Niven, Larry - Convergent series

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CONVERGENT SERIES -- A COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES by Larry Niven

v 1.0 (12-25-1998)

STORIES INCLUDED IN THIS BOOK:

"Bordered in Black"

"One Face"

"Like Banquo's Ghost"

"The Meddler"

"Dry Run"

"Convergent Series"

"The Deadlier Weapon"

"The Nonesuch"

"Singularities Make Me Nervous"

"The Schumann Computer"

"Assimilating Our Culture, That's What They're Doing!"

"Grammar Lesson"

"The Subject is Closed"

"Cruel and Unusual"

"Transfer of Power"

"Cautionary Tales"

"Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation"

"Plaything"

"Mistake"

"Night on Mispec Moor"

"Wrong Way Street"

INTRODUCTION

This book is my solution to a moral problem. If you've opened this book, you're already involved,

and I suppose you'd better hear about it.

In 1969 I published a short-story collection, The Shape of Space. It was my second collection, my

fourth book in five years of writing. The stories were a varied lot, ranging from vignette to

novelet length and from hard science fiction to fantasy and mainstream.

Half the stories were set in a single consistent future. The Known Space timeline now covers a

thousand years of the future, a huge volume of interstellar space, three collections, and four

novels.

In 1975 I did something a lot of friends and strangers had been nagging me to do. I gathered

together all of the Known Space stories and published most of them in Tales of Known Space. Two

stories were left over, and I was writing a third. Those three science-fiction/detective stories

became The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, published in 1976.

Now, here's the problem. The first of the "Gil the Arm" stories, and many of the stories in Tales

of Known Space, came out of The Shape of Space. About half the book.

In the meantime, I keep meeting people who started reading my work during the past eight years,

and have heard of The Shape of Space, and can't find it. The old paperback sells well at huckster

tables during science-fiction conventions, when it can be found at all. It's easy to say that a

reader can get half the stories by spending twice the money on two newer books. But what about

"Convergent Series" and "The Deadlier Weapon"? People who never read them seem to know the plot

lines; they get told around at parties.

I finally asked some people. Shall I gather up 30,000 words of new stories and put them in a book

with 30,000 words of older stories from The Shape of Space? I was told to do it.

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If you read The Shape of Space eight years ago... well, it's your money. You may regard this as a

chance to see how my style and/or abilities have changed over the past ten years or so. I've added

historical notes following some of the stories.

LVCN.

Bordered in Black

Only one figure stood in the airlock, though it was a cargo lock, easily big enough to hold both

men. Lean and sandy haired, the tiny figure was obviously Carver Rappaport. A bushy beard now

covered half his face. He waited patiently while the ramp was run up, and then he started down.

Turnbull, waiting at the bottom, suppressed growing uneasiness. Something was wrong. He'd known it

the moment he heard that the Overcee was landing. The ship must have been in the solar system for

hours. Why hadn't she called in?

And where was Wall Kameon?

Returning spacers usually sprinted down the ramp, eager to touch honest concrete again. Rappaport

came down with slow, methodical speed. Seen close, his beard was ragged, unkempt. He reached

bottom, and Turnbull saw that the square features were set like cement.

Rappaport brushed past him and kept walking.

Turnbull ran after him and fell into step, looking and feeling foolish. Rappaport was a good head

taller, and where he was walking, Turnbull was almost running. He shouted above the background

noise of the spaceport, "Rappaport, where's Kameon?"

Like Turnbull, Rappaport had to raise his voice. "Dead."

"Dead? Was it the ship? Rappaport, did the ship kill him?"

"No."

"Then what? Is his body aboard?"

"Turnbull, I dxon't want to talk about it. No, his body isn't aboard. His--" Rappaport ground the

heels of his hands into his eyes, like a man with a blinding headache. "His grave," he said,

emphasizing the word, "has a nice black border around it. Let's leave it at that."

But they couldn't, of course.

Two security officers caught up with them near the edge of the field. "Stop him," said Turnbull,

and they each took an arm. Rappaport stopped walking and turned.

"Have you forgotten that I'm carrying a destruct capsule?"

"What about it?" For the moment Turnbull really didn't understand what he meant.

"Any more interference and I'll use it. Understand this, Turnbull. I don't care any more. Project

Overcee is over. I don't know where I go from here. The best thing we can do is blow up that ship

and stay in our own solar system."

"Man, have you gone crazy? What happened out there? You-- meet aliens?"

"No comment. --No, I'll answer that one. We didn't meet aliens. Now tell your comedian friends to

let go."

Turnbull let himself realize that the man wasn't bluffing. Rappaport was prepared to commit

suicide. Turnbull, the instinctive politician, weighed changes and gambled.

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"If you havent decided to talk in twenty-four hours we'll let you go. I promise that. We'll keep

you here 'til then, by force if necessary. Just to give you an opportunity to change your mind."

Rappaport thought it over. The security men still held his arms, but cautiously, now, standing as

far back as they could, in case his personal bomb went off.

"Seems fair," he said at last, "if you're honest. Sure, I'll wait twenty-four hours."

"Good." Turnbull turned to lead the way back to his office. Instead, he merely stared.

The Overcee was red hot at the nose, glaring white at the tail. Mechs and techs were running in

all directions. As Turnbull watched, the solar system's first faster-than-light spacecraft slumped

and ran in a spreading, glowing pool.

***

It had started a century ago, when the first ramrobots left the solar system. The interstellar

ramscoop robots could make most of their journey at near light-speed, using a conical

electromagnetic fleld two hundred miles across to scoop hydrogen fuel from interstellar space. But

no man had ever ridden a ramrobot. None ever would. The ramscoop magnetic field did horrible

things to chordate organisms.

Each ramrobot had been programmed to report back only if it found a habitable world near the star

to which it had been assigned. Twenty-six had been sent out. Three had reported back-- so far.

... It had started twelve years ago, when a well-known mathematician worked out a theoretical

hyperspace over Einsteinian fourspace. He did it in his spare time. He considered the hyperspace a

toy, an example of pure mathematics. And when has pure mathematics been anything but good clean

fun?

... It had started ten years ago, when Ergstrom's brother Carl demonstrated the experimental

reality of Ergstrom's toy universe. Within a month the UN had financed Project Overcee, put

Winston Turnbull in charge, and set up a school for faster-than-light astronauts. The vast number

of applicants was winnowed to ten "hypernauts." Two were Belters; all were experienced spacers.

The training began in earnest. It lasted eight years, while Project Overcee built the ship.

... It had started a year and a month ago, when two men climbed into the almost luxurious

lifesystem of the Overcee, ran the ship out to Neptune's orbit under escort, and vanished.

One was back.

Now his face was no stonier than Turnbull's. Turnbull had just watched his work of the last ten

years melt and run like quicksilver. He was mad clean through; but his mind worked furiously. Part

of him, the smaller part, was wondering how he would explain the loss of ten billion dollars worth

of ship. The rest was reviewing everything it could remember about Carver Geoffrey Rappaport and

William (Wall) Kameon.

Turnbull entered his office and went straight to the bookshelf, sure that Rappaport was following.

He pulled out a leather-bound volume, did something to the binding and poured two paper cups full

of amber fluid. The fluid was bourbon, and it was more than ice cold.

Rappaport had seen this bookcase before, yet he wore a faintly puzzled frown as he took a cup. He

said, "I didn't think I'd ever anticipate anything again."

"The bourbon?"

Rappaport didn't answer. His first swallow was a gulp.

"Did you destroy your ship?"

"Yes. I set the controls so it would only melt. I didn't want anyone hurt."

"Commendable. And the overcee motor? You left it in orbit?"

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"I hard-landed it on the Moon. It's gone."

"That's great. Just great. Carver, that ship cost ten billion dollars to build. We can duplicate

it for four, I think, because we won't be making any false starts, but you--"

"Hell you wouldn't." Rappaport swirled the bourbon in his cup, looking down into the miniature

whirlpool. He was twenty to thirty pounds lighter than he had been a year ago. "You build another

Overcee and you'll be making one enormous false start. We were wrong, Turnbull. It's not our

universe. There's nothing out there for us."

"It is our universe." Turnbull let the quiet certainty show in his politician's voice. He needed

to start an argument-- he needed to get this man to talking. But the certainty was real, and

always had been. It was humanity's universe, ready for the taking.

Over the rim of his cup Rappaport looked at him in exasperated pity. "Turnbull, can't you take my

word for it? It's not our universe, and it's not worth having anyway. What's out there is--" He

clamped his mouth shut and turned away in the visitor's chair.

Turnbull waited ten seconds to point up the silence. Then he asked, "Did you kill Kameon?"

"Kill Wall? You're out of your mind!"

"Could you have saved him?"

Rappaport froze in the act of turning around. "No," he said. And again, "No. I tried to get him

moving, but he wouldn't--stop it! Stop needling me. I can walk out anytime, and you couldn't stop

me."

"It's too late. You've aroused my curiosity. What about Kameon's black-bordered grave?"

No answer.

"Rappaport, you seem to think that the UN will just take your word and dismantle Project Overcee.

There's not a prayer of that. Probability zero. In the last century we've spent tens of billions

of dollars on the ramrobots and the Overcee, and now we can rebuild her for four. The only way to

stop that is to tell the UN exactly why they shouldn't."

Rappaport didn't answer, and Turnbull didn't speak again. He watched Rappaport's cigarette burning

unheeded in the ashtray, leaving a strip of charred wet paper. It was uncharacteristic of the

former Carver Rappaport to forget burning cigarettes, or to wear an untrimmed beard and sloppily

cut hair. The man had been always clean shaven; that man had lined up his shoes at night, every

night, even when staggering drunk.

Could he have killed Kameon for being sloppy? --and then turned messy himself as he lost his self-

respect? Stranger things had happened in the days when it took eight months to reach Mars. --No,

Rappaport had not done murder. Turnbull would have bet high on that. And Kameon would have won any

fair fight. Newspapermen had nicknamed him The Wall when he was playing guard for the Berlin

Nazis.

"You're right. Where do I start?"

Turnbull was jerked out of his abstraction. "Start at the beginning. When you went into

hyperspace."

"We had no trouble there. Except with the windows. You shouldn't have put windows on the Overcee."

"Why not? What did you see?"

"Nothing."

"Well, then?"

"You ever try to find your blind spot? You put two dots on a piece of paper, maybe an inch apart,

and you close one eye, focus on one dot and slowly bring the paper up to your face. At some point

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the other dot disappears. Looking at the window in overcee is like your blind spot expanding to a

two-foot square with rounded corners."

"I assume you covered them up."

"Sure. Would you believe it, we had trouble finding those windows? When you wanted them they were

invisible. We got them covered with blankets. Then every so often we'd catch each other looking

under the blankets. It bothered Wall worse than me. We could have made the trip in five months

instead of six, but we had to keep coming out for a look around."

"Just to be sure the universe was still there."

"Right."

"But you did reach Sirius."

"Yes. We reached Sirius..."

***

Ramrobot #6 had reported from Sirius B, half a century ago. The Sirius stars are an unlikely place

to look for habitable worlds, since both stars are blue-white giants. Still, the ramrobots had

been programmed to test for excessive ultraviolet. Sirius B was worth a look.

The ship came out where Sirius was two bright stars. It turned its sharp nose toward the dimmer

star and remained motionless for twenty minutes, a silver torpedo shape in a great, ungainly

cradle studded with heavy electromagnetic motors. Then it was gone again.

Now Sirius B was a searing ball of light. The ship began to swing about, like a hound sniffing the

breeze, but slowly, ponderously.

"We found four planets," said Rappaport. "Maybe there were more, but we didn't look. Number Four

was the one we wanted. It was a cloudy ball about twice the size of Mars, with no moon. We waited

until we'd found it before we started celebrating."

"Champagne?"

"Hah! Cigars and drunk pills. And Wall shaved off his grubby beard. My God, we were glad to be out

in space again! Near the end it seemed like those blind spots were growing around the edges of the

blankets. We smoked our cigars and sucked our drunk pills and yakked about the broads we'd known.

Not that we hadn't done that before. Then we slept it off and went back to work..."

***

The cloud cover was nearly unbroken. Rappaport moved the telescope a bit at a time, trying to find

a break. He found several, but none big enough to show him anything. "I'll try infrared," he said.

"Just get us down," Wall said irritably. He was always irritable lately. "I want to get to work."

And I want to be sure we've got a place to land.

Carv's job was the ship. He was pilot, astrogator, repairman, and everything but the cook. Wall

was the cook. Wall was also the geologist, astrophysicist, biologist, and chemist-- the expert on

habitable planets, in theory. Each man had been trained nine years for his job, and each had some

training as backup man for the other; and in each case the training had been based largely on

guesswork.

The picture on the scope-screen changed from a featureless disk to a patterned ball as Carv

switched to infrared. "Now which is water?" he wondered.

"The water's brighter on the night side, and darker on the day side. See?" Wall was looking over

his shoulder. "Looks like about forty percent land. Carv, those clouds might cut out enough of the

ultraviolet to let people live in what gets through."

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"Who'd want to? You couldn't see the stars." Carv turned a knob to raise the magnification.

"Hold it right there, Carv. Look at that. There's a white line around the edge of that continent."

"Dried salt?"

"No. It's warmer than what's around it. And it's just as bright on the night side as on the day."

"I'll get us a closer look."

The Overcee was in orbit, three hundred miles up. By now the continent with the "hot" border was

almost entirely in shadow. Of the three supercontinents, only one showed a white shoreline under

infrared.

Wall hung at the window, looking down. To Rappaport be looked like a great ape. "Can we do a re-

entry glide?"

"In this ship? The Overcee would come apart like a cheap meteor. We'll have to brake to a full

stop above the atmosphere. Want to strap down?"

Kameon did, and Carv watched him do it before he went ahead and dropped the overcee motor. I'll be

glad to be out of here, he thought. It's getting so Wall and I hate the sight of each other. The

casual, uncaring way Kameon fastened his straps jarred his teeth. He knew that Kameon thought he

was finicky to the point of psychasthenia.

The fusion drive started and built up to one gee. Carv swung the ship around. Only the night side

showed below, with the faint blue light of Sirius A shining softly off the cloud cover. Then the

edge of dawn came up in torn blue-white cloud. Carv saw an enormous rift in the cloud bank and

turned ship to shift their path over it.

Mountains and valleys, and a wide river. Patches of wispy cloud shot by, obscuring the view, but

they could see down. Suddenly there was a black line, a twisting ribbon of India ink, and beyond

that the ocean.

Only for a moment the ocean showed, and then the rift jogged east and was gone. But the ocean was

an emerald green.

Wall's voice was soft with awe. "Carv, there's life in that water."

"You sure?"

"No. It could be copper salts or something. Carv, we've got to get down there!"

"Oh, wait your turn. Did you notice that your hot border is black in visible light?"

"Yah. But I can't explain it. Would it be worth our while to turn back after you get the ship

slowed?"

Carv fingered his neatly trimmed Vandyke. "It'd be night over the whole continent before we got

back there. Let's spend a few hours looking at that green ocean."

The Overcee went down on her tail, slowly, like a cautious crab. Layer after layer of cloud

swallowed her without trace, and darkness fell as she dropped. The key to this world was the word

"moonless." Sirius B-IV had had no oversized moon to strip away most of her atmosphere. Her air

pressure would be comfortable at sea level, but only because the planet was too small to hold more

air. That same low gravity produced a more gentle pressure gradient, so that the atmosphere

reached three times as high as on Earth. There were cloud layers from ground to 130 kilometers up.

The Overcee touched down on a wide beach on the western shore of the smallest continent. Wall came

out first, then Carv lowered a metal oblong as large as himself and followed it down. They wore

lightly pressurized vac suits. Carv did nothing for twenty minutes while Wall opened the box out

flat and set the carefully packed instruments into their grooves and notches. Finally Wall

signaled, in an emphatic manner. By taking off his helmet.

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Carv waited a few seconds, then followed suit.

Wall asked, "Were you waiting to see if I dropped dead?"

"Better you than me." Carv sniffed the breeze. The air was cool and humid, but thin. "Smells good

enough. No. No, it doesn't. It smells like something rotting."

"Then I'm right. There's life here. Let's get down to the beach."

The sky looked like a raging thunderstorm, with occasional vivid blue flashes that might have been

lightning. They were flashes of sunlight penetrating tier upon tier of cloud. In that varying

light Carv and Wall stripped off their suits and went down to look at the ocean, walking with

shuffling steps in the light gravity.

The ocean was thick with algae. Algae were a bubbly green blanket on the water, a blanket that

rose and fell like breathing as the insignificant waves ran beneath. The smell of rotting

vegetation was no stronger here than it had been a quarter of a mile back. Perhaps the smell

pervaded the whole planet. The shore was a mixture of sand and green scum so rich that you could

have planted crops in it.

"Time I got to work," said Wall. "You want to fetch and carry for me?"

"Later maybe. Right now I've got a better idea. Let's get the hell out of each other's sight for

an hour."

"That is brilliant. But take a weapon."

"To fight off maddened algae?"

"Take a weapon."

Carv was back at the end of an hour. The scenery had been deadly monotonous. There was water below

a green blanket of scum six inches deep; there was loamy sand, and beyond that dry sand; and

behind the beach were white cliffs, smoothed as if by countless rainfalls. He had found no target

for his laser cutter.

Wall looked up from a binocular microscope, and grinned when he saw his pilot. He tossed a

depleted pack of cigarettes. "And don't worry about the air plant!" he called cheerfully.

Carv came up beside him. "What news?"

"It's algae. I can't name the breed, but there's not much difference between this and any

terrestrial algae, except that this sample is all one species."

"That's unusual?" Carv was looking around him in wonder. He was seeing a new side to Wall. Aboard

ship Wall was sloppy almost to the point of being dangerous, at least in the eyes of a Belter like

Carv. But now he was at work. His small tools were set in neat rows on portable tables. Bulkier

instruments with legs were on flat rock, the legs carefully adjusted to leave their platforms

exactly horizontal. Wall handled the binocular microscope as if it might dissolve at a touch.

"It is," said Wall. "No little animalcules moving among the strands. No variations in structure. I

took samples from depths up to six feet. All I could find was the one algae. But otherwise-- I

even tested for proteins and sugars. You could eat it. We came all this way to find pond scum."

They came down on an island five hundred miles south. This time Carv helped with the collecting.

They got through faster that way, but they kept getting in each other's way. Six months spent in

two small rooms had roused tempers too often. It would take more than a few hours on ground before

they could bump elbows without a fight.

Again Carv watched Wall go through his routines. He stood just within voice range, about fifty

yards away, because it felt so good to have so much room. The care Wall exercised with his

equipment still amazed him. How could he reconcile it with Wall's ragged fingernails and his

thirty hours growth of beard?

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Well, Wall was a flatlander. All his life he'd had a whole planet to mess up, and not a crowded

pressure dome or the cabin of a ship. No flat ever learned real neatness.

"Same breed," Wall called.

"Did you test for radiation?"

"No. Why?"

"This thick air must screen out a lot of gamma rays. That means your algae can't mutate without

local radiation from the ground."

"Carv, it had to mutate to get to its present form. How could all its cousins just have died out?"

"That's your field."

A little later Wall said, "I can't get a respectable background reading anywhere. You were right,

but it doesn't explain anything."

"Shall we go somewhere else?"

"Yah."

They set down in deep ocean, and when the ship stopped bobbing Carv went out the airlock with a

glass bucket. "Its a foot thick out there," he reported. "No place for a Disneyland. I don't think

I'd want to settle here."

Wall sighed his agreement. The green scum lapped thickly at the Overcee's gleaming metal hull, two

yards below the sill of the airlock.

"A lot of planets must be like this," said Carv. "Habitable, but who needs it?"

"And I wanted to be the first man to found an interstellar colony."

"And get your name in the newstapes, the history books--"

"--And my unforgettable face on every trivis in the solar system. Tell me, shipmate, if you hate

publicity so much, why have you been trimming that Vandyke so prettily?"

"Guilty. I like being famous. Just not as much as you do."

"Cheer up then. We may yet get all the hero worship we can stand. This may be something bigger

than a new colony."

"What could be bigger than that?"

"Set us down on land and I'll tell you."

On a chunk of rock just big enough to be called an island, Wall set up his equipment for the last

time. He was testing for food content-- again, using samples from Carv's bucket of deep ocean

algae.

Carv stood by, a comfortable distance away, watching the weird variations in the clouds. The very

highest were moving across the sky at enormous speeds, swirling and changing shape by the minutes

and seconds. The noonday light was subdued and early. No doubt about it, Sirius B-IV had a

magnificent sky.

"Okay, I'm ready." Wall stood up and stretched. "This stuff isn't just edible. I'd guess it would

taste as good as the food supplements they were using on Earth before the fertility laws cut the

population down to something reasonable. I'm going to taste it now."

The last sentence hit Carv like an electric shock. He was running before it was quite finished,

but long before he could get there his crazy partner had put a dollup of green scum in his mouth,

chewed and swallowed. "Good," he said.

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"You-utter-damned-fool."

"Not so. I knew it was safe. The stuff had an almost cheesy flavor. You could get tired of it

fast, I think, but that's true of anything."

"Just what are you trying to prove?"

"That this alga was tailored as a food plant by biological engineers. Carv, I think we've landed

on somebody's private farm."

Carv sat heavily down on a rainwashed white rock. "Better spell that out," he said, and heard that

his voice was hoarse.

"I was going to. Suppose there was a civilization that had cheap, fast interstellar travel. Most

of the habitable planets they found would be sterile, wouldn't they? I mean, life is an unlikely

sort of accident."

"We don't have the vaguest idea how likely it is."

"All right, pass that. Say somebody finds this planet, Sirius B-IV, and decides it would make a

nice farm planet. It isn't good for much else, mainly because of the variance in lighting, but if

you dropped a specially bred food alga in the ocean, you'd have a dandy little farm. In ten years

there'd be oceans of algae, free for the carting. Later, if they did decide to colonize, they

could haul the stuff inland and use it for fertilizer. Best of all, it wouldn't mutate. Not here."

Carv shook his head to clear it. "You've been in space too long."

"Carv, the plant looks bred-- like a pink grapefruit. And where did all its cousins go? Now I can

tell you. They got poured out of the breeding vat because they weren't good enough."

Low waves rolled in from the sea, low and broad beneath their blanket of cheesy green scum. "All

right," said Carv. "How can we disprove it?"

Wall looked startled. "Disprove it? Why would we want to do that?"

"Forget the glory for a minute. If you're right, we're trespassing on somebody's property without

knowing anything about the owner-- except that he's got dirtcheap interstellar travel, which would

make him a tough enemy. We're also introducing our body bacteria onto his pure edible algae

culture. And how would we explain, if he suddenly showed up?"

"I hadn't thought of it that way."

"We ought to cut and run right now. It's not as if the planet was worth anything."

"No. No, we can't do that."

"Why not?"

The answer gleamed in Wall's eyes.

Turnbull, listening behind his desk with his chin resting in one hand, interrupted for the first

time in minutes. "A good question. I'd have gotten out right then."

"Not if you'd just spent six months in a two-room cell with the end of everything creeping around

the blankets."

"I see." Turnbulls hand moved almost imperceptibly, writing, NO WINDOWS IN OVERCEE #21. Oversized

viewscreen?

"It hadn't hit me that hard. I think I'd have taken off if I'd been sure Wall was right, and if I

could have talked him into it. But I couldn't, of course. Just the thought of going home then was

enough to set Wall shaking. I thought I might have to knock him on the head when it came time to

leave. We had some hibernation drugs aboard, just in case."

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He stopped. As usual, Turnbull waited him out.

"But then I'd have been all alone." Rappaport finished his drink, his second, and got up to pour a

third.

The bourbon didn't seem to affect him. "So we stood there on that rocky beach, both of us afraid

to leave and both afraid to stay..."

***

Abruptly Wall got up and started putting his tools away. "We can't disprove it, but we can prove

it easily enough. The owners must have left artifacts around. If we find one, we run. I promise."

"There's a big area to search. If we had any sense we'd run now."

"Will you drop that? All we've got to do is find the ramrobot probe. If there's anyone watching

this place they must have seen it come down. We'll find footprints all over it."

"And if there aren't any footprints? Does that make the whole planet clean?"

Wall closed his case with a snap. Then he stood, motionless, looking very surprised. "I just

thought of something," he said.

"Oh, not again."

"No, this is for real, Carv. The owners must have left a long time ago."

"Why?"

"It must be thousands of years since there were enough algae here to use as a food supply. We

should have seen ships taking off and landing as we came in. They'd have started their colony too,

if they were going to. Now it's gone beyond that. The planet isn't fit for anything to live on,

with the soupy oceans and the smell of things rotting."

"No."

"Dammit, it makes sense!"

"It's thin. It sounds thin even to me, and I want to believe it. Also, it's too pat. It's just too

close to the best possible solution we could dream up. You want to bet our lives on it?"

Wall hoisted his case and moved toward the ship. He looked like a human tank, moving in a stormy

darkness lit by shifting, glaring beams of blue light. Abruptly he said, "There's one more point.

That black border. It has to be contaminated algae. Maybe a land-living mutant, that's why it

hasn't spread across the oceans. It would have been cleaned away if the owners were still

interested."

"All right. Hoist that thing up and let's get inside."

"Hmph?"

"You've finally said something we can check. The eastern shore must be in daylight by now. Let's

get aboard."

At the border of space they hovered, and the Sun Rappaport

burned small and blinding white at the horizon. To the side Sirius A was a tiny dot of intense

brilliance. Below, where gaps in the cloud cover penetrated all the way to the surface, a hair-

thin black line ran along the twisting beach of Sirius B-IV's largest continent. The silver

thread of a major river exploded into a forking delta, and the delta was a black triangle shot

with lines of silvery green.

"Going to use the scope?"

Carv shook his head. "We'll see it close in a few minutes."

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