“For keeping your mouth shut. Whatever’s bugging you....” “You seen Harbridge yet?” “No. He took off during the speeches.” “I know.” Johnny smiled the new one-sided smile again. “He went to read the Log.” Pete Christensen looked at the stranger who had been a friend. “All right,” he said. “What the hell happened?” “It’s in the Log, Chris--all _I_ know about it. Ask Harbridge.” He paused. “Hey,” he said, “You got something up here to drink?” * * * * * Everything on the _Colombo_ was tested and touched (and in some cases tasted too) by teams of two: a scientist and an Intelligence officer. Johnny had done his job all right, and Doug apparently had completed his before he disappeared. The boxes and bottles, tubes and jars, notebooks and tape recorders and camera films were all filled and filed, packed with the answers to centuries of human questioning. Yes, there had once been intelligent life on Mars. No, it was there no more. There were pictures of crumbling ruins, a very few carefully packed fossil remains, atmosphere samples, terrain maps and photographs, wind charts, rock samples, analyses, assays, and boxes of “Mars-Earth,” from seven different “canals,” alive with one-celled life-forms that made planet-life possible in the dry air above ground. The record of Laughlin’s work on the symbiosis between the moisture-retaining “Mars-bugs” and the sparse photo-sensitive lichen of the “canals” were there too, neat and in order, properly filed away and labeled in Doug Laughlin’s hand. And Johnny had finished the job; he’d brought back all the pictures and records and readings, the answers they sent him to get. Nothing was missing, not a thing out of place--nothing but Laughlin himself, one specially designed sand-caterpillar-tractor, two oxygen cylinders, and the four pages torn out of the Log. * * * * * Daily, sometimes hourly, press releases were beamed down to Earth, telling it all to a waiting world--all but the last bit, about the Log. The teams of two went through the ship of space. The semanticists, psychers, and medics went to work on the Hero, and on the Log he brought back. * * * * * The last entry before the torn-out sheets was in Laughlin’s hand, dated April 26, 1975, roughly a month before scheduled takeoff for the return trip to Earth: a routine report on routine existence, noting temperature, wind, and moisture readings; cataloguing the men’s whereabouts and accomplishments during the twenty-four-and-a-half hours that made one Martian day; listing lab findings of the past several days. Nothing remarkable in any way--except that it broke off in mid-sentence at the end of the page. No clues or hints, no intimations, no cryptic allusions to Doug’s impending act--not in that entry or any previous one. Presumably, the missing pages _did_ hold some such references; but they were gone--presumably wherever Laughlin himself had gone.