After they had left he opened the ship and stepped outside, taking readings with instruments to record the character of the planet. He trudged through the eternally drifting sand, looking for some sign of life. No plants, insects, animals anywhere. Only the fine, mobile sand, occasionally an outcropping of rock not yet eroded away. And the heat! Ingomar was forced to turn the controls of his environment suit almost all the way up to keep comfortable. Then, when the sun receded behind the ghostly barren mountains, the cold came creeping in. Ingomar turned his controls in the other direction, while walking back to his ship. He was afraid he would not keep the cold outside. The landscape, with the sun's absence, was dark and fearful. Shadows moved in the wind, shadows of drifting sand that took on the shapes of monsters lurking in the darkness. Ingomar was not one to frighten easily, but the night took on such ominous sighs and moans and movements that his imagination began to magnify them beyond recognition. When he finally saw the ship loom up before him he ran, stumbling toward it. He fumbled in the darkness for the control knob to open the lock and found it at last. He leapt inside, accompanied by a cold blast of wind and sand, and stood there panting, hearing his heart pound in his ears. The night was long and lonely. He was too far from civilization for his radio equipment to bring the comfort of familiar sounds. He tried to read, but found concentration impossible. He thought of the birds, wondering where they were now, how they kept from freezing to death at night. He rewrote his notes, adding remembered facts and impressions. Finally he decided sleep was the most painless way of spending the night, and swallowed a small capsule designed to induce total sleep for at least six hours. * * * * * He awoke the next morning standing on his head. The bed, horizontal the night before, was now vertical. The whole room was vertical. Panic swept over him like a wave of burning fire. He scrambled to the airlock. It opened grotesquely. The ship, which last night had stood so proudly, now lay on its side. And in his drugged sleep he had not known when it fell. For Ingomar, the bottom dropped out of everything, and his heart dropped with it. There was no resetting of a ship once it had fallen. This took special equipment. Ingomar Bjorgson was a doomed man, and he knew it. While he stood outside in the morning sun, staring at the horrible spectacle before him, the two birds alighted, one on each side. "Why didn't you listen to us?" Pisces I said in an accusing tone. "Yes," Pisces II echoed angrily. "You make me sick, thinking you're so smart, coming down here in your big ship and strutting around like you think you're a God, or something. Now, how big do you feel? Do you realize that this is our first opportunity to leave this planet? I've a good notion to peck your stupid eyes out right here and now."