"I just wanted to make sure I'm right," Willie said. "I don't like to navigate close in." He pushed the papers back on the desk. "I guess I'd better call the big shot and let him take over." He pressed the button that rang the buzzer in the Captain's tiny cabin. "Might as well let Pudge in on it too," Tom said, "or the food will be lousy for days." "Yeah," Willie said, and buzzed the galley. Captain Bart strode into the cabin, his barrel chest bare and hairy above the shorts he had been napping in. He went straight to the porthole and stood with his fists on his hips, appraising the sun. Then he caught sight of the blue-green ball on the scope. "Earth type planet! Nice going, Willie," he shouted, and clapped Willie on the back. Willie flinched slightly, then moved over to the chart desk, a frown making vertical creases in his forehead. Bart turned to Tom without noticing. "Ten thousand credits, Tom. I knew we'd do it. Even in this forty year old tub. Willie, are we going to pass it close?" "Two more minutes," Willie murmured, busy with the charts on the desk. "You'd better check my course, though." "O.K.," Bart said. "Let her go as she's headed." Pudge came in from the galley and took his place beside Tom without comment. "Okay," Bart said, as he sat down in the control board chair, "let's get to work. Willie, I'll run us past just outside the atmosphere. Tom, you do the life search. Pudge, get the pictures." The cabin was silent except for the hum of the instruments. The radar probed the height of the mountains, the depth of the seas, the shape of the continents by recording the patterns of the reflections. The electron telescopes hunted down the movement of life, the artificial straight lines of civilization, the classification of plants; and typed the metals in the ground with the aid of a spectrum. The wave lengths of radio and TV were checked and recorded. One special instrument, sealed in its cabinet and booby-trapped with explosives against tampering, probed for the faint waves of any kind of life, down to single cells in the seas. They made four passes, the last one at a hundred miles from the ground at its closest point. Then, as each man finished his task and relaxed from his instruments, they waited for the automatic tally of the results. The computer glowed and clicked in its dull grey cabinet on the bulkhead, then dropped the tally card in the slot. Bart snatched it out, his grin fading to a blank look as he read it. "Nothing. Not a damn thing, no life at all." He went over to the screen, folded his thick arms across his chest, and stared at it in disgust. Tom picked up the card and studied it. "This is goofey," he said aloud, "the planet's got plant life, plenty of it, but not a trace of animal life, not even plankton in the sea. How'd that happen?" Willie came over and studied the card with Tom. "Could have bacteria we didn't get from this height, but it sure as hell hasn't got anything else."