Then he was able to level out and bore westward, the rising sun at his back, the sea of deadly green beneath him, and somewhere far ahead the faint promise of clean, radiation free land holding the help they needed.

Mile after mile of the green jungle swept under the flitter, and the flash of the counter’s light continued to record a land unfit for mankind.  Even with the equipment used on distant worlds to protect what spacemen had come to recognize was a reasonably tough human frame, no ground force could hope to explore that wilderness in person.  And flying above it, as well insulated as he was, Dane knew that he could be dangerously exposed.  If the contaminated territory extended more than a thousand miles, his danger was no longer problematical—­it was an established fact.

He had only the vague directions from the scrap of map Rip had uncovered.  To the west—­he had no idea how far away—­there stretched a length of coastline, far enough from the radiation blasted area to allow small settlements.  For generations the population of Terra, decimated by the atomic wars, and then drained by first system and then Galactic exploration and colonization, had been decreasing.  But within the past hundred years it was again on the upswing.  Men retiring from space were returning to their native planet to live out their remaining years.  The descendants of far-flung colonists, coming home on visits, found the sparsely populated mother world appealed to some basic instinct so that they remained.  And now the settlements of mankind were on the march, spreading out from the well established sections which had not been blighted by ancient wars.

It was mid-afternoon when Dane noted that the green carpet beneath the flitter was displaying holes—­that small breaks in the vegetation became sizable stretches of rocky waste.  He kept one eye on the counter and what, when he left the spacer, had been an almost steady beam of warning light was now a well defined succession of blinks.  The land below was cooling off—­perhaps he had passed the worst of the journey.  But in that passing how much had he and the flitter become contaminated?  Ali had devised a method of protection for the empty suit the Medic would wear—­had that held?  There were an alarming number of dark ifs in the immediate future.

The mutant growths were now only thin patches of stunted and yellowish green.  Had man penetrated only this far into the Burn, the knowledge of what lay beyond would be totally false.  This effect of dreary waste might well discourage exploration.

Now the blink of the counter was deliberate, with whole seconds of pause between the flashes.  Cooling off—?  It was getting cold fast!  He wished that he had a com-unit.  Because of the interference in the Burn he had left it behind—­but with one he might be able now to locate some settlement.  All that remained was to find the seashore and, with it as a guide, flit south towards the center of modern civilization.