e
ground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobody
but a Med Ship man was at all likely to discover or use.

"She's an idiot!" he told Murgatroyd sourly. "Come along! We've got to
be idiots too!"

He set out in pursuit.

There was blue sky overhead, as was inevitable on any
oxygen-atmosphere planet of a Sol-type yellow sun. There were
mountains, as is universal in planets whose surface rises and falls
and folds and bends from the effects of weather or vulcanism. There
were plants, as has come about wherever microorganisms have broken
down rock to a state where it can nourish vegetation. And naturally
there were animals.

There were even trees of severely practical design, and underbrush and
ground-cover equivalent to grass. There was, in short, a perfectly
predictable ecological system on Orede. The organic molecules involved
in life here would be made up of the same elements in the same
combinations as elsewhere where the same conditions of temperature and
moisture and sunshine obtained.

It was a distinctly Earthlike world, as it could not help but be, and
it was reasonable for cattle to thrive and increase here. Only men's
minds kept it from being a place where humans would thrive, too.

But only Calhoun would have considered the splintered settlement a
proof of that last.

The girl had a long start. Twice Calhoun came to places where she
could have chosen either of two ways onward. Each time he had to
determine which she'd followed. That cost time. Then the mountains
abruptly ended and a vast undulating plain stretched away to the
horizon. There were at least two large masses and many smaller clumps
of what could only be animals gathered together. Cattle.

But here the girl was plainly in view. Calhoun increased his stride.
He began to gain on her. She did not look behind.

Murgatroyd said "_Chee!_" in a complaining tone.

"I should have left you behind," agreed Calhoun dourly, "but there was
and is a chance I won't get back. You'll have to keep on hiking."

He plodded on. His memory of the terrain around the mining settlement
told him that there was no definite destination in the girl's mind.
But she was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost.
She'd guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on the
planet, they'd keep the landing-grid under observation.

If they saw her leave that area and could see that she was alone, they
should intercept her to find o