than sunlight. If so, they won't be up here by the ice-cap! If we weren't spotted by radar as we landed, we may make good repairs, raise food, and get back to space without our presence being known—because they should think they had wiped us out."

Ellen gasped suddenly from the port: "Dee! Natives! They've seen Jerry! They're coming close!"

Borden moved quickly to look over her shoulder. Sattell took a second port. They stared out at the strange world about the Danaë.

Jerry had kicked a hole in the sod and picked up a bit of it to examine closely. And, not sixty yards from him, three creatures were regarding him with intense curiosity.

They were furry bipeds. They stood as erect as penguins, not bending forward in the least. They had enormously long arms which almost reached to the ground beside them. From what should have been their chins, single tentacles drooped—like the trunk of an elephant, except that it was beneath the mouth opening instead of above it. They stared at Jerry with manifest mounting excitement, making gestures to each other with their trunks and arms.

Borden moved to warn Jerry through the outside speaker. But Jerry looked up directly at the creatures. He spoke to them quietly.

At the sound of his voice their manner changed. Borden thought irrelevantly of the way a dog flattens his ears when his master speaks to him. But these creatures flattened all their fur. Jerry spoke again. He waved his hand. He glanced at the Danaë's port and nodded reassuringly.

The three creatures moved hesitantly toward him. Two of them stopped some forty yards distant. One came on. Suddenly it wriggled with an odd effect of embarrassment. The flattening of its fur became more noticeable.

A fourth creature of the same kind came loping over a rise in the ground. It used its long arms to balance itself as an ape might do, but an ape does not run upright. This creature did. It saw Jerry and stopped short, staring.

The creature which had advanced toward Jerry appeared to be more and more embarrassed. Jerry moved to meet it. When he was ten feet away the creature lay down on the ground and rolled over on its back. It waved its trunk wildly, as if supplicating approval.

Jerry bent over and scratched the furry body as if he knew exactly what it wanted. The two others who had been its 

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