"Tracks," he said. "We came across them leading out of the deserted city."
"Many?"
"I don't think so. Five or six, perhaps. And we found where they had killed one of the small animals and eaten it."
"Did they seem—intelligent? Really, I mean?"
The lieutenant shrugged. "Who knows? They're bipeds, at any rate. We followed the tracks, but they had taken to a small stream bed, and we lost them."
The commander pondered. Then he made his decision.
"In a country as large as this," he said, "five or six can't make any difference to us, not even to a small party like our own. And certainly not when the ships begin arriving from home."
The lieutenant leaned back on his pack, his face content. The commander sat at a field desk and started writing, carefully, knowing that what he wrote would someday be in every textbook. The message was not difficult, really. Thousands of space captains had phrased the message in their minds down through, the years of The Search. So had he, time and again, as he lay in his bunk or watched the wheeling stars from the bridge. In the glow of the thermal unit his stern face glowed with pride and the certainty that it was his ship that had saved a world....
In another hut the scholar stared thoughtfully at the thing he had found in the old house where they had discovered the tracks. There had been a language on this dead world, and in his hand he held some of the brown mouldering pages upon which the language had been written. He applied his scholar's mind to the puzzle....