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well, we'll be out tomorrow. If not, it'll take us two days," the Cyberneticist declared, drinking his third mug of coffee from the thermos. They were all drinking coffee.
    "How do you know?" the Engineer asked with surprise.
    "Just a feeling."
    "He has the intuition his robots lack," said the Doctor, laughing. As the day progressed, the Doctor was in increasingly good humor. When relieved of the digging, he would run back to the ship's quarters, scavenging. He added two magneto lanterns, a portable shaver, vitamin-enriched chocolate, and a stack of towels to their supplies. The men were filthy, their suits were covered with stains. No one had shaved, of course, given the lack of electricity.
    The whole of the following day was spent digging the tunnel. The navigation room was now so full, it became difficult to dump the soil through the door. Next they used the library. The Doctor had misgivings here, but the Chemist, with whom he was carrying the improvised handbarrow, tipped a heap of marl onto the books without hesitation.
    The tunnel opened up unexpectedly. The soil had been getting drier and less compact for a while now, and though the Physicist had noted this, the others did not agree: the soil they carried into the ship seemed to them no different. The Engineer and the Captain, beginning their shift, had just taken up the tools still warm from previous hands, and were hacking at the irregular wall, when a section suddenly disappeared and air poured in through the opening. They could feel the draft: the pressure of the atmosphere outside was a little higher than in the tunnel or the rocket. The hoes and steel poles worked feverishly. No one any longer carried away the soil. The rest of the crew, unable to help those in front because there was no room, formed a tight group at the rear. After a few final blows, the Engineer was about to crawl outside, but the Captain stopped him. The Captain wanted to widen the exit first. He also gave orders for the last chunks of soil to be carried into the ship, so that nothing would obstruct the tunnel. Another ten or twenty minutes passed, therefore, before the six men crawled out onto the planet's surface.

II
    It was dusk. The tunnel opened near the base of a gently sloping knoll about forty feet high. Beyond, a vast plain stretched to the horizon, over which the first stars twinkled. There were vague, slender treelike forms in the distance, but the light of the setting sun was now so dim that everything merged into a uniform gray. The men stood silently. To their left, the huge hull of the ship jutted at an angle into the air. One hundred twenty of its two hundred feet, the Engineer estimated, were embedded in the knoll. But no one was interested any more in the silhouette of the tube ending in useless vanes and exhaust cones. The men inhaled the cool air, with its faint, unfamiliar odor that no one could give a name to, and a strong feeling of helplessness came over them. The hoes and pipes dropped from their hands. They stood gazing at the plain, its horizons in darkness, and at the stars shining overhead.
    "The Pole Star?" the Chemist asked in a hushed voice, pointing to a low star flickering in the east.
    "It wouldn't be visible from here. We're now … yes, we're directly under the Galactic South Pole. The Southern Cross ought to be over there somewhere…"
    They craned their necks. The black sky was bright with constellations. The men pointed them out to one another, naming them. This raised their spirits for a while. The stars were the only things familiar on the empty plain.
    "It's getting colder, like the desert," said the Captain.
    "We'll accomplish nothing today. We'd better go back inside."
    "What, back in that grave?" the Cyberneticist exclaimed, indignant.
    "Without that grave we'd perish in two days here," the Captain said. "Don't be childish." He turned around, walked steadily to the opening, which was barely visible from several feet higher on the slope, lowered