"So I was," the roustabout answered. "They're only different approaches and aspects of the same problem. We reincarnate in order to take another crack at the puzzle of evolution. Some day we'll solve it! Then we will fall heir to the farther stars instead of just this little old duck pond of a solar system." "You sound very sure of yourself. What proof--" "It's in the book," McLean answered. "We're _homo sapiens_. And that means something. The mud flats didn't stop us. We crawled off of them and on to the high ground and into the forests and overran a planet. The atom bomb didn't hold us up too long, even when we got to using it on each other. Where in all that space--" His hand swept upward in an arc that included all the vast expanse of stars dimly seen here on this world even at high noon. "--is anything that can stop us, when we can keep coming back to take another crack at the problem? Any problem, I don't care what it is, can be solved if we can keep working at it long enough!" Enthusiasm sounded in his voice, then faded out. He drew his hand down. Two of the fingers were missing. McLean stared at the ooze of blood and plasma and set his lips against the pain. "That damned needle ray can sure knock a hunk out of a man," he said. "Oh, Pike, why did you have to be so careless!" Sliding the pack from her back, she opened it. Taking great care not to get her head above the edge of the hole, she opened the first-aid kit and applied antiseptics and bandages to the stumps of the two fingers. Alternately she scolded and then soothed him. "You do that real well," he said, approvingly. "You should have been a mama, instead of an archeologist, and raised a whole slather of kids, so you could bandage all their cuts and pat away all their bruises." A longing as deep as the seas of Earth showed in her blue eyes. "That--that was what I wanted. But I got side-tracked into a profession." The longing was washed away in a film of sudden tears. * * * * * McLean closed his lips even tighter. He applied one eye to the sight of the Rangeley, now adjusted to function as a periscope. Level and apparently free of all danger, the grim red sands swept away to the low mountains in the distance. The air was so clear and so thin that he could even see the ruins of the city that had been their destination when they had left the ship. The city was a vast mass of tumbled masonry sprawled on treeless, forgotten hills. On the sand nothing moved. Yet death was there in front of him, and his eye had certainly passed over it. "The nice little foxes are all in their nice little holes," he said. The girl made a wan effort to smile. "How are your fingers? I mean, do they hurt much?"