language. It would be safer than trying to make
things clear to them with speech and gestures that they could not
understand anyway.

He wondered how long it would be before Malevski would find the
shattered lifeboat drifting in space, and then trace its course and
decide where he had landed. That would be the end of his divinity.
Meanwhile, until then--

Until then he was a god. Unregenerated. Permanently unregenerated.
Holding his helmet, he threw back his head and laughed loud and long,
and wondered what his mother would have thought.

* * * * *

For awhile he was being left alone. They were afraid of him, of course,
fearful of intruding with their merely mortal affairs upon the
meditations of so divine a being. Later, however, curiosity and perhaps
a desire to show him off to newcomers might draw them back. In the
interval, it would be well to find out what sort of place this was in
which he had landed.

He looked around him. There were trees, with sharp green branches, sharp
green twigs, sharp red leaves. He shuddered as he thought of what would
have happened to him if he had fallen on the point of a branch. The
trees seemed rigid and unbending in the wind that caressed his face.
There were no birds that he could see. Small black objects bounded from
one branch to another as if engaged in complicated games of tag. He
wondered if the games were as serious as the one he had been playing
with Malevski, with himself as It.

* * * * *

There were no ground animals in sight. If any showed up later, they
couldn't be too dangerous, not with the natives living here in such
apparent peace and contentment. There probably wouldn't be anything that
his pocket gun, which he had taken the precaution to remove from the
lifeboat before that shattered, wouldn't be able to handle.

Near him was a strange spring, or little river, or whatever you might
call it. It broke from the ground, ran along the hard rocky surface for
a dozen feet, and then plunged underground again. There were other
springs of a similar nature scattered here and there, and now he
realized that their combined murmuring was the noise he had mistaken, on
first removing his helmet, for the rustle of the wind in the woods.

He would have enough to drink. The natives would bring him food. What
else could any reasonable man want?

It wasn't the kind of life he had dreamed of. No Martian whiskey, n