Four-Day Planet

rding equipment. When he returned from a final gathering-up in his stateroom, I noticed that he was bulging under his jacket, too, on the lef

at we go off and wait for him to bring it up. I didn't suggest it, either. After all, it was his jeep, and he wasn't our hired p

es to Terra. It would be picked up by the Cape Canaveral when she got in from Odin five hundred hours from now. But except for a few luxury items from Odin, everything we import comes from Terra, and the Peenemünde had started discharging that already. We rode down on a contragravity skid loaded with ammunition. I saw Murell looking curiously at the square cases, marked terran

promenade from which I had come aboard, and stopped for a momen

landed directly on the planet," he said, "but I never expected an

d. "But you have to remember that this place was built close to a hundred years ago, when the population was ten times that much.

f the Fenris Company," he said. "Too much isn't known about what's

nished. Then they started digging in. The Chartered Fenris Company shipped in huge quantities of mining and earth-moving equipment-that put the company in the red more than anything else-and they began making burrow-cities, like the ones built in the Northern H

in one city, here in the archipelago. The sea water stays cooler in the daytime and doesn't

enience in mo

after the city was built, and it was years after the company had gone

The land animals are active during the periods after sunset and after sunrise; when it begins getting colder or hotter, they burrow, or crawl into cav

Sandor had also been mined out below

. Well, originally it was a valley, between two low hills. The city was built in the valley, level by level, and then the tops of the hills were dug off and bulldozed

em. Instead, he was watching the cargo come off-food-stuffs, n

ber, out of reeds harvested in the swamps after sunrise and converted to pulpwood, and we get some good hardwood from the native trees which only grow in four periods of two hundred hours a year. We only use that for furniture, gunstocks, that sort

n something connected with our local production. I went on telling him about our hydroponic farms, and the carniculture plant where any kind of animal tissue we wanted was grown-T

re," I said. "We have a chunk of goose liver about

ndred feet square and two hundred yards apart, that supported the upper city and the thick roof of rock and earth that insulated it. The area we were entering was stacked with tallow-wax waiting to be loaded onto the Cape Canaveral when she came in; it was va

?" he wanted to know. "T

lking up to now, but he answered

for them by the Co-op. When the captain gets paid for the wax he's turned over to the Co-op, he divides the money among th

after it's been turned over for sale to

olut

re both smoking, but that was all right. Tallow-wax will burn, and a wax fire is something to get really excited about, but the ignition point is 750° C., and that's a lot hotter than the end of anybody's cigar. He must have come out the same way we did, and I added that to the "wonder-why" file. Pretty soon, I'd have so many

"Freeze! On your life

hand, firing, and the empty brass flew up and came down on the concrete with a jingle on the heels of the report. We h

nto a shoulder holster under his coat. "Step ca

bout sixteen inches by four at its widest and tapering up in front to a cone about six inches high, into which a rodlike member, darker gray, was slowly c

l like a tractor. The fishpole-aerial thing it had erected out of its head was its stinger, and the yellow stu

ll swear, on a warehouse full of Bibles, Korans, Torah scrolls, Satanist grimoires, Buddhist prayer wheels and Thoran Grandfather-God images, that his hair literally

a couple of yellow stains on the cloth of his trouser leg. I told him to hold still, used my left hand to pull the cloth away from his

users, and said he could have had them cleaned. Bish War

uld remain in the fabric. Then, the next time you were caught in the rain with a s

d: "Get an ambulance, quick. Possible case of tread-snail skin poisoning

through the cloth, and he'd absorbed enough of it through his skin to make him seriously ill. The cop jabbered some more into the radio, and the laborer with the lifter brought it and let i

m a drink out of a flask, smeared a lot of gunk on the spots and slapped plasters over them,

was chewing out everybody indiscriminately, and at the same time mentioning to me that Mr. Fieschi, the superintendent, would be very much pleased if the Times didn't mention the incident at all. I told him that was editorial policy, and to talk to Dad about it. Nobody had any ide

d like an unexpected blow to him. That fitted what I'd begun to think. Finally, he motioned the laborer t

ine Federation Service, commercial type. There aren't many of those on Fenris. A lot of 10-mm's, but mostly South African Sterbergs or

you do publish anything about it, I wish you'd minimize my own part in it. As you have noticed, I have some slight proficiency with lethal ha

es, so Tom lifted the jeep and cut in the horizontal drive. We got into a busy one-way aisle, crowded with lorries hauling food-

r outside sausage skins but without the Co-op markings. They just had th

asked. "It's a long way from the dock

Tom said. "It hasn't been ch

aying cards at a table made out of empty ammunition boxes. I noticed they were all wearing pistols, and when a couple of them saw us, they got up and grabbed rifles. Tom let down and got out of the jeep, going over an