The symbols scattered among the figures were of many bright colors, and none was like any he had ever seen before. Some of the figures were of machines or vessels. Most were of bipeds, some of whom looked human enough. They were doing all sorts of things and were in various postures. Some of the paintings looked like spaceships, but he could not be sure.
"Damn it, Tappy! Wait for me!"
She was heading toward the woods. He caught up with her and said, "We have to stay together so I can see the dangers. Remember, I'm the one who isn't blind!"
Tappy made a gesture with her right hand which he interpreted as apologetic. If he had hurt her by reminding her of her blindness, he could not see it on her face. She looked eager to get going. To where? Did she know? Or was she being drawn by some undefined but powerful feeling like the instinct of a lemming? That was, he told himself, not a reassuring analogy. Lemmings were pulled toward destruction. However, it might be the right comparison after all.
He was thinking too much, too concerned about what they might be walking into. If he allowed himself to be sucked into the maelstrom of his thoughts and apprehensions, he would not be able to go on. He would just sit down and refuse to go a step farther. He would die. Either he would starve or a predator would get him.
That was enough incentive to make him drive onward, though another was the crater panorama. He was a painter, and his curiosity about the gigantic figures burned in him. That must be the biggest mural in the world. Who could have done it? How? Why?
They entered the shade of interlocking branches, the lowest of which radiated from the trunks about ten feet above them. Through the infrequent spaces among the leaves, sunlight speared. This illuminated the ground-mat of purple plants, one inch high, growing closely together, which seemed to spread everywhere. His feet crushed the plants, and a thin liquid exuding from them spread a faint peppermint odor. Most of the trees had a deeply corrugated, pale orange bark. The heart-shaped green leaves, covered with purple rosettes, were about six inches long. The branches were populated by a variety of small furry creatures, winged and wingless. They were as noisy as birds, and some of the fliers were as beautiful and varied in their markings as Terrestrial birds.
There were, here and there, bushes and plenty of dead wood fallen from the trees. But the walking was almost as easy as if they had been in a well-kept park.
After an hour's walk, Jack said, "Let's rest. I don't know where you're going, Tappy, I hope you do, but whatever is there isn't going to go away."
That might not be true. Maybe it was going to go away, and, somehow, Tappy knew it.
He brought out a few of the butterscotch "cherries" from his jacket pocket and handed them to her. From another pocket, he took a half dozen he had saved for himself.
"We have to find something solid to eat, protein and carbohydrates. Or we'll start having diarrhea."
Soon after resuming their journey, they came across a broad and shallow stream. While hand-cupping its water to drink, Jack saw some foot-long salamanderoids in pursuit of tiny fishlike creatures. He stuck a hand in the water and waited, still as a fishing bear, until a salamander came close. He grasped the thing and lifted it, though its wrigglings and greasy skin made it hard to hold, and hurled it against a tree trunk. He ran after it just in time to seize it again as it crawled painfully back to the creek. He knocked its head against the trunk once more. It still tried to creep away, but he took his jackknife from his jacket pocket, opened it, and cut the thing's head off. Its blood was red.
After catching another, Jack took off its head and gutted both of them. He collected dead wood, made shavings from it, and used his cigarette lighter to start a fire. Then he skewered a salamander on a pointed stick and held it over the fire. Though the flesh was undercooked inside and burned on the outside, it was more than satisfactory.
"Tastes like greasy frog legs," Jack said as he started cooking the second animal.
After washing their hands and faces in the creek, they started to go on. Jack, however, called a halt so that they could check their possessions. Some of them might be useful.
Tappy had nothing except the nightgown, socks, and shoes she wore. That she had not automatically taken her handbag along showed how urgent her desire had been to get to the gate-rock. He had his wristwatch, and his pants and jacket pockets held a comb, a handkerchief, the jackknife, the cigarette lighter (he had quit smoking but still carried it), car keys, a leather holder with four pencils and a pen, a small notebook with unlined pages, and his wallet. This contained four hundred dollars, mostly large bills, credit cards, a driver's license, and photographs of his parents, sister, and of some of his better paintings.
There were also three quarters, two dimes, a nickel, and five pennies.
Except for the knife and the lighter, the items seemed to be useless. But he decided not to discard them. They pushed on and did not stop until the half-twilight of the forest began darkening toward night. He told Tappy to wait while he climbed a particularly tall tree. Fortunately, there was a big boulder under it from which he could leap upward and grab the lowest limb. While he was climbing, flying mammals fled before him. He went by several nests with young in them, but did not touch them. The parents flew chittering at him, swooping around his head. He also had to brush off hundreds of long-legged insects which, however, did not bite him.
When he had gotten up as far as he could go, he looked westward. Though the sun had dropped below the crater wall, the sky was still bright, and a pale light lay over the upward-sloping land. He gasped, and he clung to the bending treetop to keep from falling.
The Brobdingnagian figures on the wall were moving.
He watched while they and the symbols around them marched along the wall as if in a slow-motion film. He stayed there for at least thirty minutes, shouting down now and then to reassure Tappy that he was all right. Finally, the figures and the symbols stopped moving. He did not know how far they had gone in their travel, perhaps a few miles. He wondered if they moved during every twilight and would eventually complete a circuit.
As he started down cautiously, he saw a pale round object with a dark crescent on its northeastern part slide up from above the eastern wall. He waited until it revealed itself as a moon slightly smaller than Earth's Luna. He was just about to tell Tappy about it when something huge and dark shot across the silvery face. It seemed to be circular and to be topped by a structure of some sort through which the moon gleamed here and there. Then the object was gone, though he had the impression that it had flown into the crater. If it could be seen from here, it must be enormous. And it must have a staggering power to be able to keep its bulk aloft.
When he got down, he waited until he had recovered his wind before he told her what he had seen. Surprisingly, Tappy nodded as if she understood what the titanic vessel was.
He said, "Well? Explain," but she did not, of course, answer.
"I know you can't help it, Tappy, or you appear not to be able to speak, though sometimes I wonder. But you really frustrate me."
She put out her hand as if to tell him that she was sorry or, perhaps, to get comfort from him. He took it and stroked the back of her hand, then pulled her to him and held her close for I a little while.
"We'll get through this somehow."
He hoped that he sounded convincing.
The dying light sifting down through the leafy canopy was presently replaced by a pale gloom shed by the moon. By now, the cries of the small animals, ever-present through the day, had died with the light. They were succeeded by a booming from far off, its direction undetectable, and, now and then, a roaring. He shivered from more than the cooling air.