ty 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 society and it almost makes me believe in their nature worship, because we've come on this at a crucial time and we have the power to help them. Basically, that's the case, Jack. We help or they die. I hope you haven't made a decision yet, because now I'm going to hit you right in the balls with a few facts we've dug up. One, our archaeologists have made test borings and excavations. We have to do this in out-of-the-way places, in order to avoid making contact, but we've been able to do some interesting things. It's difficult to state anything with much authority, because by our measurements this world has been in bad shape for the last 75,000 N.Y. You can imagine what 75,000 New Years of corrosive rains and uncontrolled erosion can do to a planet— especially one that has been burned good with atomics. Yep. That's what I said. She was burned bald. Just like the worlds of the planet-killers. Only these people did it the hard way, with old-fashioned atomics. The signs are unmistakable—all the old, decaying isotopes. They must have been very funny bombs they used, because they produced a lot of carbon isotopes with long half-lives. I know that I'm going to be asked how, with the amount of radiation that must have been present 75,000 N.Y. ago to leave this much hot stuff now, anyone at all survived to found this new race. Well, I haven't got the answer, only proof that they did survive, because they are here. I've monitored as many interviews as I could. The ones with the pointed heads who have no eyes or ears call themselves Far Seers. That's because they can send their radarlike senses out to vast distances. The Far Seers are the priests of the nature religion, logically explaining that nature abhors a vacuum as far as life is concerned. The Far Seers believe that all the far suns they can sense have planets and that those planets swarm with life like themselves. Incidentally, Jack, the Far Seers screw the computer beings, called Keepers, with astounding frequency. They're very virile cats, but completely sterile, like that creature out of our mythology, the mule. That is their only pleasure, but they're not just dirty old men, because the Keepers are also sterile but well developed sexually, and enjoy it too. That's just an aside, but I think it shows as much as anything that these fellows have basic human traits. I've looked into the records of the Far Seers, kept in the back part of the minds of the Keepers. I know about as much about the history of this race as they know themselves. I do it, of course, with the help of the little bastard from Belos II, who can't concentrate, but has to keep looking into my mind to see if I'm having too many wet dreams or something. It's interesting to note that these people are about as foggy about their beginnings as we are about ours. They have some incomplete legends, just as we do. They think they're mutations of a race they call the Old Ones. They believe that nature adapts life to meet the conditions of a world. They believe that in times of crisis nature comes up with a New One to pull life through. This is like saying that environment shapes life, isn't it? Here on this world it seems to. These people have adapted to conditions that would kill one of us in nothing flat. Their legends tell of nature forming the First Healer. He could live with what they picture as small, hard projectiles: radiation. He apparently did, for the Healer calls on that strange ability of his to repair radiation-damaged cells and his scales bounce off all kinds of radiation in quantities that would kill a horse. His organs don't collect the bad stuff either. They throw it out and vent it, along with the waste gases and unused toxic content of the air, through the gills. Then this First Healer, breeding with what they call the Old Ones, produced the Keepers and the Far Seers. I'd guess that it was the Old Ones who did in the planet with atomics. There's a beautiful series of pictures in one of their records that is called, roughly, The Book of Rose the Healer. They don't know what a rose is, but the picture of a rose is still in their minds after the conditions that would have produced a rose have been gone for 75,000 N.Y. Rose the Healer said that the Old Ones fornicated even in death, producing the Healers. That sounds rather human, doesn't it? The Healers, of course, were mutants—instant adaptation, believe it or not. I suspect the legends condense the process somewhat. But we have to believe what we see and what we find. We have here a world that, at one time, was highly technological, to the point of atomics. We've found a few decomposing chunks of metal to indicate that they were working with some advanced alloys of an atomic culture type. We've found a sizable city under the sea. We can't get to it because it's under a few hundred feet of sludge, but we detect decomposed metals, stone, everything to indicate that it was a real city. It was submerged, I'd guess, either by the melting of the icecaps or by the distortion of the planetary crust which is indicated by wide rifts, the deepest of which splits the crust almost to the molten core in the south of the western hemisphere. Both these events occurred 75,000 N.Y. ago. We've found a few traces of plastics, but a lot of it must have been burned with the surface stuff. I'm sure that, given time, well find some underground deposits that will tell us more. So this world was much like some of ours, with atomics, metals, and plastics. It killed itself. The present race mutated from the original race, which was also humanoid, because the forms of the things we can identify by instrument in the sunken city point definitely to a humanoid origin. The question is, who were the Old Ones? I think I have an answer to that. I know we don't have enough proof for what I'm coming to, not yet, but I say we have to take the risk and supply the justification later. We followed the prescribed approach to a life-zone planet. We came in slowly and carefully and did a lot of instrument work at long range. When we detected no probes from the planet we looked for a base close in and decided on a large, airless satellite that kept just one face to the planet, as do the satellites of some of our worlds. We came down on the back side and peeked around the horizon with instruments. Although we found nothing, we went through normal routine. We sent crews around to the side facing the planet to probe her and measure her. I had come down with a cold and was sacked out, groggy with drugs, when one of my junior officers came in with his ass in an uproar. What he told me made the drug-wooziness leave me like a hangover after a dose of Zarts. I got into a suit and took a jumper around to where one of my crews were milling around a veritable junkpile. Yep. We were not the first ones to land on that satellite. Someone had been there ahead of us. Two of those someones were still there. This, too, is not in the report, Jack. I suppose it should have been sent immediately Code 1, but you and I both know there's nothing that whets the curiosity of an X&A stat clerk like a Code 1 rating. It would have been all over the U.P. But a Personal-Personal communication like this is fairly sacred. Inside a five-foot-high half-dome of semi-opaque material were two beings with huge chests. They were lying on a little bed with their arms around each other. They looked as if they were asleep, but we knew they had to be dead, because we were on the night side of the satellite and it was colder than hell. There was no air outside and our instruments showed no oxygen inside. We thought they might be breathing the inert gases, but we could detect no movement. It was a male and a female of the breeder species. The female had cute little silvery and gold scales. The male was as horny as any Phebus lizard in any zoo. The thing that stoned our people was the lack of any propellant device. I mean, you could see through the whole fucking thing and the plastic-like material was soft to the touch. There was nothing in it to account for its having got here. The two beings were obviously dead. It took a few hours to get ready, and then I opened the lock. It was a funny thing, that lock. It opened easily, but when it was closed the material overlapped itself and formed an airtight seal. Well, after we'd taken all the pictures and me