territory.

"Anyone see where he went?" I asked.

"He was wearing a menticom," one of the crew offered. "Said he wanted to look around."

"The idiot!" I snapped. "He had no business going off like that."

"Nobody told him not to," Dan Warren said. Dan was my executive officer, and a good hand in case of trouble, but he left the command decisions to me, and of course I figured that everybody knew the cardinal rule of first landings. The net result was that Alex had disappeared.

I went back into the ship and broke out another menticom.

"Alex!" I broadcasted. "Return to ship at once!"

"I can't, Skipper," Alex's projection came back to me. "I'm surrounded."

"By what? Where?"

"They look sorta human—bigger than us. I'm near the edge of the forest nearest the ship. I can't do anything. I didn't bring a blaster." There was panic in his thoughts. And then suddenly I saw two hairy bipeds flash across Alex's vision. Both of them were carrying spears. The nearest one jumped and lunged. The scene dissolved in a blaze of red panic and the projection cut off as though someone had turned a switch.

I had a fix now and turned to face a knob of forest jutting out into the plain. Near the forest's edge I saw a flurry of movement that vanished as I watched.

"Break out a 'copter," I ordered.

"Why?" Warren asked, and then I realized that I alone of all the crew had seen what had happened to Alex.

I told them.

The search, of course, was unproductive. I didn't expect that it would be anything else. I was pretty certain that Alex was a casualty. I'd felt people die while wearing menticoms, and the same blank sense of emptiness had blotted out Alex. It was a bad deal all around. I liked that kid.

But Alex's death had provided data. This world was inhabited and the inhabitants weren't friendly. So I had the crew stake out a perimeter which we could energize with the ship's engines, and activated a couple of autoguards for patrol duty. Alex wasn't a pleasant thought, but we weren't equipped to retrieve bodies. So I wrote him in the log as missing and let 

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