The Peniyan Range is a bleak, windswept series of serrated peaks that crosses the northern tip of the largest continent on Cardigan's Green. Geologically young, craggy, and with poor soil, they are uninhabited, for there is too little there to support life in any great numbers; the valleys and low hills to the south are more inviting and comfortable for humanity. Until the press of numbers forces it, there will be no need for the inhabitants of Cardigan's Green to live in the mountainous wasteland. Finding a place of concealment in those jagged mountains ought to be fairly easy, Hale decided. He settled the spherical vessel gently to the ground at the bottom of a narrow gorge which had been cut out by a mountain freshet for a first look-around. Grand larceny, fraud, and murder are first-magnitude crimes, but they are far more common than police statistics would lead one to believe. The galaxy is unbelievably vast, and the universe as a whole unthinkably vaster. The really adept criminal can easily lose himself in the tremendous whirlpool of stars that forms the Milky Way. Hale knew he had eluded the IP ships; therefore, unless he were found by the sheerest accident, he would be perfectly safe from the police for a long time to come. Not that he intended to stay on Cardigan's Green for the rest of his life; far from it. He had five and a half million stellors in negotiable notes in the hold of his ship, and he would eventually want to get back to one of the civilized worlds where he could spend it. But that meant waiting until the scream for Leland Hale's blood had become submerged again in the general, galaxy-wide cry against a thousand million other marauders. Eventually, there would be other crimes, more recent, and therefore more important because they were still fresh in the public mind. Leland Hale would wait. For the first two weeks, he had plenty to do. He had to hide the ship well enough to keep it from being spotted from the air. It wasn't likely that the IP would find him, but if the colonists of this world had aircraft, they might wonder what a globe of metal was doing in their mountains. He finally found a place under an overhanging monolith--a huge, solid slab of granite that would have taken an atomic disruptor to dislodge. Then he began piling rocks and gravel around it, working steadily from dawn until daylight--a goodly stretch of labor, since it was summer in the northern hemisphere and the planet made a complete rotation in a little less than twenty-eight hours. It didn't bother Hale. His powerful body was more than a match for ordinary physical labor, and he liked to have something to do to stave off boredom. That was Hale's big trouble--boredom. Inactivity and monotony made him frantic. So it wasn't surprising that after the first two weeks, when the ship was finally well hidden, he strapped a pack on his back and went exploring.