it fled
again.

Holden fired, and missed. Cochrane ran toward the kicking, shrieking
Johnny Simms. But Alicia got there first.

He was a completely pitiable object. His clothing had been almost
completely stripped away in the brief time since his last burst of
shots. There were wounds on his bare flesh. After all, the beak of a
bird as tall as a man is not a weapon to be despised. Johnny Simms would
have been pecked to death but for the party from the ship. He had been
spotted and harried by a huntingpack of the ostrich-sized creatures at
earliest dawn. A cooler-headed man would have stood still and killed
some of them, then the rest would either have run away or devoured their
slaughtered fellows. But Johnny Simms was not cool-headed. He had made a
career of being a rich man's spoiled little boy. Now he'd had a fright
great enough and an escape narrow enough to shatter the nerves of a
normal man. To Johnny Simms, the effect was catastrophic.

He could not walk, and the distance was too great to carry him. Holden
reported by walkie-talkie, and Jones proposed to butcher one of the
animals Johnny had killed and put it in a freezer emptied for the
purpose, and then lift the ship and land by the sea. It seemed a
reasonable proposal. Johnny was surely not seriously wounded.

But that meant time to wait. Alicia sat by her husband, soothing him.
Holden moved along the beach, examining the shells that had come ashore.
He picked up one shell more glorious in its coloring than any of the
pearl-making creatures of Earth. This shell grew neither in the flat
spiral nor the cone-shaped form of Earth mollusks. It grew in a
doubly-curved spiral, so that the result was an extraordinary, lustrous,
complex sphere. Bell fairly danced with excitement as he photographed it
with lavish pains to get all the colors just right.

Cochrane and Babs moved along the beach also. It was not possible to be
apprehensive. Cochrane talked largely. Presently he was saying with
infinite satisfaction:

"The chemical compounds here are bound to be the same! It's a new world,
bigger than the glacier planet. Those beasts last night--if they're good
food-stuff--will make this a place like the old west, and everybody
envies the pioneers! This is a new Earth! Everything's so nearly the
same--."

"I never," observed Babs, "heard of blue sand on Earth."

He frowned at her. He stooped and picked up a handful of the beach
stuff. It was not blue. The tiny, se