aid quietly. "But they're all
dead. It's quite a mess," he added simply.

"A mess?" Gallifa echoed. "Could you tell how they died? Was it a
disease? Were they killed by some animals? Speak up, man!"

"You aren't going to believe this," Hawkins said grimly. "But it sure
looks like they killed each other."

"Why would they want to do that?" MacFarland protested. "Are you sure,
Hawkins? How could you tell, anyway?"

"I could tell," Hawkins insisted. "You better come and have a look for
yourselves. I'll take you in the 'copter, then bring you back for the
truck."

Gallifa shrugged, and the men joined Hawkins in the helijet. The mapping
man handled the controls, and the ship soared into the air.

"There is something else kind of funny, too," Hawkins volunteered. "The
ship landed almost on top of a colony of the screwiest bunch of things
you ever saw. They look something like little gnomes, only with a
pinkish fur. They are all around the ship, but they haven't bothered
anything."

"More gnomes," Gallifa told MacFarland. "I wonder if they're
ecologically basic?" He addressed Hawkins. "Gnomes are exactly what I
called them, but I'm quite sure there were never such gnomes on Earth.
What do you mean by colony? Like a village?"

"No," Hawkins said slowly. "Not that. Maybe I don't mean colony. They
just sort of hang around and eat together. They don't have any
dwellings, or anything like that. At least, none that I could see," he
amended.

Gallifa wasn't sure why he sighed with relief. At least his hypothesis
wasn't spoiled. They were clannish. But hell, rabbits were clannish.
Herd development wasn't anything more than instinct.

IV

The helijet suddenly swooped around and settled for a landing. It was
easy to see how the grounded ship had avoided detection. It was
camouflaged almost perfectly--although whether purposely or not wasn't
readily discernible.

The space craft wasn't large. Gallifa estimated an eight-man crew, and
Hawkins proved him correct. He had found all of them at once. They had
been dead a long while; decomposition had been thorough. But Hawkins was
right. It did look as if they had killed themselves.

They were scattered haphazardly around an irregular perimeter of the
ship, and no two of the bodies were close together. The positions of the
skeletons showed that they hadn't been molested by any wild animals--nor
had they been killed by any.

But the strange thing--and this to Gallifa w