Calhoun said angrily, “How long ago, Murgatroyd?”

“Chee!” said Murgatroyd indignantly.

It wasn’t an answer, but it showed that Murgatroyd was vexed that he’d been left behind.  He and the girl were close friends, now.  If she’d left Murgatroyd in the ship when he wanted to go with her, then she wasn’t coming back.

Calhoun swore.  He made certain she was not in the ship.  He flipped the outside-speaker switch and said curtly into the microphone, “Coffee!  Murgatroyd and I are having coffee.  Will you come back, please?”

He repeated the call, and repeated it again.  Multiplied as his voice was by the speakers, she should hear him within a mile.  She did not appear.  He went to a small and inconspicuous closet and armed himself.  A Med Ship man was not ever expected to fight, but there were blast-rifles available for extreme emergency.

When he’d slung a power-pack over his shoulder and reached the airlock, there was still no sign of his late stowaway.  He stood in the airlock door for long minutes, staring angrily about.  Almost certainly she wouldn’t be looking in the mountains for men of Dara come here for cattle.  He used a pair of binoculars, first at low-magnification to search as wide an area down-valley as possible, and then at highest power to search the most likely routes.

He found a small, bobbing speck beyond a faraway hill crest.  It was her head.  It went down below the hilltop.

He snapped a command to Murgatroyd, and when the tormal was on the ground outside, he locked the port with that combination that nobody but a Med Ship man was at all likely to discover or use.

“She’s an idiot!” he told Murgatroyd sourly.  “Come along!  We’ve got to be idiots too!”

He set out in pursuit.

There was blue sky overhead, as was inevitable on any oxygen-atmosphere planet of a Sol-type yellow sun.  There were mountains, as is universal in planets whose surface rises and falls and folds and bends from the effects of weather or vulcanism.  There were plants, as has come about wherever microorganisms have broken down rock to a state where it can nourish vegetation.  And naturally there were animals.

There were even trees of severely practical design, and underbrush and ground-cover equivalent to grass.  There was, in short, a perfectly predictable ecological system on Orede.  The organic molecules involved in life here would be made up of the same elements in the same combinations as elsewhere where the same conditions of temperature and moisture and sunshine obtained.

It was a distinctly Earthlike world, as it could not help but be, and it was reasonable for cattle to thrive and increase here.  Only men’s minds kept it from being a place where humans would thrive, too.

But only Calhoun would have considered the splintered settlement a proof of that last.

The girl had a long start.  Twice Calhoun came to places where she could have chosen either of two ways onward.  Each time he had to determine which she’d followed.  That cost time.  Then the mountains abruptly ended and a vast undulating plain stretched away to the horizon.  There were at least two large masses and many smaller clumps of what could only be animals gathered together.  Cattle.