Briggan grinned. "You've only been here five days, sir; you don't know how thoroughly our indoctrination has failed. The Earth people hate us more than ever." "Even so, how could one of the prisoners have brought the robot down?" "By tampering with the beam." "But that means they had a subversive--that means one of us must be--" "An Earthman, yes. We encourage them to apply for citizenship. If we had an Earthman on the post masquerading as an officer, how would we know it--unless he told us? They're no different from our own people, Captain." On the other side of the crater Tynia staggered out of the communications pillbox. Tchassen saw her waving frantically and he knew something was wrong--very wrong. He began to run toward her. Briggan and Drein followed close behind him. Almost immediately the Captain staggered and gasped for breath; he motioned for the Sergeant and the Corporal to go on without him. Briggan waited long enough to say, "So far we've located four survivors, sir--only four. And one of the four is very probably an Earthman. The transit beams don't fail of their own accord. It's not a very nice thing to think about, is it, sir?" * * * * * The two men left him and Tchassen walked slowly, alone across the barren land. The wind whispered against his naked chest; it felt suddenly cold and forbidding. The ragged peaks piled on the western horizon were no longer simply photogenic curiosities of an alien world, but symbols of undefined terror. Why had the supply robot crashed? Why had the prisoners been able to get away without a casualty? Had it been planned by an officer of the station? If so, where was he now--with the prisoners, dead in the commissary, or among the four survivors? The tide of questions hammered at Tchassen's mind, but he came up with no workable answers. His real trouble stemmed from the fact that he knew so little about the Earth people. Their reasoning was beyond rational analysis. They were physically identical to normal human beings, and it was almost impossible not to assume that their thinking would be normally human, too. When Tchassen reached the communications pillbox, the Sergeant, the Corporal, and Tynia were inside. In the gloomy half-light he saw the others silently trying to patch together the broken wires of the transmitter. It was hopeless; Tchassen saw that at once. Only a master technician could have made sense out of that jumbled maze. The other three knew that, too. They stopped when they saw Tchassen and looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell them what to do. With something of a shock, he realized that he now ranked as station commander. "I don't believe the explosion wrecked the transmitter," Tchassen decided uncertainly. "It was torn up like this when I first came in," Tynia told him.