 What is hiding underneath the gigantic mound on the alien planet?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Fantastic Stories of Imagination May 1962. Then he knew he was being marooned on a planet of endless terrors. Two hours since, the sun of this solar system had been a vast glaring disk off to port, with streamers and prominences erupting about its edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran could see the planet that had been chosen for his marooning. The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet rotated at a not unreasonable rate. A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the planet's atmosphere. Its size, too, told about temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would have meant a large area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with small temperate and tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant wide tropical and sub-tropical zones. The fact was verified by the thick, dense cloud-masses which covered most of the surface,—all the surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap. But since there were ice-caps there would be temperate regions. In short, the ice-cap proved that a man could endure the air and temperature conditions he would find. Moran observed these things from the control-room of the Nadine , then approaching the world on planetary drive. Two of the Nadine's four-man crew watched out the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. They didn't seem to resent what he'd tried to do, or that he'd brought them an indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from their last landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves. They'd been on Coryus Three and they'd gotten departure clearance from its space-port. Without rigid control of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents and its crew would spark an investigation. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world Moran did not know. It could have travelled at almost any speed in practically any direction for a length of time that was at least indefinite. It had elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-charts. The process would be to find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other planets, and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. It was a trilling, whining sound among the innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
 An empty spacecraft where a crew member had survived long enough to set up a marker
 A pulsing, reeking object egg casing that contains countless unhatched beetle eggs  An empty spacecraft where a crew member had survived long enough to set up a marker  A 'yard-worm,' which is an uncontrolled type of an 'inch-worm'  The remains of a crew that had landed on the alien planet a century earlier