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against the crimson sheen on the lake. A flight of creatures with
     leathery wings croaked hoarsely as they passed above us. The air was dank and tropical. Now that my broken arm was stadered,
     I could use it, but those nerves throbbed.
    “I’m not sure I want to,” I muttered.
    Valland spoke a brisk obscenity. “What’s a few years? Shouldn’t taken us any longer to find some way off this hell-ball.”
    I goggled at him. “Do you seriously believe we can?”
    He lifted his tawny head with so much arrogance that he wasn’t even aware of it, and answered: “Sure. Got to. Mary O’Meara’s
     waitin’for me.”

VI
    T HE SUN crept down almost too slowly to notice. We had days of daylight. But because the night would be similarly long and very dark,
     we exhausted ourselves getting camp established.
    Our site was a small headland, jutting a few meters above the shore and thus fairly dry. Inland the country ran toward a range
     of low hills. They were covered with trees whose broad leaves were an autumnal riot of bronzes and yellows, as far as we could
     identify color in this sullen illlumination. The same hues prevailed in those tussocky growths which seemed to correspond
     to grass, on the open stretch between woods and water, and in the reedy plants along the mud beach. But this was not due to
     any fall season; the planet had little axial tilt. Photosynthesis under a red dwarf star can’t use chlorophyll.
    We saw a good deal of wild life; and though the thin air deadened sound, we heard much more, off in the swamps to the north.
     But having only the chemical apparatus left to make a few primitive tests—which did show certain amino acids, vitamins and
     so forth missing, as you’d expect—we never ventured to eat local stuff. Instead we lived off packaged supplies until our food
     plant was producing.
    To get that far was our most heartbreaking job. In theory it’s quite simple. You fit together your wide, flat tanks, with
     their pumps and irradiator coils; you sterilize them, fill them with distilled water, add the necessary organics and minerals;
     you put in your cultures, filter the air intake, seal off thewhole thing against environmental contamination, and sit back. Both phyto- and zooplankton multiply explosively till equilibrium
     is reached. They are gene-tailored to contain, between them, every essential of human nutrition. As needed, you pump out several
     kilos at a time, return the water, cook, flavor, and eat. (Or you can dispense with flavors if you must; the natural taste
     is rather like shrimp.) You pass your own wastes back through a processor into the tank so that more plankton can grow. The
     cycle isn’t one hundred percent efficient, of course, but comes surprisingly close. A good construction only needs a few kilos
     of supplementary material per year, and we had salvaged enough for a century, blessing the Guild law that every spaceship
     must be equipped fail-safe.
    Simple. Sure. When there are machines to do the heavy work, and machines to control quality, and it isn’t raining half the
     time, and you’re acclimated to air and temperature, and your nerves aren’t stretched wire-thin with looking for the menaces
     that instinct says must lurk all around, and you don’t keep wondering what’s the use of the whole dismal struggle.
We
had to assemble a small nuclear generator to supply current, and level a site for the tanks with hand shovels, and put up
     our shelter and a stockade, and learn about the planet faster than it could find new ways to kill us, simultaneously.
    About hazards: No carnivores attacked. A few times we glimpsed web-arctoid giants. They kept their distance; doubtless we
     smelled inedible to them and doubtless we were. But a horned thing, thrice the mass of a human, charged from the brush at
     Rorn and Galmer as they went surveying. They gave it the full blast of two heavy torchguns, and it didn’t die and didn’t die,
     it kept on coming till it