n indescribable condition and the
worst of it was that one of them was still moving, feebly, long past
help. Regis turned blindly from the door and leaned against the wall,
his shoulders heaving. Not, as I first thought, in disgust, but in
grief. Tears ran over his hands and spilled down, and when I took him by
the arm to lead him away, he reeled and fell against me.

He said in a broken, blurred, choking voice, "Oh, Lord, Jason, those
children, those children--if you ever had any doubts about what you're
doing, any doubts about what you've done, think about that, think that
you've saved a whole world from that, think that you've done something
even the Hasturs couldn't do!"

My own throat tightened with something more than embarrassment. "Better
wait till we know for sure whether the Terrans can carry through with
it, and you'd better get to hell away from this doorway. I'm immune, but
damn it, you're not." But I had to take him and lead him away, like a
child, from that house. He looked up into my face and said with burning
sincerity, "I wonder if you believe I'd give my life, a dozen times
over, to have done that?"

It was a curious, austere reward. But vaguely it comforted me. And then,
as we rode into the village itself, I lost myself, or tried to lose
myself, in reassuring the frightened trailmen who had never seen a city
on the ground, never seen or heard of an airplane. I avoided Kyla. I
didn't want a final word, a farewell. We had had our farewells already.

* * * * *

Forth had done a marvelous job of having quarters ready for the
trailmen, and after they were comfortably installed and reassured, I
went down wearily and dressed in Jay Allison's clothing. I looked out
the window at the distant mountains and a line from the book on
mountaineering, which I had bought as a youngster in an alien world, and
Jay had kept as a stray fragment of personality, ran in violent conflict
through my mind:

_Something hidden--go and find it_ ...

_Something lost beyond the ranges_ ...

* * * * *

I had just begun to live. Surely I deserved better than this, to vanish
when I had just discovered life. Did the man who did not know how to
live, deserve to live at all? Jay Allison--that cold man who had never
looked beyond any ranges--why should I be lost in him?

Something lost beyond the ranges ... nothing would be lost but myself. I
was beginning to loathe