he silence in the village
and added, "Even if Throon should show up I could not ask him what was
wrong. I've learned a few words but they have so many different
definitions that I can't use them."

"I know," Brender said. "Variable and unrelated definitions,
undetectable shades of inflection--and sometimes a language that has no
discernibly separate words. The Singer brothers of Ship Eight ran into
the latter. We've given them up as lost."

"The Singers--dead?" he exclaimed. "Good God--it's been only a month
since the Ramon brothers were killed."

"The circumstances were similar," Brender said. "They always are. There
is no way the Exploration men can tell the natives that they mean them
no harm and the suspicion of the natives grows into dangerous hostility.
The Singers reported the natives on that world to be both suspicious and
possessing powerful weapons. The Singers were proceeding warily, their
own weapons always at hand. But, somehow, the natives caught them
off-guard--their last report was four months ago."

There was a silence, then Brender added, "Their ship was the ninth--and
we had only fifteen."

He did not reply to the implications of Brender's statement. It was
obvious to them all what the end of the Plan would be. What it had to
be.

* * * * *

It had been only three years since the fifteen heavily armed Exploration
ships set out to lead the way for Terran expansion across the galaxy; to
answer a cry from far planets, and to find all the worlds that held
intelligent life. That was the ultimate goal of the Plan: to accumulate
and correlate all the diverse knowledge of all the intelligent
life-forms in the galaxy. Among the achievements resulting from that
tremendous mass of data would be a ship's drive faster even than
hyperspace; the Third Level Drive which would bring all the galaxies of
the universe within reach.

And now nine ships were gone out of fifteen and nineteen men out of
thirty....

"The communication barrier," Brender said. "The damned communication
barrier has been the cause behind the loss of every ship. And there is
nothing we can do about it. We're stymied by it...."

The conversation was terminated shortly afterward and he moved about the
room restlessly, wishing it was time to lift ship again. With Johnny not
there the dark world was like a smothering tomb. He would like to leave
it behind and drive again into the star clouds of the galaxy; d