Back of the anger were
unshed tears.

[Illustration]

"Did you hear what I said?" she repeated.

McLean shifted his long body so that it lay a little lower in the
depression in the sand. "I guess you came here because you're an
archeologist and you're getting paid to examine ruins. I came here
because I'm a roustabout who is supposed to be able to do anything,
which is what I'm getting paid for." He paused and removed an offending
grain of sand from his right eyelid. "Dying is not much," he continued.
"Why are you so frazzled about it? It doesn't even hurt, when you really
get to it, that is."

"You talk as if you have died before!"

"Why, I have," he answered, surprise in his voice. "Hundreds of times.
Since we first crawled out on the mud flats and grew feet and left our
gills behind us, that's a long time. We've been dying ever since, that's
for sure. And probably for a much longer time."

"I thought you were talking about reincarnation," the astonished
archeologist said.

"So I was," the roustabout answered. "They're only different approaches
and aspects of the same problem. We reincarnate in order to take another
crack at the puzzle of evolution. Some day we'll solve it! Then we will
fall heir to the farther stars instead of just this little old duck pond
of a solar system."

"You sound very sure of yourself. What proof--"

"It's in the book," McLean answered. "We're _homo sapiens_. And that
means something. The mud flats didn't stop us. We crawled off of them
and on to the high ground and into the forests and overran a planet. The
atom bomb didn't hold us up too long, even when we got to using it on
each other. Where in all that space--" His hand swept upward in an arc
that included all the vast expanse of stars dimly seen here on this
world even at high noon. "--is anything that can stop us, when we can
keep coming back to take another crack at the problem? Any problem, I
don't care what it is, can be solved if we can keep working at it long
enough!" Enthusiasm sounded in his voice, then faded out. He drew his
hand down. Two of the fingers were missing.

McLean stared at the ooze of blood and plasma and set his lips against
the pain. "That damned needle ray can sure knock a hunk out of a man,"
he said.

"Oh, Pike, why did you have to be so careless!" Sliding the pack from
her back, she opened it. Taking great care not to get her head above the
edge of the hole, she opened the first-aid kit and appl