oin' to hurt yourself. We
won't worry about you none. We're all gettin' along all right, so you
needn't worry about us either."

"You want me to come with you, Cal?" Tom asked.

"No," Cal answered, "I think better if I'm alone."

He left them then, went past some colonists who were picking berries and
eating them, and on up the valley that ran between two ridges.

It was only a few miles to the foothills, a gradual rise of the valley
floor, a gradual shallowing and narrowing of the stream, a gradual
drawing in of the spokelike ridges until the valley at last became a
ravine. The morning air was clear and still, the scent of flowers and
ripening fruit was sweet.

Before he left the ravine to begin his climb he ate some of the fruit,
and washed the lingering sweet taste from his mouth with a long, cool
drink of water from one of the many springs that fed the stream.

He looked up at the mountain above him, and his eye picked out the most
likely approach to its summit. It was not a high mountain, not in terms
of those tremendous, tortured skin folds of other planets. Hardly more
than a high hill in terms of those. Nor, as far as he could see, would
the climb be difficult or hazardous.

The fanciful thought of Mount Olympus on Earth came into his mind,
although this one was not so inaccessible, so parched and barren. The
gods of Greece would have found this a pleasanter place, although they
might not have lived so long in the minds of man, since the mountain was
more easily climbed, and therefore man would have been the more easily
convinced after repeated explorations that no gods lived there after
all.

Would the Greeks, as with the later religions, have placed the site of
heaven farther and farther away, retreating reluctantly, as man explored
the earlier site and found no heaven there? Retreat after retreat until
at last the whole idea was patently ridiculous?

Dead are the gods, forever dead, and yet--to what may man now turn in
rapture? In ecstasy? In communion? What, in all physical science, filled
the deep human need of these expressions?

The climb of the first slope, up to the crest of the ridge he intended
to follow, was quickly done. He turned there and looked behind him, at
the valley of the colonists below, and far down where the valley merged
into the sea, and far on out at the hazy purple line of another island.
As he started to turn back again, to resume his climb, his eye caught a
flash of some