like a blow. Three
had never once failed to answer. All they had to do when they heard
the signal buzz was go into the radio shack and say hello. That was
all they had to do. He called again and again, but nobody answered.
There was no static and no interference and he didn't hear a thing. He
checked frenziedly through his own apparatus and tried again, but the
air was as dead as deep space. He raced out to tell Dylan.

Dylan accepted it. He had known none of the people on Three and what
he felt now was a much greater urgency to be out of here. He said
hopeful things to Rossel, and then went out to the ship and joined the
men in lightening her. About the ship at least, he knew something and
he was able to tell them what partitions and frames could go and what
would have to stay or the ship would never get off the planet. But
even stripped down, it couldn't take them all. When he knew that, he
realized that he himself would have to stay here, for it was only then
that he thought of Bossio.

Three was dead. Bossio had gone down there some time ago and, if Three
was dead and Bossio had not called, then the fact was that Bossio was
gone too. For a long, long moment Dylan stood rooted in the snow.
More than the fact that he would have to stay here was the unspoken,
unalterable, heart-numbing knowledge that Bossio was dead--the one
thing that Dylan could not accept. Bossio was the only friend he had.
In all this dog-eared, aimless, ape-run Universe Bossio was all his
friendship and his trust.

He left the ship blindly and went back to the settlement. Now the
people were quiet and really frightened, and some of the women were
beginning to cry. He noticed now that they had begun to look at him
with hope as he passed, and in his own grief, humanly, he swore.

Bossio--a big-grinning kid with no parents, no enemies, no
grudges--Bossio was already dead because he had come out here and tried
to help these people. People who had kicked or ignored him all the days
of his life. And, in a short while, Dylan would also stay behind and
die to save the life of somebody he never knew and who, twenty-four
hours earlier, would have been ashamed to be found in his company. Now,
when it was far, far too late, they were coming to the army for help.

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