“Oh, hell; you couldn’t keep him on a leash all the time. You thought he’d be all right with Diamond, and Diamond thought he was going to take a nap too, and…” He paused briefly. “I’m coming up right away; I’ll bring some people along. That river’s a hell of a thing for anybody to get into, but he might have gotten out again.” He looked at the clock. “Be seeing you in about an hour.”

Then he screened Gerd van Riebeek, who was getting ready for bed, and told him. Gerd cursed, then repeated what he had been told over his shoulder to Ruth, who was somewhere out of screen-range.

“Okay, I’ll be along. I’ll call Protection Force and have Bjornsen and the rest of the gang who were up there with me called out; they know the place. Be seeing you.”

Then Gerd blanked out. Jack kicked his feet out of his moccasins and pulled on his boots, buckled on his pistol and got his hat and a jacket. There was a kitbag ready, packed for emergencies. Weather forecast hadn’t been good; southwest winds, with a warm front running into a cold front at sea to the west.

He got a raincape too. He only had to wait a few minutes before Gerd was at the door. Ruth was with him.

“I’ll Fuzzy-sit, and put them to bed,” she said. “Or maybe they’d like to come down to our place for tonight.” He nodded absently, and she continued: “Jack, maybe he’s all right. Fuzzies can swim when they have to, you know.”

Not in anything like Yellowsand Canyon. He wouldn’t bet on a human Interstellar Olympic swimming champion in a place like that. He said something, he didn’t know what, and he and Gerd hurried to the hangar and got his car out.

After they were airborne, he wished he hadn’t let Gerd take the controls; flying the car would have given him something to concentrate on. As it was, all he could do was sit while the car tore north through the night.

In about ten minutes they began running into cloud — that rain the forecast had warned of. They got below the clouds. Maybe they were flying through rain now; an aircar at Mach 3 could go through an equatorial cloudburst on Mimir without noticing it. He could see lightning to the northwest, and then to the west. Then there was a blaze of electric light on the underside of the clouds ahead.

It was drizzling thinly when they set down at the mining camp at Yellowsand. Grego was waiting for him, so was Harry Steefer, the Company Police chief who had transferred his headquarters to Yellowsand when the mining had begun. They shook hands with him, Grego hesitantly.

“Nothing yet, Jack,” he said. “We’ve been over that canyon inch by inch ever since I called you. Just nothing but that chopper-digger.”

“Victor, you’re not to blame for anything. If blaming anybody means anything. And Diamond’s not to blame, and I don’t even think Little Fuzzy’s too much to blame. He wanted to see what it was like down there, and maybe he thought he’d find a zatku. Aren’t many zatku around Hoksu-Mitto anymore.” Hell, he wasn’t talking to Grego, he was talking to himself. “Hirohito Bjornsen’s on his way, with the gang he had here before you took over.”

“He’s not in the canyon at all; we’re sure of that. We’re looking along both banks below, but I don’t think he got out of it. Not alive.”

“I know what it’s like. Hell, I discovered it. Now I wish I hadn’t.”

“Jack, I’d give every sunstone in this damned mountain if…” Grego began, then stopped, as though it were the most useless thing in the world to say, which it was.

Bjornsen arrived with a combat car and two patrol cars. George Lunt was along, and so was Pancho Ybarra. They spent the night searching, or drinking coffee in the headquarters hut, listening to reports and watching screen-views. The sky lightened to a solid dull gray; finally the floodlights went off. The rain continued, falling harder, a constant drumming on the arched roof of the hut.

“We’ve been halfway to the mouth of Lake-Chain River,” Bjornsen reported. “We didn’t see anything of him on either side of the river. If the visibility wasn’t so bad…”

“Visibility, what visibility?” a Company cop wanted to know. “Anything down there I can see, I can hit with a pistol, the way the fog’s closing in.”

“Damn river’s up about six inches since midnight,” somebody else said. “It’ll keep on rising, too.” He invited them to listen to that obscenely pejorative rain.

Jack started to yawn and bit on his pipe stem. Grego, across the rough deal table, was half-asleep already, his head nodding slowly forward and then jerking up.

“Anybody fit to carry on for a while?” he asked. “I’m going to lie down; wake me up if anybody hears anything.”

There were a couple of Army cots at the end of the hut. He rose and went toward them, unbuckling his belt as he went, sitting down on one to pull off his boots. He was about to stretch himself out when he remembered that he still had his hat on.

AT FIRST, LITTLE Fuzzy was only aware of utter misery. He was cold and wet and hungry, and he hurt all over, not in any one place but with a great ache that was all of him. It was dark, and rain was falling, and all around him he could hear the gurgling rush of water moving, and, finding that he was clinging tightly to something, he clung tighter, and felt the roughness of bark under his hands. His knees were locked around something that must be a tree branch, and he wondered how he had come here.

Then he remembered — hunting for shining-stones where the Big Ones had been digging, going down into the deep-place beside the river; he wished he had listened to Pappy Vic and Diamond and stayed out of there. Falling into the water. He remembered clutching something that had hit him in the water, and he remembered the small tree that the Big Ones had uprooted and thrown down over the edge. It must have gone into the water when he did.

Then everything had gone black, and he had known nothing more, except once, for just a little, he had seen the sky, with black clouds angry-red at the edges, and once again it had been dark and he had seen lightning. It had been raining then.

But the tree was not moving now. He thought he knew what had happened; the river had carried it against the bank and it had stopped. That meant that he could get onto ground again. He clutched tighter with his hands and loosened his knee-grip, putting one foot down and touching soft ground with it. He decided to remain where he was until it became light enough to see before he tried to do anything. Then, gripping tightly with his knees and one hand, he felt to see if he still had his shoulder bag. Yes, it was there. He wanted to open it to see if water had gotten into it, but decided not to until it was light again. He wriggled to make himself more comfortable, and went back to sleep.

It was daylight when he woke. Not whole daylight, and it was still raining and there was a fog, but he could see. The river, yellow and rapid, rushed past on both sides. The tree was caught on a small sandbar, and there was water on both sides of it. A little grass grew on the sandbar, and there were bits of wood that the river had left there at other times, and a whole big tree, old and dead. Climbing off the little tree, he walked about until some of the stiffness left his muscles.

He would have to get off this sandbar soon. The rain was still falling, and when it rained rivers became more, and this river might come up over the sandbar before long.

On one side, the river was wider than he could see in the fog; on the other, the left side as it flowed, it was not much more than a stone-throw to the bank, and the bank looked low enough for him to climb up out of the river. He picked up some bits of wood and threw them in the water to test the current. It was faster than he liked, but he noticed that the wood was carried toward the bank. He threw in many sticks, watching how each one was carried. Then, making sure that the snaps that held his knife and trowel in their sheaths were closed, he waded into the water. As soon as he was carried off his feet, he began swimming against the current.