during the early weeks he had found a thick loose-leaf binder in the back of one of the desk drawers. he thought it might have been left there intentionally. its heading was notes on the terrestrial ecological base of the eighteenth system, volume iii. after leafing through them once, it had been a while before barney could bring himself to study the notes in more detail. he didn't, at that time, want to know too much about the situation he was in. he was still numbed by it.

but eventually he went over the binder carefully. the various reports were unsigned, but appeared to have been compiled by at least four or five persons—mcallen among them; his writing style was not difficult to recognize. leaving out much that was incomprehensible or nearly so, barney could still construe a fairly specific picture of the association project of which he was now an unscheduled and unwilling part. selected plants and animals had been moved from earth through the mcallen tube to a world consisting of sand, rock and water, without detected traces of indigenous life in any form. at present the ecological base was only in its ninth year, which meant that the larger trees in the valley had been nearly full-grown when brought here with the soil that was to nourish them. from any viewpoint, the planting of an oasis of life on the barren world had been a gigantic undertaking, but there were numerous indications that the mcallen tube was only one of the array of improbable devices the association had at its disposal for such tasks. a few cryptic paragraphs expressed the writer's satisfaction with the undetailed methods by which the base's localized climatic conditions were maintained.

so far even the equipment which kept the cabin in uninterrupted operation had eluded barney's search. it and the other required machinery might be buried somewhere in the valley. or it might, he thought, have been set up just as easily some distance away, in the desert or among the remotely towering mountain ranges. one thing he had learned from the binder was that mcallen had told the truth in saying no one could contact him from earth before the full period of his exile was over. the reason had seemed appalling enough in itself. this world had moved to a point in its orbit where the radiance of its distant sun was thickening between it and earth, growing too intense to be penetrated by the forces of the mcallen tube. another four years would pass before the planet and the valley emerged gradually from behind that barrier again.