She nods. “And are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I’m absolutely wonderful. Let’s go up there and find him.”

They hold hands as they scramble up the rise. There is, once again, some benefit conferred by actual physical contact, even through their heavy gloves. Huw sets a slower pace than before: he is getting troublesome messages from his chest now that indicate it would be a smart idea not to try to do any more running for the time being. The slope of the basin is not quite as shallow as it had seemed from the landing site. And the ground is rough, very rough, unexpected little sandy pits everywhere and nasty tangles of flat, wiry vines and a tiresome number of sharp, loose rocks in just the places where you would prefer to place your foot.

But eventually they get to the top. On the far side there is a fairly steep descent to a sprawling valley pockmarked with more of the yellow bushes, which grow in the same elliptical grove. Here, too, each grove is bizarrely set with mathematical precision at identical distances from all of its neighbors. Some tall, ugly, sparse-leaved trees are visible beyond them, and in the hazy region farther out there seems to be a completely flat savannah that runs clear to the horizon.

At first there is no sign of Marcus.

Then Giovanna sucks in her breath sharply and points. Huw follows the line of her arm down the hill. Marcus. Yes.

Marcus is lying about a hundred meters downslope from them, facedown, his arms wrapped around a flat-faced rectangular boulder as though he is hugging it. From the angle that Marcus’s head makes against his shoulders, Huw knows that the news is not going to be good, but all the same he feels obliged to get himself down to him just as fast as his aching legs and overtaxed heart will permit. The anxiety that he feels now is of an entirely different quality from the one with which this planet has been filling his mind for the past couple of hours.

He kneels at Marcus’s side. Marcus is not, Huw sees now, actually hugging the boulder; he is simply sprawled loosely against it with his arms splayed out over it and his cheek pressed to the flat surface of the rock that he must have hit when he tripped and fell. There is a deep cut, virtually an indentation, along one side of his head. A trickle of blood is coming from the corner of Marcus’s mouth, and another from one of his nostrils. His lips are parted and slack. His eyes are open, but not functioning. He is not breathing. His neck, Huw assumes, is broken.

Huw is hard pressed to remember the last time he saw a dead person. Twenty years ago, perhaps; thirty, even. Death is not a common event in Huw’s world, certainly not death at Marcus’s age. There are occasional unfortunate accidents, yes, few and far between, but in general death is not considered a normal option for people less than a century old. The idiotic, meaningless death of this young man on this alien world strikes Huw with massive impact. Above and beyond the special things that Planet A has been doing to his mind since the moment of landing, completely separate from all of that, Huw feels a pure hot shaft of grief and shock and utter despondency run through the core of his soul. He sags for a moment, and has to steady himself against this unexpected weakness. This planet is teaching him things about the limits of his resilience, which he once had thought was boundless.

“What can we do?” Giovanna asks. “Is there something in the medical kit that will—”

Huw laughs. It is such a harsh laugh that she flinches from him, and he feels almost like apologizing, but doesn’t. “What we have to do,” he says, as gently as he can, “is pick him up and carry him back to the ship, I suppose. That’s all. The other option, the practical thing to do, would be to leave him right here, with a cairn to mark the place, but we really can’t do that, you know. Not without permission. The one thing we can’t do is bring him back to life, Giovanna.”

The year-captain cuts in once more, wanting to know what’s going on.

“We have a casualty here,” Huw says somberly. He is furious with himself, though he knows that none of this is his fault. “There’s something about this goddamned place that drives you crazy. Marcus panicked and bolted and ran. Up the hill, down the other side. And tripped and fell headlong against a rock and broke his stupid neck.”

Silence, for a moment, at the other end.

“Are you saying that he’s dead, Huw?” the year-captain finally asks.

“I’m saying that, yes.”

“Do you want to talk to Leon?”

“About what?” Huw asks savagely. “Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? Marcus is really dead and he’s going to stay that way. He can’t be fixed, not by me, not by Leon if I bring him back up there, not by Jesus Christ himself. Believe me.” There’s Jesus Christ again, Huw thinks. The old myths keep surfacing. Something about this planet makes you want to invoke divine aid, it would seem. “Or Zeus, for that matter,” Huw says, still angry, angry at the year-captain, at Marcus, at himself, at the universe.

Once again the year-captain is slow to respond.

“I think what we have here is an uninhabitable planet,” Huw says, as the silence from above stretches intolerably. “That’s not a final conclusion but it looks pretty overwhelming. There’s something very peculiar here, some kind of a psychic field, that starts operating on you the moment you make surface contact with the planet, and it, doesn’t let up. You just go on and on, feeling horrible, every minute you’re here. Some minutes are worse than others, but none of them is ever any good. Do you understand what I’m saying, year-captain?”

“We’ve been following your ground conversations. We have some idea of what it’s been like.”

“You haveno idea, none. You only think you do. What shall I do with Marcus? Bury him here?”

“No. Bring him back with you.”

“You think he isn’t really dead?”

“I think salvaging what we can of him for the ship’s organ bank makes more sense than putting him in a hole in the ground,” the year-captain says, sounding brusque. “You’re going to start back up here right away, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“No?”

“That would be aborting the mission, captain. Do you want me to do that?”

“You said the place is uninhabitable.”

“I saidI think it’s uninhabitable. We’ve only experienced one small patch of it. Suppose this psychic field, if that’s what it is, is a factor only in this one region? The least I can do is check out some other area before we write the mission off as a complete failure.”

“It’s cost us one life already, Huw.”

“Exactly. That’s why I want to make absolutely sure that we can’t use this planet before we give up on it. Marcus will really have died in vain if we let one bad experience spook us away from a planet that might have worked out for us had we only bothered to take a little more time for a good look at the rest of it.”

Still another spell of nonresponse now from on high. Huw wonders what effect Marcus’s death is having on the year-captain and the rest of them up there. He himself is growing almost numb to it, he realizes. Marcus’s twisted form, lying right at his feet, seems to him to be nothing more than a badly constructed doll now.

Once more Huw is compelled to break the silence himself. “Are you ordering me to abort the mission, captain?”

“No. I’m not doing that. What’s your actual plan, Huw?”

“I was originally going to make a trek to the seashore near here, but there’s no sense in that now. What we’re going to do is make a landing on a second continent, a brief reconnaissance. If we get the same kind of negative results there too, we’ll head for home right away. Bringing Marcus with us, as you request. What do you say?”

“Go ahead,” says die year-captain. “Check out a second continent, if that’s what you want to do.”