“If his eyes had gotten used to the darkness, he might have seen the forest and tried to get into it to get away from those animals.”

And if Johnny Simms had not stopped short instantly he reached the woods and presumable safety, he would be utterly lost by now.  There could be nothing less hopeful than the situation of a man lost on a strange planet, not knowing in what direction he had blundered on his first starting out.  Even nearby, three directions out of four would be wrong.  Farther away, the chance of stumbling on the way back to the ship would be nonexistent.

Alicia saw a human footprint on the trodden muck near the last carcass.  It pointed toward the wood.

They reached the wood, and search looked hopeless.  Then by purest chance they found a place where Johnny had stumbled and fallen headlong.  He’d leaped up and fled crazily.  For some fifteen yards they could track him by the trampled dried small growths he’d knocked down in his flight.  Then there were no more such growths.  All signs of his flight were lost.  But they went on.

There were strangenesses everywhere, of which they could realize only a small part because they had been city-dwellers back on Earth.  There was one place where trees grew like banyans, and it was utterly impossible to penetrate them.  They swerved aside.  There was another spot where giant trees like sequoias made a cathedral-like atmosphere, and it seemed an impiety to speak.  But Holden reported tonelessly in the walkie-talkie, and assured Jones and Al and Jamison that all so far was well.

They heard a vast commotion of chattering voices, and they hoped that it might be a disturbance of Johnny Simms’ causing.  But when they reached the place there was dead silence.  Only, there were hundreds of tiny nests everywhere.  They could not catch a glimpse of a single one of the nests’ inhabitants, but they felt that they were peeked at from under leaves and around branches.

Cochrane looked unhappy indeed.  In cold blood, he knew that Johnny Simms had left the ship in exactly the sort of resentful bravado with which a spoiled little boy will run away from home to punish his parents.  Quite possibly he had intended only to go out into the night and wait near the ship until he was missed.  But he’d found himself among the unknown beasts.  He’d gone into blind panic.  Now he was lost indeed.

But one could not refuse to search for him simply because it was hopeless.  Cochrane could not imagine doing any less than continuing to search as long as Alicia had hope.  She might hope on indefinitely.

They heard the faint, distant, incisive sound of a shot.

Holden’s voice reported it in the walkie-talkie.  Cochrane nodded brightly to Alicia and fired a shot in turn.  He was relieved.  It looked like everything would end in a commonplace fashion.  The party from the ship headed toward the source of the other sound.