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Updated: June 27, 2025
First, he had not been able to find the strong-jaws's den. Then the marks on the ground at the point from which he had fallen and the L-B were here, just as he remembered. But not far from the small ship he had discovered something more a campsite with a shelter fashioned out of spalls and vines, containing possessions a castaway might have accumulated.
Hume left the tracks, made a detour which brought him to a point from which he could study those clumps of brush. No sign except that line of prints pointed to the woods. And if the party kept on, they might well come upon the L-B! He decided to risk it. But when they were less than a couple of yards from the tree fringe his hand shot up to direct Chambriss to fire towards the quivering bush.
This was where he had regained consciousness yesterday and there was no den! He faced away from the river, breathing fast. No den was there also no L-B? If he had passed this way dazed from a former fall, surely he would have left some trace. There was a crushed, browned plant flattened by weight. He stooped to finger the wilted leaves. Something had come in this direction. He would back-track.
The man nodded. "As you wish, Brodie." "Brodie?" Rynch squatted on his heels. Those gray eyes, so light in the other's deeply tanned face, narrowed the smallest fraction, Rynch noted with an inner surge of triumph. "Were you looking for me?" he added. "Yes." "Why?" "We found an L-B we wondered if there were survivors." Slowly Rynch shook his head. "No you knew I was here. Because you brought me!"
And he could still hear the echoes of the startled cries which had come from the men who had threaded through the woods to the up-pointed tail fins of the L-B. Now he tried to reason why he had run. They were his own kind, they would take him out of the loneliness of a world heretofore empty of his species.
But he was Rynch Brodie, he had come here on an L-B when he was a boy, he had buried the ship's officer under a pile of rocks, managed to survive by himself because he had applied the aids in the boat to learn how. This morning he had been hunting a strong-jaw, tempting it out of its hiding by a hook and line and a bait of fresh killed skipper.
His one-in-a-thousand idea had been absorbed, was now being examined, amplified, broken down into details he could never have hoped to manage for himself, by the most cunning criminal brain in at least five solar systems. "Is there any hope of survivors?" Wass attacked the problem straight on. "No evidence even of there being any passengers when the L-B planeted.
Afterwards the L-B and a man with him in it "Simmons Tait!" An officer, badly hurt. He had died when the L-B landed here. Rynch had a clear memory of himself piling rocks over Tait's twisted body. He had been alone then with only the survival manual and some of the L-B supplies. The important thing was that he must never forget he was Rynch Brodie. He licked grease from his fingers.
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