earned quickly that he was
confined to as much of the valley as he could see from the cabin.
Beyond the ridges lay naked desert and naked mountain ranges, silent
and terrifying in the moonlight.

Barney glanced up and down the valley, undecided but not knowing quite
what he was undecided about. He didn't feel like going back into the
cabin, and to just stand here was boring.

"Well," he said aloud, sardonically, "it's a nice night for a walk,
Brother Chard."

Well, why not? It was bright enough to see by now if he kept away from
the thickest growths of trees, and getting steadily brighter as the
big moon moved up behind the distant desert rim. He'd walk till he got
tired, then rest. By the time he got back to the cabin he'd be ready
to lie down and sleep off the curious mood that had taken hold of him.

Barney started off up the valley, stepping carefully and uncertainly
along the sloping, uneven ground.

* * * * *

During the early weeks he had found a thick loose-leaf binder in the
back of one of the desk drawers. He thought it might have been left
there intentionally. Its heading was NOTES ON THE TERRESTRIAL
ECOLOGICAL BASE OF THE EIGHTEENTH SYSTEM, VOLUME III. After leafing
through them once, it had been a while before Barney could bring
himself to study the notes in more detail. He didn't, at that time,
want to know too much about the situation he was in. He was still
numbed by it.

But eventually he went over the binder carefully. The various reports
were unsigned, but appeared to have been compiled by at least four or
five persons--McAllen among them; his writing style was not difficult
to recognize. Leaving out much that was incomprehensible or nearly so,
Barney could still construe a fairly specific picture of the
association project of which he was now an unscheduled and unwilling
part. Selected plants and animals had been moved from Earth through
the McAllen Tube to a world consisting of sand, rock and water,
without detected traces of indigenous life in any form. At present the
Ecological Base was only in its ninth year, which meant that the
larger trees in the valley had been nearly full-grown when brought
here with the soil that was to nourish them. From any viewpoint, the
planting of an oasis of life on the barren world had been a gigantic
undertaking, but there were numerous indications that the McAllen Tube
was only one of the array of improbable devices the assoc