had kept his wits about
him.

"A combination of weather, soil, et cetera," the medic said. "Completely
innocuous."

"About the toxin," I said. "Given time, could you work up an antivenin?"

"Probably. But I'd need plenty. Both time and toxin." He looked at me.
"Oh, I see what you're getting at." He became professionally parochial.

"In other words--" I said.

He snapped his fingers.

"You know how it hit you."

The confusion persisted, so I allowed the medic to use a pressure hypo.

Hours later, I felt better--physically.

On the vid screen, the magnified surface of the insular mass seemed
almost to beckon. _Sireni_, I thought.

Little remained of the weather front. Over the area of the plain and the
rolling hills were meager wisps of clouds. Darkness again was creeping
across the face of E-T.

"That storm didn't amount to much," Moya said.

_Storm_, I thought. _Rain._

"I know what I'd do," Moya continued. "I'd radiate and have done with
it."

The medic dissented on clinical-curiosity grounds.

"I can't reconcile things yet," I said. "But let's assume that it was a
tragedy of errors. Let's say that what hit me, killed them. But what was
it? Where did it come from? And why? No, I'll have to go down again.
It's my burden to find _all_ the answers."

Moya growled: "There's a time for stubbornness."

I caught the rest of the crew staring at me; their expressions were a
motley.

* * * * *

Back at the same old stand, open for business, looking at the pitiful
alteration, feeling lonely, feeling vulnerable, too, despite the bug
suit, Moya's parting blast still burning in my mind.

He'd ferried me down to the hilltop in the long shadows of early
morning. I'd had to order him to return to the star ship. I stood now
beside the communal mound. Moya had said, pointing down the hill, anger
making him illogical: "These are the people you sold out when you
transferred to Interstel. They could have used your kind of brains.
Post-mortems aren't going to help them, now."

It was simple, wasn't it?

Something on E-T was a killer: quick and deadly.

If it got any sort of clean shot at you--

Something visible. Something big enough to make a mark. And not static,
like a thorn. A ground crawler? My pant's legs had been tucked securely
into my boot tops. A flier? It would have to be strong enough to pierce
a GS uniform and make an entrance into flesh. Or to leave a scratch from