, suddenly. A look of intense surprise came upon his face.
He'd thought of what a self-doubtful, discontented man would try to do,
here on Xosa II at this juncture.

The surprise was because he had also thought of how it could be done.

* * * * *

The _Warlock_ came to life. Her skipper gloomily answered the emergency
call from Xosa II. He listened. He clicked off the communicator and
hastened to an exterior port, deeply darkened against those times when
the blue-white sun of Xosa shone upon this side of the hull. He moved
the manual control to make it more transparent. He stared down at the
monstrous, tawny, mottled surface of the planet five thousand miles
away. He searched for the spot he bitterly knew was the colony's site.

He saw what he'd been told he'd see. It was an infinitely fine,
threadlike projection from the surface of the planet. It rose at a
slight angle--it leaned toward the planet's west--and it expanded and
widened and formed an extraordinary sort of mushroom-shaped object that
was completely impossible. It could not be. Humans do not create visible
objects twenty miles high, which at their tops expand like toadstools on
excessively slender stalks, and which drift westward and fray and grow
thin, and are constantly renewed.

But it was true. The skipper of the _Warlock_ gazed until he was
completely sure. It was no atomic bomb, because it continued to exist.
It faded, but was constantly replenished. There was no such thing!

He went through the ship, bellowing, and faced mutinous snarlings. But
when the _Warlock_ was around on that side of the planet again, the
members of the crew saw the strange appearance, too. They examined it
with telescopes. They grew hysterically happy. They went frantically to
work to clear away the signs of a month and a half of mutiny and
despair.

It took them three days to get the ship to tidiness again, and during
all that time the peculiar tawny jet remained. On the sixth day the jet
was fainter. On the seventh it was larger than before. It continued
larger. And telescopes at highest magnification verified what the
emergency communication had said.

Then the crew began to experience frantic impatience. It was worse,
waiting those last three or four days, than even all the hopeless time
before. But there was no reason to hate anybody, now. The skipper was
very much relieved.

* * * * *

There was eig