tly the beasts don't
stampede. Maybe they don't even charge, but just form rings to protect
their females and young, like musk-oxen. I'm afraid he's alive, but I'm
also afraid we'll never find him."

He marshaled his group. Jones had walkie-talkies ready, deftly removed
for the purpose from space-suits nobody had used since leaving Lunar
City--and Holden took one to keep in touch by. They went down in the
sling, two at a time.

Cochrane regarded the two dead animals near the base of the ship. They
were roughly the size of cattle, and they were shaggy like buffalo. They
had branching, pointed, deadly horns. They had hoofs, single hoofs, not
cloven. They were not like any Earth animal. But horns and hoofs will
appear in any system of parallel evolution. It would seem even more
certain that proteins and amino acids and such compounds as hemoglobin
and fat and muscle-tissue should be identical as a matter of chemical
inevitability. These creatures had teeth and they were herbivorous. Bell
photographed them painstakingly.

"Somehow," said Cochrane, "I think they'd be wholesome food. If we can,
we'll empty a freezing-locker and take a carcass for tests."

Holden fingered his rifle unhappily. Alicia said nothing. Babs stayed
close beside her. They went on.

They came to another dead animal a quarter-mile away. The ground was
full of the scent and the hoofmarks of the departed herd. Bell
photographed again. They did not stop. Johnny Simms had been this way,
because of the carcass. He wasn't here now.

They topped the next rise in the ground. They saw two other slaughtered
creatures. It was wholly evident, now, that these animals did not charge
but only stood their ground when alarmed. Johnny Simms had fired blindly
when he blundered into their groupings.

The last carcass they saw was barely two hundred yards from the one
patch of woodland visible from the ship. Cochrane said with some
grimness.

"If his eyes had gotten used to the darkness, he might have seen the
forest and tried to get into it to get away from those animals."

And if Johnny Simms had not stopped short instantly he reached the woods
and presumable safety, he would be utterly lost by now. There could be
nothing less hopeful than the situation of a man lost on a strange
planet, not knowing in what direction he had blundered on his first
starting out. Even nearby, three directions out of four would be wrong.
Farther away, the chance of stumbling on the