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.They have no witnesses.If they report honestly, it’s put down to cabin fever or nitrogen poisoning.Mostly they don’t report.And then if some of it comes out later, it becomes barroom gossip, and the facts are soon lost in hype and garble.You know?.Some of the stories may be nonsense, but some of them have to be true, and very important.I feel deeply that someone should get it all down straight, while there’s still time.I’m trying.”He grunted; not hostile, but not forthcoming either.“Hal said you had quite a story.”Instead of answering, he shot a blue gleam of fury at Hal behind the bar.“I use no names, by the way; I protect identities every way I can.My records are under numbers, which refer to other numbers, and the master set is in my safe on Pallas.Also I can disguise all the nonessential detail you want.You did experience something extraordinary, didn’t you?”He really looked at me then, and I saw in the depths of the blue eyes a pain eating at him, a loss barely to be endured.“Hal says you don’t take the first runs anymore, after.whatever happened.”“No.I stick with the follow-up teams, where it’s safe.”He had a good, patient voice, underlaid with obscure self-mockery.I saw he was drinking Hal’s blue doubles, but they hadn’t affected him yet.I knew he didn’t mean physically safe; the teams going in to set up bases on Earth-type planets have an unpleasant casualty rate.“Could you tell me why?”He was gazing beyond me.“Please, if you can.It’s so important.”“Important.” He sighed; I sensed he really wanted to let it out, but the self-discipline of silence was strong.“Well.we were way outside the Arm, see, checking out a cluster of promising-looking second-generation stars— Did you mean that, about the codes?”I showed him my notebook: nothing but numbers.“Somewhere in here is a woman who saw a flight of winged hominids take off into empty space.And singing, where of course no sound could carry.Another is a man who fought a huge invisible hand in his cabin.They put the wreckage down to space paranoia: he’d been out twenty trips.You see, I can’t tell who they are myself until I get back and go through the locked safes routine.Does it matter, so long as the facts are there?”He sighed again, yielding.“Well, all right.Anyway, we didn’t find anything useful, just gas giants.I took the last run, out to a GS at extreme range.And I saw it had two inner planets in the life zone.One of them was nothing but a cinder, the atmosphere read solid CO2, with the runaway heat effect.But the other was cool, it read out fine.I don’t mean habitable yet, I mean it had its permanent atmosphere, nitrogen and water vapor, with the CO2 going down fast, being taken up by calcium silicate rock.Not a trace of free oxy, of course—or rather, just a twitch from zero.Big ranges of volcanoes blowing like mad.It had to be changing fast.I hadn’t heard of anyone catching an Earth-type planet right on the edge of atmospheric flip-over, so I decided to run on in for a look.I had plenty of fuel.The problem was air.Those scouts don’t have a bionic regeneration like the big ships, maybe you know that”“I thought you had some sort of catalytic recycler.”“Oh yes.Just enough to let you die slow after the tanks are empty.You have to figure close.But I had enough for two orbits easy.And the thing was, as soon as I got within tight scan range, I knew I had to get closer.There was.activity.”‘The vulcanism?”“No.” He was staring past me, with his teeth bared.I was afraid Hal’s specials were getting to him, but he went on very lucidly.“It was a half-and-half planet, you see.All the landmass on one side, and the other all ocean.Not like our ordinary oceans, of course, not water.Hot and shallow and mephitic.What they used to call the primordial soup.Lot of electrical storm action going on
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