"Good enough," he said. "After all it was my idea, wasn't it?"
He moved away with the twig still clutched in his hand. By nightfall he had retraced his way to the river and the Terra IV.
He was sitting on the dew-wet turf with his back against the personnel ladder when he heard them coming. A cone of light fanned into the darkness from the open port above him, poking a yellow finger into the mists and shedding a diffuse glow that reached to the river below.
Hanlon lay on the grass beside him, shaved and bathed and dressed in clean shorts and singlet. He had eaten enormously after Geddes woke him from the hypnol, and under the tedium of their waiting he had dozed off, his chest rising and falling in the even rhythm of sleep.
Hovic and Lowe splashed through the water and came up out of the darkness, their hair streaming, eyes shining whitely in pinched faces. They were muddy and dirty—and beaten.
"You didn't do it," Hovic said hoarsely when he saw Hanlon. "Thank Heaven for that. How did you guess?"
"I've sat here all night, thinking about it," Geddes said. "I thought about the two of you up there claiming your rights as winners, and I should have gotten a vicarious excitement out of it. But I didn't, and finally I knew why. They threw you out, didn't they?"
They avoided his eyes. "It was awful," Lowe said miserably. "They were—furious. I wanted to die."
"So Hanlon was right again," Geddes said. "Doesn't that mean something to you, that he was right every time? He knew instinctively from the start that a man's natural belligerence springs directly from his sex, and that the Foundation wouldn't risk its making trouble among us on the trip. So they—eliminated it. That's why I brought Hanlon out of hypnol, because they hadn't gotten that far with him before he washed out. Because he is our last hope of keeping the race alive."