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‘He’s grumbling already because he won’t get a chance to locate and record pre-Indo-Hittite speech. He’s talking of making a trip by himself to Germany.’
    ‘There’s nothing wrong with dreaming,’ Gribardsun said. ‘But we’re all scientists and thoroughly disciplined. We’ll do our job and then go home.’
    ‘I hope so,’ Drummond said as he stowed away his equipment in the middle cabin. ‘But don’t you feel something in the air? Something …?’
    ‘Wild and free?’ Rachel said. She was looking at Gribardsun with a peculiarly intent expression. ‘The soul of the primitive is floating on the air.’
    ‘Very poetic,’ von Billmann said. ‘Yes, I feel it too. I think it’s because we’ve been living in a cramped and regulated world, and suddenly we’re released with a whole unspoiled world to ourselves, and we feel like exploding. It’s a psychological reaction that our psychologists didn’t foresee.’
    Gribardsun did not comment. He was thinking that if this were true, then those who originally were the wildest and had repressed the most, would react the most violently.
    The Silversteins let down their wall bunks in the middle room and closed the port after saying good night. The other two went to bed. The vessel was not spacious, but it was designed to be lived in for four years if the explorers found it necessary.
    Gribardsun’s ear alarm went off at five A.M., ship’s time. He rolled out and did a few sitting-up exercises, ate breakfast, put on clothes, and left. He carried an express rifle in one gloved hand and a short-range rifle which shot anesthetic missiles in a sheath over one shoulder. He also carried a big hunting knife and an automatic pistol.
    The air was cold and pale. The sun had not risen, but it was bright enough to see everything clearly. His breath steamed. He climbed briskly despite the weight of sack and weapons. His clothing was thin and light but very warm. After a while he had to unzip the front of the one-piece suit to cool off.
    At the top he stopped to look back. He had left a message for them in the recorder-player. He might be back before they awakened.
    He turned and trotted away down the gentle slope. He was exuberant. This was a wild land, not nearly as vegetation-grown as he would have liked it, but the open stretches had an appeal.
    He had gone perhaps a mile, still trotting, when he flushed out grouse from a stand of dwarf pines. A minute later he saw a brownish fox scud from a ravine and across a field to a hiding place behind a boulder. Half a mile farther on, he had to swing northward because of six woolly rhinoceroses, one of which made short savage charges toward him.
    He kept on trotting. The sun rose, but not for long. Clouds appeared and covered the sky quickly. And half an hour later, rain fell heavily.
    His clothing was waterproof. But the water was cold and chilled his face. He passed a herd of vast shapes with humped heads and necks and great curving tusks. They were plucking up moss and the large flat cushions of a plant with white flowers (Dryos octopetda probably), saxifrage, and the dwarf azaleas, willows, and birch. He could hear the rumbling of their stomachs above the downpour. It was an old sound and a soothing one. He felt at home despite the freezing rain.
    A little later he came to stands of dwarf pines again. As the glaciers retreated northward, the pines would appear in growing numbers. South, in lower Iberia, taller pines would be spreading over the land.
    Gribardsun had been following the edge of the top of the valley. When he was above where he estimated the natives were, he looked over the edge. He had stopped almost exactly above them. The overhang, of course, hid their dwelling place, but he recognized the hill and the land below it. There was no sign of life. Either the hunters were staying home because of the rain, which did not seem likely since they had not been overstocked with meat, or they had already left. He resumed