join in friendly
greeting, for hostile suspicion was unknown among minds that lay open
one to the other. Among the handful of known life forms of sufficient
intelligence to possess highly organized communications, no exception to
this natural rule existed. A meeting of minds was a meeting of friends.

* * * * *

Memory flinched, wavered, then flowed on into previously forbidden
areas. The long outward voyage approached its turning point, its
disaster point. He did not know how or why it had happened. Perhaps
in their mutual absorption he and Andra became careless. They had
entered a planetary system, he recalled, and he had casually manipulated
the controls. His perceptive faculties detected a tiny spurt of flame
somewhere out of sight in the control bank, then the potent engines
reacted out of control for a critical instant near planetary mass. The
swift restoration of control only eased the crash, the automatics taking
over a fraction too late after the fragile living tissue was smashed
against the walls.

The return of consciousness told him at once that he was in the presence
of death. Lying paralyzed and helpless in a pool of his own fluids, he
could see the jelly that had been Andra. He quietly resigned himself to
the death that might yet take days to come. It would be welcome.

An interregnum of shock followed in which his normal faculties were
unseated, but with the passage of time he roused himself a little.
Weakened as he was, his perception told him that the ship had buried
itself deep in a swamp until it rested on bedrock. A dozen feet of muck
and water lay over it. Even had they survived the crash they would have
been helpless unless intelligent aid could be enlisted. He tried to
drive out his thoughts in a cry for help, but the strength was gone from
him. Within a radius of two miles there was no intelligent life, if any
existed on the planet.

More from habit than for any other reason, he awakened the Challonari.
It had survived the crash unharmed in its carefully cushioned
immobility, unaware that anything had transpired between the last
planetfall and this one. It immediately perceived that one of the
Mentors had gone, but before it could ask questions it was sternly
directed to concentrate its attention on the environs of the vessel.
Having thus distracted it from the presence of death, he sank back
gratefully into a stasis of no-thought. Let time pass. It would brin