The thought of television reminded him of the money, and the questions. The air and an occasional swim, and the food, had all combined to give him a feeling of health and relaxation. He felt supremely confident; he knew he could cope with the questions. And the time must be growing short. The plane should be arriving any day. Don suddenly realized that he had stopped shaving some time before, and that he had fallen into the habit of not wearing a shirt. He shaved, and discovered that he had only two clean shirts left. He also discovered that the freezer was nearly empty, but he remembered seeing a number of plants growing near the house; if the freezer should run out before the plane arrived, he could grow something, he thought. But the freezer did not run out of supplies. Instead, the generator stopped. It was out of gas. Draining the last of the melted ice from the box, Don suddenly became aware of a simple fact. There should have been enough gas. The tank had been quite full enough to last more than the two months. He suddenly realized that he had completely lost count of days, and that the plane might be overdue by as much as a week or two. Feeling a slight panic, he began to check back through his daily stacks of writing. He found that he had done an average of eight pages every day, which gave him a means of counting back. But it was only a rough estimate, since there had been off days. Still, the count came out to at least three months. The plane was very definitely overdue. * * * * * In the middle of the third year, he completed a radio receiver, made from wire stripped from the useless generator and using the crystal receiver principle. It had a pinpoint balanced on an old razor blade. There had been a description of the method of making such a receiver in a mechanics magazine, and Don had done it carefully. It took him a long time, because he did not find the job very interesting except when he was tired of reading and writing. Also, he had spent a long time extracting the blank leaves from all of the books so that he would have plenty of writing paper. The receiver seemed to be a workable design. However, all he could hear was a steady crackle and hiss, and, during storms, the sounds made by distant lightning. Things went well, otherwise. His garden grew with a minimum of attention; he had learned the easiest methods of fishing, and he could not have named a single thing that he did not have that he would want. The history grew longer. It was bound, volume by volume, in covers removed from books that were then piled carefully away. Don had found a way to bleach out the pages of printed matter, but there were only a few books that he could bring himself to turn into writing paper in this manner. In his notes, he used the term "palimpsest"; he knew what it meant by now.