"Have you any further orders to give, Captain Theusaman?" His tone was frankly insolent. I clenched my fists, but checked the response I might have made. Baiel and I were the only Space Officers with the expedition; any difference between us would be disastrous.
"Turn all hands into the stern cabins," I said, "and break out the landing gear. It'll keep us warm. Detail five men to check on the damage, and have them report to me."
An hour later Baiel and I stood at the control panel reading through the list of damages. Remarkably little had happened—nothing, at least, that we could not repair with material we had at hand. We organized all survivors into repair crews of five each; even the women were given assignments.
Baiel and I made preliminary soil tests for fissionable metals. The computer prognosis from such highly selective data is never infallible, but the probable degree of error is no more than .0006. Over a period of two hours we made five tests, with the same results. There was fissionable matter on the planet—no doubt of that—but it was locked in a chemical combination we could not release without building a giant separation plant such as we used on Earth.
"Our data is too limited if we sample so close to the ship," I told Baiel.
"Possibly." There was a long pause before he added the prescribed, "sir."
I nodded toward the hill sloping away from the glacier toward a forest of tangled pines. "We'll make another test down there." With a shrug, Baiel followed after me obediently.
Three miles from the Olympus, in a thick grove of trees, we found the man. Naked, he lay bound over a heap of boulders, his dead eyes staring up at the sky. A gash had been torn in his chest and his blood had spilled out over chunks of glacial ice arranged in a crude pyramid beside him.
To both of us, the sight of a man and the thing it implied was vaguely terrifying. For almost five centuries expeditions of Earthmen had explored the skies, slowly reaching beyond our own solar system toward the stars. Where the atmosphere was hospitable, we had built thriving colonies. But nowhere had we found a race of people like ourselves. The planets had been so consistently untenanted that we had grown to expect nothing else.