just a trace of frost. It melts off completely in the summer. The air is full of sulphur and ammonia and other goodies with just the barest trace of oxygen. The surface is about eight-tenths water, but usable water is as scarce as on any desert planet you can name. The rivers are running chemical sewers and the seas are just about as thick as a good juaro soup—only they contain everything that is soluble in water. They'd float a piece of steel, almost, they're so saturated. Fortunately these people don't need water; they subsist on an all-purpose liquid food that comes from a slimy, green sea plant. There's not enough soil on the planet to grow a patch of beans. Most of the land is bare rock, except in valleys where soil has been trapped. Those low places are something out of a nightmare. They're filled with plants that look something like toadstools, but they're unlike anything we've seen because they're as toxic as a Telos red-snake. The soil holds about all the
radioactivity that is left on the planet. It limits the stay in a Type-A suit to about ten minutes. That's damned hot. The radioactivity is artificially produced and is all old stuff. Lots of the carbon series. There are enough original radioactives down deep to tell us what happened. There are indications of mining at very deep levels. Yep. That's the story. I didn't put that in my official report and I leave it to you whether or not to break it right now. I was afraid if I reported it I might give the isolationists more fodder for their fear-mongering. The planet has been systematically looted of every resource. On the surface there's not enough metal to put together a child's toy and indications point to quite a few millennia since anyone has dug for it. We've turned up samples of most of the common stuff, Lead 208 and 206 and a bit of U-235 at the deep levels. On the surface, especially next to the vegetation in the low spots, there's some Strontium 90 and Cesium 137, and it gets into the atmosphere at times. But these beings are not the planet-killers of the central galaxy. I'd stake my career on that, Jack. This planet was killed, all right, but it's older than the center worlds. Not in geological formation, but in settlement. And this very oldness leads one to speculate. The ruins of the central worlds are about 75,000 N.Y. old. The planet-killers were in their big, final battles just about the time we came from wherever it was we came from and landed on Terra II. We couldn't have come from the central galaxy or beyond, or we'd have encountered the killers. Suppose we'd missed Terra II—and it would have been easy as it's the only life-zone planet in its sector. We'd have gone on and run head-on into that big war and that would have been the end of us. But we hit on the one planet in a thousand that could give us the proper conditions and then we settled down and started pulling ourselves into space again. It makes me think, sometimes, that Jordan is right in his history about a one-ship landing. That would explain a lot. If one ship had carried our little zoo out from the mother planet, wherever the hell it is, and if it had been severely damaged on landing so that somehow the history tapes or whatever records there were were lost, the survivors would have nothing but their intelligence. And they'd have been so damned busy during the first few generations rebuilding toward a technological civilization that they wouldn't have bothered with recording history and where they came from. Word of mouth is a chancy way of preserving fact. All right, I'm rambling, but it's all connected, It's all about the Goddamnedest bunch of people I've ever imagined. This world is peopled by four distinct racial types. No type is dominant. One type is a moron-intellectual sort of being, female, and the most humanoid in appearance. They're hairless, with skin much like ours, only a bit thicker and tougher. They have breasts and most of the other female accouterments. They grow to adult-size, a bit smaller than the average U.P. female, but their brains remain at the level of about a six-month-old baby. I've seen one or two of them. They lie in bed, naked, kicking and mewling like infants. But behind the part of the brain that controls their bodily functions is an area that, according to the creeps from Belos II, is like a flesh-and-blood computer. These idiot-computer beings can't control that part of the brain, but it's used by another racial type. This is a male who lives and works with the idiot female and he's a real monster right out of the flicks. He's got scales like a lizard and a chest about the size of a barrel and his head rises from his shoulders in a solid, fleshy cone into a rounded peak. He has no eyes, but has a small mouth and a hairy, inverted nose through which he breathes. All four types have one thing in common. They have red gills on their necks. The gills have something to do with breathing, because the computer morons, whose gills look like they haven't been completely formed, can't go into the outside, except under ideal conditions. The male types living with the computer morons have the gills on the thick, fleshy portion of their tall, domed heads. They see and hear and apparently smell and do a lot of other things with senses much like old-fashioned radar. They can hurt with the power of their minds, but they're gentle. We've observed no attempt to dominate. They can send their senses bouncing off the near planets and—try this one on for size—they can sense the stars. Of course, they're not sending signals all the way there and back, because the nearest star to their sun is four plus light-years distant, but they can feel something, maybe the light from the stars, which is quite a trick since the thickness of the atmosphere makes a summer's day as dark as the inside of a cat's ass. They've got an abstract sense of time that tells them the season, the month, and the day, although they have no names for them. They use pictures to compare the time in relationship to the entire year. Of the two other racial types one is male and one female. The female is the flyer. She uses electromagnetic force in some way that has our boys stumped to lift herself and a considerable load for fantastic distances. More on that later. The other male type is the worker. He's developed some amazing body functions, including the ability to rebuild damaged cells on the DNA level. This healing ability allows him to go out into that hell of a planet and gather food. He likes to travel and bugs around all over the land areas and under the seas when he's not working. He can exist in an atmosphere in which an ant couldn't get a good breath of air by storing oxygen and nutrition in his cells and using these reserves at will. These two types are the breeders. They copulate just once in a lifetime. Once in a lifetime, Jack. How would you like that? All four of the types are ugly by our standards. The male breeder has huge, thick scales that repel both the local radiation and that from the sun. This property in itself is worthy of a lifetime of study for a dozen of our scientists. He has a chest capacity of about four cubic liters. He has eyes, as do the three types other than the radar fellow. The male breeder also has the strongest aesthetic sensibilities. But you've got all this if you've read the rather unusual transcript we sent as exhibit one in this affair. I hope you have read it, thoroughly, because this whole thing means a lot to me, and I sincerely feel that it means a helluva lot to all of us. So here's this society working together. They never, never, except in rare cases of severe law-breaking, do any harm to any living thing. They're the dominant form on the planet, and there's not much else. There's a large, spiderlike thing and another insect type about the size of a phralley dog which looks like an ant and makes a fantastic amount of sting fluid. Then there are the half-plant, half-animal creatures, the size of the period dot on a blinkstat typer, which can eat the atmosphere and synthesize oxygen. These little bugs are keeping the race more or less alive. The people know they're living on a dying planet, but they don't know why it's dying. They have a semi-religion and worship nature as a force for good. Their god is life itself. They think the role of nature is to people worlds with life of an intelligent nature, and to them that means individuals like themselves. But their faith is being tested, because their best minds predict death for the race in about one generation. We think they have plus or minus nine years, New Years, that is, before the air is gone. We may be slightly underestimating their survival capacity, but it is my considered opinion—and the opinion of my staff —that the situation is urgent. They're going to die. The little oxygen-makers they call Breathers are being killed in their natural habitat by a worsening of the sea and air conditions. Colonies of the Breathers are kept inside, but the Breathers are relatively short-lived and cannot be bred satisfactorily in captivity. New Breathers have to constantly be brought in from the sea with much labor and difficulty. And in about nine years there ain't gonna be no supply of new Breathers, as one of my mech-mates says. For the first time in history we're face to face with an intelligent alien