the wet sleeve turned wrong side out he noticed his wristwatch showed fifteen hundred hours.

As usual he fetched his toothbrush from the personals kit and started to scrub his teeth.

This was when he saw his first qurono in the act of geoplancting.

It was a deeply disturbing experience.

Barnhart and the lank, slick-bodied alien ignored each other every morning while the marooned captain had his coffee and the native chronoped; each afternoon while Barnhart laid down for a nap and the other xenogutted; and of course before retiring while Barnhart brushed his teeth and the alien did his regular stint of geoplancting.

The captain sat about arranging living quarters on the planet. The crew of the Quincey had provided him with every necessity except communications gear. Still he was confident he would find a way back and see that Simmons and the rest got the punishment clearly called for in Regulation C-79, Clause II.

This driving need to have the regulation obeyed was as close as he could get to anger.

His lot was a rough and primitive one, but he sat down to doing the best with things that he could. Using the nuclear reactor, he synthesized a crude seven-room cottage. He employed an unorthodox three-story architecture. This gave him a kind of observation tower from which he could watch to see if the natives started to get restless. Traditionally, this would be a bad sign.

Humming to himself, he was idly adding some rococo work around the front door when thirteen-hundred-thirty came up and he stopped for his nap. At the edge of the now somewhat larger clearing the alien was xenogutting in the indigo shadows of a drooping bush-tree. Since he hadn't furnished the house yet, Barnhart stretched out on the grass. Suddenly he sat upright and shot a glance at the alien. Could this sort of thing be regarded as restless activity?

He was safe so long as the aliens maintained their regular routine but if they started to deviate from it he was in trouble.

He tossed around on the velvet blades for some minutes.

He got to his feet.

The nap would have to be by-passed. As much as he resented the intrusion on his regular routine he would have to find some other natives. He had to know if all the aliens on 

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