there been oversights on the part of the scanners. One, almost comically, had been on Earth, when the scanners were first being tested. The chunky roborocket—its angles and bulges and tapering pickup-heads unsuitable for flight in any medium but airless space—had swept giddily about the planet, the sensitive pickup-heads recording and filing on microtape the patterns of the life-pulses of all sentient life below. And when the tape had been translated onto the IBM cards, and the cards run through the translation chambers, to get their incomprehensible sine-patterns changed into readable English, it was found that there was an animal missing.

Six months of circling the planet had still left the index blank on that animal's expected check-pattern. The animal was the brown bear, of north central America. And only after agonizing hours of theorizing and worrying did someone come up with the answer to the dilemma:

It had been a long, hard winter. The bears were in extended hibernation. Somehow, the fleeting flicker of their subdued life-pulses had never managed to correspond with the inquisitive sweep of the scanner-beams from the blackness of space overhead. And so, they'd been left off, as though they did not even exist.

A lot of sweat was dabbed from relieved foreheads in the Corps when a secondary roborocket, sent into a short one-week orbit, had picked up the animals' pulses with ease as soon as springtime was upon the land. The odds against their being thus missed were fantastic, astronomically unlikely. But it had happened, despite the odds against it, and the Corps was forcibly reminded that in a universe of planets, there is infinite room for even the unlikely to occur.

The only other oversight had been years later, when a just-settling colony had been half-destroyed by a herd of immense beasts similar to the buffalo of Earth, but viciously carnivorous. There had been no indication, in the six-month scanning period, that such a species even existed on the planet, the third planet of Syrinx Gamma, the sun of a newly discovered system beyond the Coalsack.

The reason was maddeningly simple. The herds were migratory. Their migrations had corresponded in scope around the oceanless planet with the sweep of the scanner-beam in such a way that the roborocket was scanning either where the herd had just been or where it had not yet arrived. Again, the odds were fantastic against the occurrence. Yet, again, it had happened. Other than these two events, though, there had been no further error on the part of scanners for 

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