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itself.
    Since the sand-floor was relatively clear, he pushed himself down to it and ventured a little farther into the ship. Fortunately, a few of the internal doors were still closed. Strange animals, lost in the corridors, scuttered at his approach or adopted stiff threatening postures which he might have found ludicrous but that on this planet he had no standard yet by which to judge such matters. He made his way along the spinal tunnel of the ship, not wanting to open any sealed doors in case they were still airtight, toward the forward control sections.
    Here were the most precious items. And here the chaos was terrible.
    Computers, loosed from their mounts in readiness for transfer to the town, then left behind when winter intervened, had fallen across the floor and been shattered. The subradios were—as he had feared—corroded and crusted with crystals of sea-salt. The navigation room was a shambles out of which he could pick nothing but a few odds and ends to drop in his net bag.
    Depressed, he made his way toward the stern, where the engines were located. Something bad had happened here, too; a gap big enough to walk through in the wall of the fuelreserve store was the first sign of a succession of chemical explosions that had wrecked most of the drive gear beyond repair. His light revealed smears of multicolored corrosion, cracked plates, instrument panels pockmarked as though by shrapnel.
    He could sum up his report for tomorrow’s stocktaking assembly here and now. Nothing in the ship worth salvaging except as raw materials.
    Oh, perhaps the odd instrument might be reparable and come in handy for some unpredictable function. But nothing as immediately useful as power-tools or accumulators could have survived.
    Scraping the latest film of green from his helmet, he turned dejectedly back the way he had come.
    His first thought when he approached the cargo lock from inside was that the sea had gone dark. Then he saw that the opening was blocked by something. His light showed a slick dark surface, pulsating and straining, splitting open along horizontal lines to emit hordes of tiny flapping things toward which the hanging strands on the walls reached out eagerly.
    At the sight of this, a tremendous anger filled him. He spoke aloud, hearing the words echo eerie in his helmet “Damn you! It’s still ours! In spite of everything, it’s still
ours
!”
    He raised his hatchet and stormed forward at the creature sowing its multitudinous young. They swarmed like midges around him as he chopped, ripped, tore at the leathery flesh, with his hand as well as the hatchet; plunged through the very middle of it, through writhing blackness and out into discolored water where hopeful lesser carnivores were already gathering to pick at carrion;then, covered with foul ichor and trailing some riband-formed internal organ of the beast, in dismal triumph to the surface and the boat, leaving the shabby symbol of his defiance to die on the bed of the sea.

V

    Zarathustra’s day had run about twenty-two and a half hours Earth-basic time and, as was customary on colonized planets, had been cut into an arbitrary standard twenty hours. Here on the other hand noon-to-noon ran about twenty-eight Earth basic hours. Some attempt had been made to modify one of the clocks from the ship, but there had been more demanding tasks. Now clocks and natural time were totally out of gear, though a record was being kept of the number of days elapsed.
    Was it a matter of mere convenience that people were suddenly thinking in terms of daylight and dark, or the first sign of reversion to actual primitivism? Jerode pondered the question as he looked out over their ramshackle little town from the crude verandah of the headquarters office. Most people were coming for evening chow, walking slowly and wearily back from their work, although Fritch’s team was still busy patching the roof of the single men’s house the other side of the valley. The thud of