In his spare time he gathered diamonds, dumping them in a pile outside his shack. And in the idle afternoons or the long evenings, he sat beside his campfire and sorted them out--washing them free of clinging dirt and grading them according to their size and brilliance. The very best of them he put into a sack, designed for easy grabbing if the time should ever come when he might depart the planet. Not that he had any hope this would come about. Even so, he was a man who planned against contingencies. He always tried to have some sort of loop-hole. Had this not been the case, his career would have ended long before, at any one of a dozen times or places. That it apparently had come to an end now could be attributed to a certain lack of foresight in not carrying a full complement of spare parts. Although perhaps this was understandable, since never before in the history of space flight had that particular valve which now spelled out Sherwood's doom ever misbehaved. Perhaps it was well for him that he was not an introspective man. If he had been given to much searching thought, he might have found himself living with his past, and there were places in his past that were far from pretty. He was lucky in many other ways, of course. The planet was not a bad one, a sort of New England planet with a rocky, tumbled terrain, forested by scrubby trees and distinctly terrestrial. He might just as easily have been marooned upon a jungle planet or one of the icy planets or any of another dozen different kinds that were not tolerant of life. So he settled in and made the best of it and didn't even bother to count off the days. For he knew what he was in for. He counted on no miracle. * * * * * The miracle he had not counted on came late one afternoon as he sat, cross-legged, sorting out his latest haul of priceless diamonds. The great black ship came in from the east across the rolling hills. It whistled down across the ridges and settled to the ground a short distance from Sherwood's crippled ship and his patched-together shack. It was no patrol vessel, although in his position, Sherwood would have welcomed even one of these. It was a kind of ship he'd never seen before. It was globular and black and it had no identifying marks on it. He leaped to his feet and ran toward the ship. He waved his arms in welcome and whooped with his delight. He stopped a hundred feet away when he felt the first whiff of the heat that had been picked up by the vessel's hull in its plunge through atmosphere. "Hey, in there!" he yelled. And the Ship spoke to him. "You need not yell," it told him. "I can hear you very well." "Who are you?" asked Sherwood. "I am the Ship," the voice told him. "Quit fooling around," yelled Sherwood, "and tell me who you are." For the sort of answer it had given was foolishness. Of course it was the ship. It was someone in the ship, talking to him through a speaker in the hull.