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compounded for emergency use.
Flandry decided that Tryntaf lacked any sense of humor. Most Merseians had one, sometimes gusty,
sometimes cruel,often incomprehensible to men. He had in his turn baffled various of them when he
visited their planet; even after he put a joke into their equivalents, they did not see why it should be funny
that one diner said, Bon appétit and the other said, Ginsberg.
Sure. They differ, same as us. My life could depend on the personality of the commandant down there.
Will I be able to recognize any chance he might give me?
He sought to probe his companion, but was soon left alone on grounds of work to do, except for the
close-mouthed rating who tail-sat by the door.
Watching the view took his mind partly off his troubles. He could pick up visual clues that a layman
would be blind to, identify what they represented, and conclude what the larger pattern must be.
Talwin had no moon maybe once, but not after the invader star had virtually wrecked this system.
Flandry did see two relay satellites glint, in positions indicating they belonged to a synchronous triad. If
the Merseians had installed no more than that, they had a barebones base here. It was what you d expect
at the end of this long a communications line: a watchpost, a depot, a first-stage receiving station for
reports from border-planet agents like Rax.
Aside from their boss, those latter wouldn t have been told Siekh s coordinates, or of its very existence.
They d have courier torpedoes stashed away in the hinterland, target preset and clues to the target
removed. Given elementary precautions, no Imperial loyalist was likely to observe the departure of one.
Replenishment would be more of a problem, dependent on smuggling, but not overly difficult when the
Terran service was undermanned and lax. Conveyance of fresh orders to the agents was no problem at
all; who noticed what mail or what visitors drifted into Rax s dope shop?
The value of Talwin was obvious. Besides surveillance, it allowed closer contact with spies than would
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otherwise be possible. Flandry wondered if his own corps ran an analogous operation out Roidhunate
way.Probably not. The Merseians were too vigilant, the human government too inert, its wealthier citizens
too opposed to pungling up the cost of positive action.
Flandry shook himself, as if physically to cast off apprehension and melancholy, and concentrated on
what he saw.
Clearances given and path computed,the destroyer dropped in a spiral that took her around the planet.
Presumably her track was designed to avoid storms. Cooler air, moving equatorward from the poles,
must turn summer into a monsoon season. Considering input energy, atmospheric pressure (which
Tryntaf had mentioned was twenty percent greater than Terran), and rotation period (a shade over
eighteen hours, he had said), weather surely got more violent here than ever at Home; and a long, thin,
massive object like a destroyer was more vulnerable to wind than you might think.
Water vapor rose high before condensing into clouds. Passing over dayside below those upper layers,
Flandry got a broad view.
A trifle smaller (equatorial diameter 0.97) and less dense than Terra, Talwin in this era had but a single
continent. Roughly wedge-shaped, it reached from the north-pole area with its narrow end almost on the
equator. Otherwise the land consisted of islands. While multitudinous, in the main they were thinly
scattered.
Flandry guessed that the formation and melting of huge icecaps in the course of the twice-Terran year
disturbed isostatic balance. Likewise, the flooding and great rainstorms of summer, the freezing of winter,
would speed erosion and hence the redistribution of mass. Tectony must proceed at a furious rate;
earthquake, vulcanism, the sinking of old land and the rising of new, must be geologically common
occurrences.
He made out one mountain range, running east-west along the 400-kilometer width of the continent near
its middle. Those peaks dwarfed theHimalayas but were snowless, naked rock. Elsewhere, elevations
were generally low, rounded, worn. North of the wall, the country seemed to be swamp. Whew! That
means in winter the icecup grows down to 45 degrees latitude! The glaciers grind everything flat. The far
southlands were a baked desolation, scoured by hurricanes. Quite probably, at midsummer lakes and
rivers there didn t simply dry up, they boiled; and the equatorial ocean became a biological fence. It
would be intriguing to know how evolution had diverged in the two hemispheres.
Beyond the sterile tropics, life not long ago had been outrageously abundant, jungle choking the central
zone, the arctic abloom with low-growing plants. Now annual drought was taking its toll in many
sections, leaves withering, stems crumbling, fires running wild, bald black patches of desiccation and
decay. But other districts, especially near the coasts, got enough rain yet. Immense herds of grazers were
visible on open ground; wings filled the air; shoal waters were darkened by weeds and swimmers. Most
islands remained similarly fecund.
The dominant color of vegetation was blue, in a thousand shades the photosynthetic molecule was not
chlorophyll, then, though likely to be a close chemical relative but there were the expected browns,
reds, yellows, the unexpected and stingingly Homelike splashes of green.
Descending, trailing a thunderclap, the ship crossed nightside. Flandry used photomultiplier and infrared
step-up controls to go on with his watching. It confirmed the impressions he had gathered by day.
And the ship was back under the hidden sun, low, readying for setdown. Her latitude was about 40
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degrees. In the north, the lesser members of the giant range gave way to foothills of their own. Flandry
made out one volcano in that region, staining heaven with smoke. A river flowed thence, cataracting
through canyons until it became broad and placid in the wooden plains further south. The diffuse light
made it shine dully, like lead, on its track through yonder azure lands. Finally it ran out in a
kilometers-wide bay.
The greenish-gray sea creamed white with surf along much of the coast. The tidal pull of Siekh in
summer approximated that of Luna and Sol on Terra, and ocean currents flowed strongly. For some
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