just because you didn't find our village.

Anyhow, hadn't we ought to work out some kind of a message? Maybe scrape
some kind of a message on the ground? They decided the smooth sand above
the tide line down on the sea shore was the best place for it.

Nobody had anything else to do, so the whole colony, all forty of them,
walked the couple of miles down to the seashore. They picked out a nice
stretch of white sand, and with a broken piece of driftwood they started
to scratch a message, just a big SOS. The driftwood wriggled out of
their hands like a snake. Nobody could hold it. Several men tried
together, made no difference.

Somebody started scooping out a furrow with his hands. The furrow
closed up and smoothed out right behind him. Somebody tried piling up
sand, first in letters, then in code signals. Made no difference. Sand
smoothed right out again.

Then somebody got a bright idea. All right, he said. Didn't need to use
a stick, or scoop out a furrow, or pile up the sand. They had their bare
feet, didn't they? They could tromp out the letters that way.
Footprints, close together, would be as good as a furrow.

That's when it happened.

Jed tried it himself. And his footprints disappeared. They just weren't
there. Everybody looked behind himself, where he'd been walking. Nobody
was leaving any footprints.

That's when they bolted in panic.

17

Jed looked quickly at Cal when he told him how the colonists had
spooked, bolted in panic. As if he expected disbelief.

"Maybe that seems funny to you," he commented. "After taking so much
we'd spook like crazy animals and hightail for the woods over not making
footprints."

"Pretty fundamental thing," Cal said with a shrug. "Animals are aware of
spoor long before they are aware of tools. It hit deep down into
fundamental being, a thing like that."

Jed looked relieved. Hussein and Van Tassel exchanged glances, as if
confirming their belief that an E would understand their problems. Cal
appreciated the confidence expressed in that glance, but did not feel it
was justified. It was now pretty obvious that this was some alien
co-ordinate system, never before encountered by man. But how to get hold
of it? How to reconcile with it? Coexist with it?

Never before encountered by man? What if the myths of early man be true?
And too authentic the legends of his being a pawn to the will of the
gods? Could there have been some factual basis for the gods? And n