Charley chuckled.
"I've got outsized feet even when I'm as bare as a baby. But I was wearing heavy moon-shoes, and the prints I'd left in the snow were eight inches across!
"There was a straight line of prints, as big and square as my own, leading out across the valley—prints I couldn't possibly have made. I'd stumbled around a bit, of course. But I hadn't budged two yards from the base of the slope.
"The oddest thing about that single trail of prints was the fact that it started right where I was standing!
"An icy wind seemed to blow through me. On the moon you don't slide down a steep slope and land right where someone else has been standing. Not if you're in your right mind, you don't. The moon isn't that thickly populated.
"I was badly shaken, I can tell you! But I didn't sit down and brood over it. When you go into a huddle with yourself on the moon you're apt to wind up looking like an ice-carved replica of Rodin's Thinker.
"I simply shaded my helmet with my palm, to cut down the starshine, and stared across the valley. The valley was about a mile wide, and as smooth as a skating rink over most of its surface. But about halfway across a big mound of blue-gray sandstone broke the monotony by looming up on the frozen plain like an African termite's nest.
"Maybe you've seen some pictures of those big nests in travel books. They were usually photographed with seven-foot natives standing beside 'em, to make you realize what insects could accomplish. Old travel books, of course, because Africa is just one big stone highway now.
"Those nests were huge, weren't they? If my memory doesn't betray me—some of those nests were twelve feet tall.