the
asteroids. We were four years and three months out of Terra, and we'd
reached Vesta right on schedule. Ten minutes after landing, we had known
that the clod was part of the crust of Planet X--or Sorn, to give it its
right name--one of the few such parts that hadn't been blown clean out
of the Solar System.

That made Vesta extra-special. It meant settling down for a while. It
meant a careful, months-long scrutiny of Vesta's every square inch and a
lot of her cubic ones, especially by the life-scientists. Fossils,
artifacts, animate life ... a surface chunk of Sorn might harbor any of
these, or all. Some we'd tackled already had a few.

In a day or so, of course, we'd have the one-man beetles and crewboats
out, and the floodlights orbiting overhead, and Vesta would be as
exposed to us as a molecule on a microscreen. Then work would start in
earnest. But in the meantime--and as usual--Hargraves, Reiss and I were
out prowling, our weighted boots clomping along in darkness. Captain
Feldman had long ago given up trying to keep his science-minded charges
from galloping off alone like this. In spite of being a military man,
Feld's a nice guy; he just shrugs and says, "Scientists!" when we appear
brightly at the airlock, waiting to be let out.

* * * * *

So the three of us went our separate ways, and soon were out of sight of
one another. Ed Reiss, the biologist, was looking hardest for animate
life, naturally.

But I found it.

* * * * *

I had crossed a long, rounded expanse of rock--lava, wonderfully
colored--and was descending into a boulder-cluttered pocket. I was
nearing the "bottom" of the chunk, the part that had been the deepest
beneath Sorn's surface before the blow-up. It was the likeliest place to
look for fossils.

But instead of looking for fossils, my eyes kept rising to those
incredible stars. You get that way particularly after several weeks of
living in steel; and it was lucky that I got that way this time, or I
might have missed the Zen.

My feet tangled with a rock. I started a slow, light-gravity fall, and
looked down to catch my balance. My torch beam flickered across a small,
red-furred teddy-bear shape. The light passed on. I brought it sharply
back to target.

My hair did _not_ stand on end, regardless of what you've heard me
quoted as saying. Why should it have, when I already knew Yurt so
well--considered him, in fact, o