reached the bank of the stream,
I'd lost track of individual varieties.

The stream was a bare trickle; the bed was spongy and dotted with tall,
spare plants that resembled horse tails; I negotiated the fifty feet to
the opposite bank without difficulty.

I threaded through a thicket and came out into a brief expanse of
savannah.

There I found the first evidence of the fate of 231's people.

It was a small object, oval, flattened, the color of old ivory.

Although I hadn't been walking along with my head under my arm, it took
me a moment to tumble to what I'd discovered.

Then my hair tried to stand on end. I rid myself of it and used the
minicomm for the first time.

Speaking to a recorder was altogether too impersonal for what I had to
report.

"I've just found a patella; a human knee-cap. I'm about a hundred feet
beyond the far bank of the stream in almost a straight line from the
camp. I'm in grass about two feet tall. I'm casting about now,
looking--Hold it. Yes, it's scraps of a gray uniform. More remains.
Here's a femur; here's a radius-ulna. The bones are clean, scattered.
Evidence of scavengers. No chance for a P-M on this one."

I got out the chart from its case on the suit's belt, x'd the location,
and went on, feeling more lonely all the time.

It wasn't that I was unconversant with the physical evidence of death.
I've marked corpses on planets you've probably never heard of--corpses
resulting from disaster, unavoidable accident, stupid error, and even
murder. What I've learned is that you never get used to coming face to
face with human death, even when its manifestation is the inscrutable
vacancy of bare bones.

You can put this down, too, and think what you want about incongruity: I
was angry; angry with the spacer that had got himself catapulted into
eternity so far from home; angry with myself for having assumed before
leaving the Interstel office in Mega Angeles that this is what I would
find; angry because the assumption had done nothing to prepare me for
the reality. No space padre would have admired what I said inside the
bug suit's hood--nor the refinements that grew more bitter with each new
discovery.

Within three hours, I'd accounted for all twelve of 231's missing crew.

The search had led to and beyond the hillside where the original team
had made its second and permanent camp. In one place, I found enough to
separate four skeletons of men who had fallen within a few feet of