going back toward the stormy wastes. By the trail, it had ten or twelve or twenty legs, like some unthinkable centipede. The tracks of its separate sets of legs were separated by fifteen feet. And each footprint was two yards across.

For three days by the chrono on the space skid, the hard white sun Khor Alpha circled the horizon without once setting. Which was natural, because this was one of the poles of Khor Alpha's only planet, and this was summer. In those three days Stan and Esther saw no living thing. No bird, beast, or insect; no plant, moss, or lichen. They had planted the seeds from their abandon-ship kits—included in such kits because space castaways may have to expect to be isolated not for weeks or months, but perhaps for all their lives.

The weeds would produce artificially developed plants with amazing powers of survival and adaptation and food production. On the fourth day—clock time—the first of the plants appeared above the bank of damp sand in which they had been placed. In seven days more there would be food from them. If one plant of the lot was allowed to drop its own seeds, in time there would be a small jungle of food plants on which they could live.

For the rest, they lived in a fashion lower than any savages of Earth. They had no shelter. There was no building material but sand. They slept in their space suits for warmth. They had no occupation save that of waiting for the plants to bear food, and after that of waiting for Rob Torren to come.

And when he came—the presence of Esther changed everything. When Torren arrived to fight a duel to the death with Stan, the stake was to have been ultimately Esther's hand. But if she were present, if she knew the true story of Torren's charges against Stan and their falsity, he could have no hope of winning her by Stan's death. He would have nothing to gain by a duel. But he would gain by the murder of one or both of them. Safety from the remotest chance of later exposure, at any rate, and revenge for the failure of his hopes. And if he managed to kill Stan by any means, fair or foul, Esther would be left wholly at his mercy.

So Stan brooded, hating Rob Torren with a desperate intensity surpassing even the hatred he'd felt on the Stallifer. A large part of his hatred was due to helplessness. There was no way to fight back. But he tried desperately to think of one.

On the fourth day he said abruptly, "Let's take a trip, Esther."

She looked at him in mute 

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