He was a completely pitiable object.  His clothing had been almost completely stripped away in the brief time since his last burst of shots.  There were wounds on his bare flesh.  After all, the beak of a bird as tall as a man is not a weapon to be despised.  Johnny Simms would have been pecked to death but for the party from the ship.  He had been spotted and harried by a huntingpack of the ostrich-sized creatures at earliest dawn.  A cooler-headed man would have stood still and killed some of them, then the rest would either have run away or devoured their slaughtered fellows.  But Johnny Simms was not cool-headed.  He had made a career of being a rich man’s spoiled little boy.  Now he’d had a fright great enough and an escape narrow enough to shatter the nerves of a normal man.  To Johnny Simms, the effect was catastrophic.

He could not walk, and the distance was too great to carry him.  Holden reported by walkie-talkie, and Jones proposed to butcher one of the animals Johnny had killed and put it in a freezer emptied for the purpose, and then lift the ship and land by the sea.  It seemed a reasonable proposal.  Johnny was surely not seriously wounded.

But that meant time to wait.  Alicia sat by her husband, soothing him.  Holden moved along the beach, examining the shells that had come ashore.  He picked up one shell more glorious in its coloring than any of the pearl-making creatures of Earth.  This shell grew neither in the flat spiral nor the cone-shaped form of Earth mollusks.  It grew in a doubly-curved spiral, so that the result was an extraordinary, lustrous, complex sphere.  Bell fairly danced with excitement as he photographed it with lavish pains to get all the colors just right.

Cochrane and Babs moved along the beach also.  It was not possible to be apprehensive.  Cochrane talked largely.  Presently he was saying with infinite satisfaction: 

“The chemical compounds here are bound to be the same!  It’s a new world, bigger than the glacier planet.  Those beasts last night—­if they’re good food-stuff—­will make this a place like the old west, and everybody envies the pioneers!  This is a new Earth!  Everything’s so nearly the same—.”

“I never,” observed Babs, “heard of blue sand on Earth.”

He frowned at her.  He stooped and picked up a handful of the beach stuff.  It was not blue.  The tiny, sea-broken pebbles were ordinary quartz and granite rock.  They would have to be.  Yet there was a blueness—­The blue grains were very much smaller than the white and tan and gray ones.  Cochrane looked closely.  Then he blew.  All the sand blew out of his hand except—­at last—­one tiny grain.  It was white.  It glittered greasily.  Cochrane moved four paces and wetted his hand in the sea.  He tried to wet the sand-grain.  It would not wet.

He began to laugh.

“I did a show once,” he told Babs, “about the old diamond-mines.  Ever hear of them?  They used to find diamonds in blue clay which was as hard as rock.  Here, blue clay goes out from the land to under the waves.  This is a tiny diamond, washed out by the sea!  This is the last thing we need!” Then he looked at his watch.  “We’re due on the air in two hours and a half!  Now we’ve got what we want!  Let’s go have Holden tell Jones to hurry!”