The suicide complex has never been a part of my psyche, but there are times when you have to place yourself in jeopardy; it's occupational, and I've got the gray hair, worry lines, and scars to prove it. I waited for three long hours. The sweat dampness of my uniform evaporated only to be replaced by the stains of new perspiration. I sucked in great gulps of E-T's air and found it consistently comfortable in my lungs. Insects came, investigated, and retreated, mostly because of urging. I was not approached by anything larger than a line of creatures the size of Vici-Terran milatants, and I was able to avoid them by evasive action. As far as I could determine, I wasn't invaded by anything microscopic or sub-microscopic either, because at the end of the three hours, I felt nothing beyond the personal infirmities that I'd brought with me. The definite decline of E-T's sun forced me to give up. The walk back to the plain wasn't entirely fruitless; I found something that I'd overlooked previously: the scattered remains of a small vertebrate. Many of the bones were missing. "What happened to you?" I mused. "Did you come for a meal and got killed by a larger animal? Or were you caught in the same disaster that--?" There was no way to tell. What was it about Epsilon-Terra that could accept one survey team for months of occupancy--occupancy that had involved detailed examination of the region within miles of the plain and the hillside, and cursory examination of thousands of square miles of the rest of the insular mass by air, including touchdowns at key points for short stays--and that five years later could entice, enmesh, and destroy the entire complement of a modern star ship, indiscriminately, within a matter of hours? * * * * * It was late afternoon when I reached the camp. I was tired, dirty, thirsty, hungry, and thoroughly frustrated. I drank from a previously unopened water bowser and wolfed several nutratabs. Then I stumbled over to the shuttler, secured the recorder and interrogation setup, raised the star ship, and brought Moya up to date. "I'm going to move this vehicle to the hillside and spend the night there. I figure I'd better give E-T a full twenty-six hour rotation interval to come up with something before the next step. Tomorrow, I'm going to need a man down here to witness the location and disposition of the corpses. You know the drill. It's your decision whether they should be identified singly, if possible, and secured for removal to Terra, or whether they should be interred here, commonly. My recommendation is to make a film record and plant them, but I'm too tired to argue. One thing more: whoever you send--if he gives me any lip, I'll cut him down like a small tree. There's been enough mistakes made here already." I spent the night in the shuttler. Call it an atavistic response to the unknowns of darkness. It was a restless interval between dusk and dawn.