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By Root 338 0

no hardship to go naked—but the nights, under that cloudless sky, were decidedly chilly. Luckily Grimes had foreseen this, and before sunset of the first day had, with Una's help, managed to build a shelter. Slender branches were broken from convenient trees and lesser foliage torn from bushes as material for this crude attempt at architecture. The most primitive human aborigine would have sneered at the ramshackle humpy, but it was better than nothing. It would do as long as it didn't rain. But what were the seasons on this world? There almost certainly would be seasons—very few planets have no axial tilt. Was this high summer, or autumn, or (optimistically) winter? Whatever it was, a chill wind arose at night and the hut was drafty, and Grimes, in spite of the warmth of Una's body against his, would willingly have swapped his bicycle for a good sleeping bag.

There was—Grimes insisted on doing everything by the book—the problem of digging a latrine trench with only not-very-sharp sticks for tools.

There was the lack of fire. They had light, when they required it, from the bicycles' headlamps. These, thought Grimes, must be battery powered, and reasoned that the cells must be charged from dynamos built into the thick hubs of the rear wheels. He hoped that he might be able to start a fire with an electrical spark. Then he discovered that it was quite impossible to take the lamps apart. Their casings were in one piece, and the glass of the lenses seemed to be fused to the surrounding metal rims. The wiring, presumably, ran from dynamo to lamp inside the tubular framework. In the entire structure of the machines there was a total absence of screws, nuts and bolts, even of rivets. They had been made, somehow, all in one piece.

Grimes knew, in theory, how to make fire by friction, using two suitable pieces of wood. To shape such pieces he needed tools—and there were no tools. There were no stones—on the surface of the soil, at least—from which hand axes or the like might be fashioned. So, not very hopefully, he started to dig, using a stick to break through the turf, and then his hands. The earth was sandy, not unlike that of the desert outside the garden. Una, watching him, made unkind remarks about a dog burying a bone. "If I had a bone," Grimes growled, "I wouldn't be burying it! It would be a weapon, a tool . . ."

She said, "But there must be bones around here somewhere. Those things . . ." she gestured toward a flock of the sheeplike animals drifting slowly over the cropped grass, " . . . must die sometime, somewhere."

"Mphm?" Grimes stood up slowly in the hole that he had been digging. He was sweating profusely and his naked body was streaked and patched with dirt. "But perhaps they were put here at the same time as we were. There hasn't been any mortality yet."

"Yet. But you could kill one."

"With my bare hands? And I'd have to catch it first. Those brutes can run when they want to. And what about skinning it? With my teeth?"

She laughed. "Oh, John, John, you're far too civilized—even though with your beard and long hair you're starting to look like a caveman! You want a gun, so you can kill from a distance."

"A gun's not the only long-range weapon," he muttered. "A bow and arrow? Mphm? Should be able to find some suitable wood . . . . But what about the bowstring? Vegetable fibers? Your hair?"

"Leave my hair alone!" she snapped.

"But we'll think about it," he said. "And when we get really hungry for meat we'll do something about it."

He climbed out of the hole, ran to the lake, splashed in. He scrubbed his body clean with wet sand from the narrow beach. He plunged into the cool water to rinse off. She joined him. Later, when they sprawled on the grass in the hot sunlight, the inevitable happened.

It was always happening.

It was always good—but how long would it, could it last?

* * *

A few mornings later, when they were awakened by the rising sun, Grimes noticed a smear of blood on the inside of Una's thigh. "Have you hurt yourself?" he asked solicitously.

"Don't be so bloody stupid!" she snarled.

"Let