a sort going on within, either of the tree or in it.

He stood and mounted the central stalk. Quickly he climbed, spikes penetrating at fingers, knees and toes, bearing him ant-like up the sheer column without hesitation. The light above became brighter, though it was only the lesser gloom of a starless night on a moonless planet. Ahead the straight trunk went on and on, narrowing but never branching. Huge limbs from neighboring trees crossed nearby, bare and eerie, residual moisture shining dully; but his climb ignored them. Fifty feet; seventy-five; and now he was as high above the bole as it was above the ground. The stem to which he clung had diminished to a bare five foot diameter, but rose on toward the green upper forest.

Tinnerman's muscles bunched once more with strain. A wind came up; or perhaps he had come up to it. At this height, even the slightest tug and sway was alarming. He reached his arms around the shaft and hung on. Below, the spokes of other trees were a forest of their own, a fairyland of brush and blackness, crossing and recrossing, concealing everything except the slender reed he held. Above, the first leaves appeared, flat and heavy in the night. He climbed.

Suddenly it ended. The trunk, barely three feet through, expanded into a second bole shaped like an upsidedown pear with a five foot thickness, and stopped. Tinnerman clambered onto the top and stood there, letting his weary arms relax, balancing against the sway. There was nothing else--just a vegetable knob two hundred feet above the ground. All around, the dark verdure rustled in the breeze, and the gloom below was a quiet sea.

No branches approached within twenty feet of the knob, though the leaves closed in above, diffusing the glow of the sky. Tinnerman studied the hollow around him, wondering what kept the growth away. Was this a takeoff point for the hidden quarry?

Then it came to him, unnerving him completely. Fear hammered inside him like a bottled demon; he dared not let it out. Shaking, he began the descent.

Morning came, dim and unwilling; but it was not the wan light filtering down like sediment that woke the explorers. Nor was it the warmth of day, soaking into the tops and running down the trunks in the fashion of the night water.

They woke to sound: a distant din, as of a large animal tearing branches and crunching leaves. It was the first purposeful noise they had heard since entering the forest; as such, it was unnatural, and brought all three to their feet in alarm.

The evening deluge had eradicated all trace of the prints leading up to the giant structure under which they had taken shelter. Beneath it the spoor remained, as deep and fresh as before; one print near the edge was half gone.

Slaker sized up the situation immediately. "Guarantees the trail was fresh," he said. "We don't know whether it was coming or going, but it was made between rains. Let's get over and spot that noise." He suited action to word and set off, pack dangling from one hand, half eaten space-ration in the other.

Abel was not so confident. "Fresh, yes--but we still don't know where the thing went. You don't look as though you got much sleep, Tinny."

Tinnerman didn't answer. They picked up their packs and followed Slaker, who was already almost out of sight.

They came up to him as he stood at the edge of an open space in the forest. Several mighty trees had fallen, and around their massive corpses myriad little shoots were reaching up. The sunlight streamed down here, intolerably bright after the obscurity underneath. The noise had stopped.

There was a motion in the bush ahead. A large body was moving through the thicket, just out of sight, coming toward them. A serpentine neck poked out of the copse, bearing a cactuslike head a foot in diameter. The head swung toward them, circularly machairodont, a ring of six-inch eye stalks extended.

The men froze, watching the creature. The head moved away, apparently losing its orientation in the silence. The neck was smooth and flexible, about ten feet in length; the body remained out of sight.

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