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mountain-trained Zabal to bring up the rear. As they moved away from the ship and through the smallclutter of roughly-made build-ings and shelters, the great red sun began to lift above the line of farawayhills, like an enormous, inflamed, bloodshot eye. Fog lay thick in the bowl of land where the ship lay, butas they began to climb up out of the valley it thinned and shredded, and in spite of himself' MacAran'sspirits began to lift. It was, after all, no small thing to be leading a party of exploration' perhaps the

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    only party of exploration for hundreds of years, on a wholly new planet.
    They walked in silence; there was plenty to see. As they reached the lip of the valley, MacAran
    paused and waited for them to come up with him.
    "I have very little experience with alien planets," he said. "But don't blunder into any strange underbrush, look where you step, and I hope I don't have to warn you not to drink the water or eat anything until Dr. Lovat has given it her personal okay. You two are the specialists." he indicated Zabal and MacLeod, "anything to add to that?"
    "Just general caution," MacLeod said. "For all we know this planet could be alive with poisonous snakes and reptiles but our surface uniforms will protect us against most dangers we can't see. I have a handgun for use is extreme emergencies--if a dinosaur or huge carnivore comes along and rushes us--but is general it would be better to run away than shoot. Remember this is preliminary observation, and don't get carried away in classifying and sampling--the next team that comes here can do that."
    "If there is a next team," Camilla murmured. She had spoken under her breath, but Rafael heard her and gave her a sharp look. All he said was, "Everybody, take a com-pass reading for the peak, and be sure to mark every time we move off that reading because of rough ground. We can see the peak from here; once we get further into the foothills we may not be able to see anything but the neat hilltop, or the trees."
    At first it was easy, pleasant walking, up gentle slopes between tall, deeply rooted coniferous trunks,surprisingly small in diameter for their height, with long blue-green needles on their narrow branches. Except for the dimness of the red sun, they might have beep in a forest preserve on Earth. Now andagain Marco Zabal fell out of line briefly to Inspect some tree or leaf or root pattern, and once a small

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animal scooted away in the woods. Lewis MacLeod watched it regretfully and said to Dr. Lovat, "One
    thing--there are furred mammals here. Probably marsupials, but I'm not sure."
    The woman said, "I thought you were going to take specimens."
    "I will, on the way back. I've no way to keep live

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    specimens on the way, how would I know what to feed them? But if you're worried about food supply, I should say that so far every mammal on any planet without exception, has proved to be edible and wholesome. Some aren't very tasty, but milk-secreting animals are all evi-dently alike in body chemistry."
    Judith Lovat noted that the fat little zoologist was puffing with effort, but she said nothing. She couldun-derstand perfectly well the fascination of being the first to see and classify the wildlife of a completelystrange planet, a job usually left to highly specialized First Land-ing teams' and she supposed MacAranwouldn't have accepted him for the trip unless he was physically capable of it.
    The same thought was on Ewen Ross's mind as he walked beside Heather, neither of them wastingtheir breath in talk. He thought, Rafe isn't setting a very hard pace, but just the same I'm not too sure howthe women will take it. When MacAran called a halt, a little more than an hour after they had set out, heleft the girl and moved over to MacAran's side.
    "Tell me, Rafe, how high is this peak?"
    "No way of telling, as far off as I saw it, but I'd esti-mate eighteen-twenty thousand feet."
    Ewen asked, "Think  the women can handle it?"
    "Camilla