Cliff led by example, roving through the nearby copse of trees and bushes in search of edibles. There were plenty of berries and some fat leaves, but testing by taste was dangerous even on Earth.

But what choice did he have? He smelled them for sourness, tried a tongue touch, and if all seemed unthreatening, would bite in. Sometimes this worked with berries and the fat-leaved plants and he got a sweet burst of juice. Other candidates stung like mad and he quickly washed them away with water. He did this several times, returning with a hatful of berries or flavorful leaves. He made them memorize the plant features before eating. The others welcomed fresh food and some caught on, following him in his prowling. Irma was best at this.

The guys seemed to think that they were cut out for hunting. Howard and Terry said they had some experience. Cliff half listened to their bragging amid a discussion of guns. He had glimpsed something large in the bushes—a quick flash of brown hide, then a soft flurry that sounded like hooves, fading. If this had been Earth, he would have guessed it was a deer.

Howard and Terry went out together, making a show of it. Surprisingly, within an hour, they brought back something that looked like a large rabbity grazer, furry and with ears that pitched upward from the flat, level skull. Cliff looked at the odd ears that cupped skyward, and realized that they must be for hearing birds—diving predators, probably. He had never seen such an adaptation on Earth. It was testimony to how important flying was here.

Skinned, the critters had interesting skeletal structure and internal organs. Cliff sectioned them out and tried to understand how they worked. Odd fans of bones, lumpy organs with no apparent function. Some made sense, most not. He needed a real lab.…

They cooked the pseudo-rabbits over a small fire, taking care to keep it hot and show no smoke. Under some spreading canopy trees, the little smoke that did rise got trapped and spread, so they hoped nobody could see it at a distance. Cliff thought they needed their spirits lifted a bit, and warm food again did the job. The meat was tasty, dark and gamy, and very welcome. “See anything that looked like a deer?” he asked them.

Terry nodded. “How’d you know? Four-footed, at least, and meaty—but it had teeth.”

Howard added, “And antlers. Looked pretty weird. Kept sniffing the wind, like a predator. Looked like more trouble than it was worth.”

Aybe said, “We should save our lasers for defense, anyway. I thought we should have tracked and cooked that badger thing we shot before.”

“It looked hard to kill,” Cliff said. “And we were in a hurry.”

Aybe shot back, “And now we’re not.”

Cliff took a long breath of musky air. Might as well bring up the tough issues while they were all relaxed, bellies full. “Look, we’re wandering. We need an agenda.”

That brought on plenty of discussion but few ideas. He had expected that—they needed to vent. Anxiety came out as talk, rambling and vexed. Danger and hardship made for bad reasoning, but if he could defuse their frustrations, they could all then work better together. So they talked for a while, mostly hashing over we-shouldas and we-couldas, and finally Cliff said, “The past is prologue. What do we do next?”

“Find the others,” Howard shot back.

“How?” Cliff asked.

“Maybe make a link to SunSeeker.” Howard paused, obviously not having thought very far ahead. “They can maybe link to Beth.”

Cliff did not want to step all over anyone’s ideas; give and take was how you worked forward. He said carefully, “We don’t have anything that can reach SunSeeker.”

“How about our lasers?” Irma said. “If we could send a simple Morse message…” Her voice trailed off, seeing the difficulty of even locating the ship in a sky that never darkened.

Aybe saw how this was going, his eyes moving swiftly around their little circle, and said briskly, “First, figure out how this crazy place works. That will tell us how to get on top of our situation.”

Cliff agreed, but it was best to let the ideas come from others. As they tossed thoughts around, he wondered at his own developing social skills. His career had focused on technical abilities—mostly useless here—not management ones. Here he would have to get this little band through unknowable threats—much harder than just keeping employees happy, a task that had always bored him. But this was lots more interesting, and nobody else seemed to want to lead. None of the expedition’s actual, official leaders were here. Though as someone had remarked in Leadership Training, the important skills can’t be taught.

They kicked this around for a while and finally agreed to what Cliff thought was obvious, without his having to say a word. Good—but talk took time, and he doubted they had a lot of time to spare.

The next two Earth days, they spent moving warily across the strange yet oddly familiar landscape. Trees with limb decks, zigzag trunks, spirals—on low hills with running streams and shallow arroyos. Cliff kept track of how long they all slept and found it was steadily increasing.

Irma commented on this. “Y’know, they did Earthside experiments while preparing for starship life. People under constant illumination had sleep–wake cycles that got longer and longer. Without the sun, they lost track of time.”

Terry said, “So that’s why shipboard lighting follows the sun cycle.”

Aybe asked Cliff, “How does anything get regulated here, then?”

“I don’t know. Biology without outside timing, no day or night—we have no experience with that.”

They hunted small game, using spears they made—and got nothing bigger than the pseudo-rabbits. Still, it was fun and they celebrated their rare victories with ragged cheers. They were urban types, and the skills of stalking came hard. Maybe it helped that the rabbity grazers were used to attacks from the sky, so were less adapted to ground predators.

But there had to be intelligent life somewhere here. They could see fields in the distance—great plains of crops stretching between the forks of two converging river valleys. Grass crops, Cliff guessed. They worked their way closer, staying in the hills and staying within the trees. Still, Cliff was startled when they came up behind a few silent, trudging figures. Not human.

“Careful,” Cliff whispered. They crouched down.

The shapes were crossing a foggy slope ripe with thick aromas. Out of the mist came shambling shadows, slow and silent. Cliff switched his distance specs to infrared to isolate movements against the pale background and found the figures too cool to be visible. In the mist they were ghostly, slim shapes. Legs, but no arms.

“The farmers?” Howard whispered.

“No.” Aybe peered closely at the ponderous, spindly forms. “Plants.”

“What?” Now Cliff heard the squish squish as limbs labored.

In the murky light, they watched as crusty pods popped from the trunks of great trees. Stubby limbs peeled away from their parents and found unsteady purchase on the ground. They were about two hands high and a mottled green. The slow, deliberate birth came moist and eerie in the quiet.

Cliff watched in awe. Working their stubby legs forward with grave slowness, the roots freshly pulled from soil and then moved onto wetter ground that enjoyed better sunlight. The air brought the scent of their sharp thorns to him, a tinge of acrid poison. The young needed defenses here.

They watched the animated seeds find new spots and with great, slow care settle down to take root again. To Cliff, this method extended animal mobility to plants, perhaps made easier in lower gravity. The others looked incredulous and uneasy, though Irma nodded when he advanced his idea. Certainly these plants were not dangerous, but their strangeness unsettled. Cliff realized that they had all been thinking of this place as mildly different, just the sort of world you would see in a movie, complete with dinosaurs. Reassuringly ordinary in just the right way. He had to guard against such comfy illusions.