"In a way," he answered. "I was going to give you the detailed report tomorrow." "Give me a brief sketch of it now." "Except for their short brown fur, the natives are humanoid in appearance. But there are basic differences. Their body temperature is cool, like their climate. Their vision range is from just within the visible red on into the infrared. They'll shade their eyes from the light of anything as hot as boiling water but they'll look square into the ship's floodlights and never see them." "And their knowledge of science?" Brender asked. "They have a good understanding of it, but along lines entirely different from what our own were at their stage of development. For example: they power their machines with chemicals but there is no steam, heat, or exhaust." "That's what we want to find--worlds where branches of research unknown to our science are being explored. How about their language?" "No progress with it yet." He told Brender of the silence in the village and added, "Even if Throon should show up I could not ask him what was wrong. I've learned a few words but they have so many different definitions that I can't use them." "I know," Brender said. "Variable and unrelated definitions, undetectable shades of inflection--and sometimes a language that has no discernibly separate words. The Singer brothers of Ship Eight ran into the latter. We've given them up as lost." "The Singers--dead?" he exclaimed. "Good God--it's been only a month since the Ramon brothers were killed." "The circumstances were similar," Brender said. "They always are. There is no way the Exploration men can tell the natives that they mean them no harm and the suspicion of the natives grows into dangerous hostility. The Singers reported the natives on that world to be both suspicious and possessing powerful weapons. The Singers were proceeding warily, their own weapons always at hand. But, somehow, the natives caught them off-guard--their last report was four months ago." There was a silence, then Brender added, "Their ship was the ninth--and we had only fifteen." He did not reply to the implications of Brender's statement. It was obvious to them all what the end of the Plan would be. What it had to be. * * * * * It had been only three years since the fifteen heavily armed Exploration ships set out to lead the way for Terran expansion across the galaxy; to answer a cry from far planets, and to find all the worlds that held intelligent life. That was the ultimate goal of the Plan: to accumulate and correlate all the diverse knowledge of all the intelligent life-forms in the galaxy. Among the achievements resulting from that tremendous mass of data would be a ship's drive faster even than hyperspace; the Third Level Drive which would bring all the galaxies of the universe within reach. And now nine ships were gone out of fifteen and nineteen men out of thirty....