want to keep active and alert.

And where was that thrice-blasted scout?

He decided to have him flogged when he returned. Good discipline policy.

The Scout woke from his drunken sleep and glanced at the clock on the dash of his little craft. It was very late, he saw. He would have to think of a fine excuse when he returned or they would put him in Truth and learn that all Scouts took the precious freedom of voyages to become intoxicated for a while.

Not much time! He would have to take what he could find in the vicinity. Small difference it made, though, since the beings of the planet were surely doomed.

The Scout yawned, then lifted the ship from the mountain and arrowed it down into the folds of the valley. His visor translated the immediate night into light, showing him the typically repugnant surface features of a type J planet: Foliage, sharp young geology, water flowing in natural beds. A world like a hundred others he'd visited in the name of Law.

When the floor of the valley came up he leveled off, then silently sped along in search of dwellings. Beneath him, on level stretches of land, stood odd four-legged creatures. The dominants of this world? he wondered. Probably not. The extremities of their limbs appeared to be too blunt and crude to do even the simple tooling he'd noticed during his flight in. Beasts of transport, no doubt. Boldly, he swooped low over a group, scattering them in panic.

The meadow ended with almost sheer mountain wall, and the Scout whipped his craft up its face and down the opposite side. Something flickered in his vision screen and he swung the controls. A dwelling! In a moment he was back over it, hanging motionless. Sure enough, a revolting crude shack that nestled high in the branches of one of this world's surface growths.

This was it. There was no time nor need to search further.

He locked the controls, then turned on the deadly screen that would kill all life directly beneath, save one properly shielded such as himself, and would stun all life attempting to enter the edges of the field.

Pulling on his helmet, the Scout reached to the stud at his belt and reduced his weight to but a fraction of itself. Then he opened the hatch and clambered out into the air.

His first few minutes of 

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