nothing to defeat them as they unloaded the mountains of equipment and
supplies.

Now that same equipment lay oozing in the muck of leafy decomposition,
corroded and useless like the men themselves. And in the dry seasons it
had been alternately buried and blasted by the sands and the winds.

He remembered exactly the day and the hour when they had cracked beyond
all recovery. With an iron hand he had held them for three years. Weekly
he demanded an appearance in full dress uniform, and hard discipline in
all their relationships was the rule. Then one day he let the dress
review go. They had come in from a long trek through a jungle that was
renewing itself after a dry season. Too exhausted in body and spirit,
and filled with an increasing sense of futility, he abandoned for the
moment the formalities he had held to.

After that it was easy. They fell apart all around him. He tried to hold
them, settling quarrels that verged on mutiny. Then in the sixth month
of the fourth year he had to kill with his own hands the first of his
crazed and rebellious crew. The scientific work disintegrated and was
abandoned. He remembered he had locked up all their notes and
observations and charts, but where he had hidden the metal chest was one
of the few things he seemed unable to recall.

The more violent of the expedition killed each other off, or wandered
into the jungle or desert and never came back. On the even dozen who
were left there had settled a kind of monastic hermitage. Each man kept
to himself, aware that a hairbreadth trespass against his neighbor would
mean quick challenge to the death. Yet they clung to membership in this
degenerate community as if it represented their last claim to humanness.

This is what they would see though. They would see his personal failure.
It _was_ his, there was no question of that. If he had been strong he
could have held the expedition together. He could have maintained the
base in all the strength and honor of military tradition that had been
entrusted to him. He hadn't been strong enough.

The ships would come. The four of them. They might come tomorrow or even
today. A panic crept through him. The ships could land at any time now,
and their men would come marching out to greet him in his failure and
cowardice and his dishonor. It must not happen. Old fatty Winthrop had
said one thing that made sense: "--there goes the honor of Mankind. Do
not, above all, betray that honor."

F