e of ravines and hollows in which he
had wandered the day before his arrival at the farm. For the time being,
he felt safe, and finally confident that he was not being pursued, he
stopped to rest. The place where he stopped seemed familiar, and he
looked about. In a moment, he recognized the little stream, the pool
where he had bathed his feet, the clump of seedling pines under which he
had slept. He even found the silver-foil wrapping from the food
concentrate capsule.

But there had been a change, since the night when he had slept here.
Then the young pines had been green and alive; now they were blighted,
and their needles had turned brown. Hradzka stood for a long time,
looking at them. It was the same blight that had touched the plants
around the farmhouse. And here, among the pine needles on the ground,
lay a dead bird.

It took some time for him to admit, to himself, the implications of
vegetation, the chickens, the cow, the farmer and his wife, had all
sickened and died. He had been in this place, and now, when he had
returned, he found that death had followed him here, too.

* * * * *

During the early centuries of the Atomic Era, he knew, there had been
great wars, the stories of which had survived even to the Hundredth
Century. Among the weapons that had been used, there had been artificial
plagues and epidemics, caused by new types of bacteria developed in
laboratories, against which the victims had possessed no protection.
Those germs and viruses had persisted for centuries, and gradually had
lost their power to harm mankind. Suppose, now, that he had brought some
of them back with him, to a century before they had been developed.
Suppose, that was, that he were a human plague-carrier. He thought of
the vermin that had infested the clothing he had taken from the man he
had killed on the other side of the mountain; they had not troubled him
after the first day.

There was a throbbing mechanical sound somewhere in the air; he looked
about, and finally identified its source. A small aircraft had come over
the valley from the other side of the mountain and was circling lazily
overhead. He froze, shrinking back under a pine-tree; as long as he
remained motionless, he would not be seen, and soon the thing would go
away. He was beginning to understand why the search for him was being
pressed so relentlessly; as long as he remained alive, he was a menace
to everybody in this Fir