They passed many curious artifacts that had survived the centuries intact, or nearly so, but they investigated very few of them, lest they stir some antagonistic force they were not equipped to deal with.
On the third day after they left the meadow they came across a column of yellow metal that gleamed as if it were new, despite its antiquity. It was ten meters in diameter and soared sixty meters into the air, unhampered by the crush of trees and vines that proliferated elsewhere. Indeed, where the vines and undergrowth had edged too close, they were blackened, as if a flame had been touched to them. Around the pillar, etched in perfect block letters, was this wisdom: JESUS SAVES, TRUST IN HIM… JESUS SAVES, TRUST IN HIM… The legend wound around and around the magnificent column, repeated perhaps a thousand times.
“Who was Jesus?” Jask asked.
Tedesco looked up at the shiny tube with its cryptic message and said, “He was a god.”
“When?”
“Before the Last War.”
“What happened to him?”
Tedesco smiled. “Died, I guess. Killed as all gods are.”
“Gods can't be killed,” Jask said.
Tedesco smiled even more openly and said, “I'd agree to that.”
“Of course.”
“Because,” Tedesco added, “they were not alive in the first place, just figments of the imagination.”
Jask refused to let himself be dragged into that, by now, familiar argument. He approached the recessed door in the base of the yellow column and said,' 'Can't we have a look inside?”
“I wouldn't recommend it,” the bruin grunted.
“We have our rifles.”
“And we may not get a chance to use them. Death is always swift, otherwise it isn't death but injury.”
“When we began this trip,” Jask said, “I was the coward, afraid of every new experience. Now it seems —”
“I'm not susceptible to that kind of psychological game-playing,” Tedesco said. “If you want to go in there, by all means go. I'll wait out here and have an apple. We can afford a rest break, but for no more than ten minutes.”
“I'll be back by then,” Jask assured him. He touched the ornate handle of the golden door and jumped, startled, as it swung in without any effort on his part.
He stepped into a tiny foyer from which a series of roughened metal steps led downward.
“The church was underground,” Jask said.
“Umph,” Tedesco said, leaning against the door jamb and chewing a mouthful of apple. “Probably built it during one of the wars; didn't want it blown to smithereens during a ceremony.”
“Didn't they trust in their god?” Jask asked.
“As much as most men,'' the bruin said. He spat out a seed as large as a strawberry. “In theory they knew he protected them. In reality it was every man for himself.”
Jask stepped onto the first stair, listened to the sound of his footstep echoing scratchily down the winding well.
Nothing responded to his intrusion.
On both sides yellow metal light standards were bolted to the smooth walls at intervals of ten feet. Half of these no longer functioned, but the other half provided sufficient illumination to show him the way. As he progressed, the lights behind him went out and new lights sprang up ahead, so that there was always a pocket of impenetrable darkness close at his back and another not too terribly far ahead.
Three hundred steps later, six complete turns in the stairwell behind him, Jask walked out into the main chamber of the church. Of the four hundred lights placed there, a hundred and fifty popped on, leaving a few corners shrouded in shadows but providing him a fairly good idea of the nature of the place: rows and rows of pews, a railing around the section where the ceremony took place, an altar and one enormous symbol fully thirty feet high and twenty wide, a cross of silvery material that had spotted with rust during the eons since it had been venerated.
Jask was fascinated by two things: first, the great number of pews, enough for five thousand celebrants, more than the number of men in the entire enclave from which he came; secondly, the fact that the worshipers apparently paid obeisance to the great cross and had no provisions on their altar for the placement of things of Nature, plants and animals, the things man should attribute to the benificence of his gods. The first item was simply a mathematical shock. The second was a moral indignation. Why worship idols when god's creations, plants and animals, were the things meant to be idolized?
He was still standing in the middle of the church, considering this, when something crashed in the back of the chamber.
He whirled, bringing up his power rifle to face whatever was behind him. The rear of the church lay in so much shadow that he could not make out the thing until it moved again. It had entered the main room through a pair of double doors barely wide enough to admit it: a huge crablike creature fully four meters across and three meters high, traveling on six jointed legs, its antennae quivering back and forth, its enormous pincers exceeded in ugliness only by its serrated beak, which it slowly opened and closed without making a sound, an act that would have been less terrifying if accompanied by noise.
Jask backed down the center of the church, clambered over the altar rail and watched the behemoth cautiously.
It did not move.
He went to the back of the altar and looked for another exit from the main room.
He did not find one.
He went back to the rail and stared at the crab.
His eyes had adjusted to the dim light well enough to see its beady eyes, set deep in a mottled green and black carapace.
“Tedesco!” he shouted.
The crab scuttled forward.
“Tedesco!”
The crab made a throaty rattling noise.
Jask decided that quiet was the best course. Besides, Tedesco seemed to be too far away to hear his cry.
Jask walked to the far side of the church, putting as much distance between himself and the beast as he could.
Its eyes followed him, bright and red.
He stepped over the altar rail and stood next to the first pew, gauging the distance from there to the opening of the stairwell at the rear of that main chamber. He had not seen how fast the crab could move, and he really should know that before deciding whether to run for it or not. Once he made the stairwell, the crab would not be able to follow, for it was twice as wide as the entrance to the steps. Still, if it could move fast and could capture him before he even reached the steps, the entire issue of its size would be academic.
The beast did not move.
Jask walked slowly along the aisle toward the back of the church, the barrel of his rifle directed at the creature.
It scuttled easily along the rear of the room, toward him, stopped, watched him, waited.
Jask had stopped, too. Then he began to move again, easily, carefully, hoping not to antagonize it any further.
The crab came a few yards closer, so near the exit that it was unlikely Jask could squeeze past even if he moved too fast for it to react properly.
He went back to the railing, climbed over it and put his back to the altar.
The crab entered the center aisle and stood there, antennae jiggling, waiting, its beak opening and closing like the well-oiled jaws of a pair of pliers.
“Tedesco, help me!” he shouted at the top of his voice.
That brought the crab at top speed, its legs rattling against the metal floor, sharp-edged shell banging the
