Bickering in more or less friendly fashion, they covered their first five miles, then turned to the left and started circling. About a mile of this and they entered a fairly large wood. The trees here were so strange the boys looked about them with a growing excitement.
Unconsciously, they drew closer together, and finally Jon voiced what was in both their minds.
"I'm beginning to get scared, Jak. Ought we to keep trying to go this way?"
"I'm not sure," slowly. "I'm getting a feeling there's something here that seems to be unfriendly—perhaps dangerous. But there isn't a thing we can see—not even animal life."
"Maybe it's only because this forest is so unlike either those on Terra or the ones on Two." But Jon gripped his rifle more tightly, and his thumb unlocked the safety catch.
The two boys finally came to a dead halt in a small clearing perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, and examined more closely the few trees and bushes about them. The ground on which they were now standing was bare and sandy, although beneath the trees it had been more like black loam.
"This sand must be why there's practically no vegetation here," Jak said. He dug into the ground a bit, and found it to be sand as deep as he went.
Rising, he looked even more closely at the trees about the edge of the clearing.
Not one of them was the straight, slim type with which they were familiar. These were ungainly and appeared stunted, although many were actually close to thirty feet tall. Even so, they looked too large in diameter for their height. None of them had more than five or six twigless, leafless limbs, and those were almost as large in diameter as the trunks from which they grew. These branches twisted and curved, although in most cases the curve was upward, so that the leafless limbs often ended at a higher point than the main trunk of the tree.
Suddenly Jak began laughing—but with a high-pitched, mirthless laughter. As Jon looked at him in surprise, the elder tried to calm himself.