 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. 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. 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. Without rigid control of space-travel, any criminal anywhere could escape the consequences of any crime simply by buying a ticket to another world. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world Moran did not know. 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 marked a first-landing spot on some planet or other, so the people could find that spot again. If they left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet. All five of its proper company watched as the planet's surface enlarged. The ice-cap went out of sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings appeared. The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two, with elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even possibly habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would provide food in a minimum of time. But space-travel regulations are especially designed to prevent such escapes.
 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