way back to the ship would
be nonexistent.

Alicia saw a human footprint on the trodden muck near the last carcass.
It pointed toward the wood.

They reached the wood, and search looked hopeless. Then by purest chance
they found a place where Johnny had stumbled and fallen headlong. He'd
leaped up and fled crazily. For some fifteen yards they could track him
by the trampled dried small growths he'd knocked down in his flight.
Then there were no more such growths. All signs of his flight were lost.
But they went on.

There were strangenesses everywhere, of which they could realize only a
small part because they had been city-dwellers back on Earth. There was
one place where trees grew like banyans, and it was utterly impossible
to penetrate them. They swerved aside. There was another spot where
giant trees like sequoias made a cathedral-like atmosphere, and it
seemed an impiety to speak. But Holden reported tonelessly in the
walkie-talkie, and assured Jones and Al and Jamison that all so far was
well.

They heard a vast commotion of chattering voices, and they hoped that it
might be a disturbance of Johnny Simms' causing. But when they reached
the place there was dead silence. Only, there were hundreds of tiny
nests everywhere. They could not catch a glimpse of a single one of the
nests' inhabitants, but they felt that they were peeked at from under
leaves and around branches.

Cochrane looked unhappy indeed. In cold blood, he knew that Johnny Simms
had left the ship in exactly the sort of resentful bravado with which a
spoiled little boy will run away from home to punish his parents. Quite
possibly he had intended only to go out into the night and wait near the
ship until he was missed. But he'd found himself among the unknown
beasts. He'd gone into blind panic. Now he was lost indeed.

But one could not refuse to search for him simply because it was
hopeless. Cochrane could not imagine doing any less than continuing to
search as long as Alicia had hope. She might hope on indefinitely.

They heard the faint, distant, incisive sound of a shot.

Holden's voice reported it in the walkie-talkie. Cochrane nodded
brightly to Alicia and fired a shot in turn. He was relieved. It looked
like everything would end in a commonplace fashion. The party from the
ship headed toward the source of the other sound.

In half an hour Cochrane was about to fire again. But they heard the
hysterical rat-tat-tat of firing. It seemed