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s and vines above and around him. He remembered, at the first moment of impact, just before the ship began to break apart, a tremendous geyser of mud and water. The picture was indelibly imprinted on his mind. He couldn't see the water now, but he could hear it. The litter he could see by twisting his head as far to the left as it would go told him they had crash-landed on the water--a river by the sound of it--and had skipped drunkenly, in something approximating flat stone fashion, into the forest lining the river's bank. There had been no explosion and no fire, there was no wide swath cut through the trees--and therefore no reason why he should assume the patrol would spot him. There might be pieces of the ship lying where the patrol could see them. But he doubted that, for the river was deep and the vegetation was thick.
* * * * *
He strained his ears, not to hear if the patrol was approaching closer, but listening for the sound of life around him. This was his one hope--another survivor, and of necessity a mobile one. Someone to shout and wave, to climb a tree, to find an open space and build a fire, to light a flare, to do something--anything--that would attract the patrol's attention. Andy Larson wasn't afraid of dying. He felt no panic, no agonies of conscience, remorse or bitterness at the apparent inevitability of the prospect before him. But if he was not destined to die he needed a miracle or the assistance of that almost impossible--but only almost--survivor. And instead of praying for the miracle, he listened with all the hearing power at his command for the sound of human life. That would be miracle enough, and he didn't intend to stop listening until he couldn't any more.
Not that he didn't pray at all; back home in New Jersey, while not considered a pillar of the church, Andy Larson was known as a good, practicing Lutheran. But it was doubtful if the Lutherans, or any other sect for that matter, had sent missionaries this high into the heavens yet; the misbegotten flight he h