"Hello there. I'm in the bleakest wilderness I've ever seen. This place makes the moon look cozy. There's precipice around me every way but one and that's up. So it's up I'll have to go till I find a way to go down. I've been chewing snow to quench my thirst but I could eat a horse. I picked up a short-wave broadcast on my suit but couldn't understand a word. Not English, not French, and there I stick. Listened to it for fifteen minutes just to hear a human voice again. I haven't much hope of reaching anyone with my five milliwatt suit transmitter but I'll keep trying. "Just before I start the climb there are two things I want to get on tape. The first is how I got here. I've remembered something from my military training, when I did some parachute jumps. Terminal velocity for a human body falling through air is about one hundred twenty m.p.h. Falling fifty miles is no worse than falling five hundred feet. You'd be lucky to live through a five hundred foot fall, true, but I've been lucky. The suit is bulky but light and probably slowed my fall. I hit a sixty mile an hour updraft this side of the mountain, skidded downhill through about half a mile of snow and fetched up in a drift. The suit is part worn but still operational. I'm fine. "The second thing I want to say is about the Chingsi, and here it is: watch out for them. Those jokers are dangerous. I'm not telling how because I've got a scientific reputation to watch. You'll have to figure it out for yourselves. Here are the clues: (1) The Chingsi talk and laugh but after all they aren't human. On an alien world a hundred light-years away, why shouldn't alien talents develop? A talent that's so uncertain and rudimentary here that most people don't believe it, might be highly developed out there. (2) The _Whale_ expedition did fine till it found Chang. Then it hit a seam of bad luck. Real stinking bad luck that went on and on till it looks fishy. We lost the ship, we lost the launch, all but one of us lost our lives. We couldn't even win a game of ping-pong.