The star swallowed him up. He was stretched infinitely long, compressed infinitely thin, and vanished with it from existence.

  The ship prowled the farther reaches. Much might yet be learned.

  Captain Szili visited Eloise in sickbay. Physically she was recovering. “I’d call him a man,” he declared through the machine mumble, “except that’s not praise enough. We weren’t even his kin, and he died to save us.”

  She regarded him from eyes more dry than seemed natural. He could just make out her answer. “He is a man. Doesn’t he have an immortal soul too?”

  “Well, uh, yes, if you believe in souls, yes, I’d agree.” She shook her head. “But why can’t he go to his rest?”

  He glanced about for the medic and found they were alone in the narrow metal room. “What do you mean?” He made himself pat her hand. “I know, he was a good friend of yours. Still, his must have been a merciful death. Quick, clean; I wouldn’t mind going out like that.”

  “For him…yes, I suppose so. It has to be. But—” She could not continue. Suddenly she covered her ears. “Stop! Please!”

  Szili made soothing noises and left. In the corridor he encountered Mazundar. “How is she?” the physicist asked.

  The captain scowled. “Not good. I hope she doesn’t crack entirely before we can get her to a psychiatrist.”

  “Why, what is wrong?”

  “She thinks she can hear him.”

  Mazundar smote fist into palm. “I hoped otherwise,” he breathed.

  Szili braced himself and waited.

  “She does,” Mazundar said. “Obviously she does.”

  “But that’s impossible! He’s dead!”

  “Remember the time dilation,” Mazundar replied. “He fell from the sky and perished swiftly, yes. But in supernova time. Not the same as ours. To us, the final stellar collapse takes an infinite number of years. And telepathy has no distance limits.” The physicist started walking fast, away from that cabin. “He will always be with her.”

  The Problem of Pain

  Maybe only a Christian can understand this story. In that case I don’t qualify. But I do take an interest in religion, as part of being an amateur psychologist, and—for the grandeur of its language if nothing else—a Bible is among the reels that accompany me wherever I go. This was one reason Peter Berg told me what had happened in his past. He desperately needed to make sense of it, and no priest he’d talked to had quite laid his questions to rest. There was an outside chance that an outside viewpoint like mine would see what a man within the faith couldn’t.

  His other reason was simple loneliness. We were on Lucifer, as part of a study corporation. That world is well named. It will never be a real colony for any beings whose ancestors evolved amidst clean greenery. But it might be marginally habitable, and if so, its mineral wealth would be worth exploiting. Our job was to determine whether that was true. The gentlest-looking environment holds a thousand death traps until you have learned what the difficulties are and how to grip them. (Earth is no exception.) Sometimes you find problems which can’t be solved economically, or can’t be solved at all. Then you write off the area or the entire planet, and look for another.

  We’d contracted to work three standard years on Lucifer. The pay was munificent, but presently we realized that no bank account could buy back one day we might have spent beneath a kindlier sun. It was a knowledge we carefully avoided discussing with teammates.

  About midway through, Peter Berg and I were assigned to do an in-depth investigation of a unique cycle in the ecology of the northern middle latitudes. This meant that we settled down for weeks—which ran into months—in a sample region, well away from everybody else to minimize human disturbances. An occasional supply flitter gave us our only real contact; electronics were no proper substitute, especially when that hell-violent star was forever disrupting them.

  Under such circumstances, you come to know your partner maybe better than you know yourself. Pete and I got along well. He’s a big, sandy-haired, freckle-faced young man, altogether dependable, with enough kindliness, courtesy, and dignity that he need not make a show of them. Soft-spoken, he’s a bit short in the humor department. Otherwise I recommend him as a companion. He has a lot to tell from his own wanderings, yet he’ll listen with genuine interest to your memories and brags; he’s well-read too, and a good cook when his turn comes; he plays chess at just about my level of skill.

  I already knew he wasn’t from Earth, had in fact never been there, but from Aeneas, nearly 200 light-years distant, more than 300 from Lucifer. And, while he’d gotten an education at the new little university in Nova Roma, he was raised in the outback. Besides, that town is only a far-off colonial capital. It helped explain his utter commitment to belief in a God who became flesh and died for love of man. Not that I scoff. When he said his prayers, night and morning in our one-room shelterdome, trustingly as a child, I didn’t rag him nor he reproach me. Of course, over the weeks, we came more and more to talk about such matters.

  At last he told me of that which haunted him.

  We’d been out through the whole of one of Lucifer’s long, long days; we’d toiled, we’d sweated, we’d itched and stunk and gotten grimy and staggered from weariness, we’d come near death once: and we’d found the uranium-concentrating root which was the key to the whole weirdness around us. We came back to base as day’s fury was dying in the usual twilight gale; we washed, ate something, went to sleep with the hiss of storm-blown dust for a lullaby. Ten or twelve hours later we awoke and saw, through the vitryl panels, stars cold and crystalline beyond this thin air, auroras aflame, landscape hoar, and the twisted things we called trees all sheathed in glittering ice.

  “Nothing we can do now till dawn,” I said, “and we’ve earned a celebration.” So we prepared a large meal, elaborate as possible—breakfast or supper, what relevance had that here? We drank wine in the course of it, and afterward much brandy while we sat, side by side in our loungers, watching the march of constellations which Earth or Aeneas never saw. And we talked. Finally we talked of God.

  “—maybe you can give me an idea,” Pete said. In the dim light, his face bore a struggle. He stared before him and knotted his fingers.

  “M-m, I dunno,” I said carefully. “To be honest, no offense meant, theological conundrums strike me as silly.”

  He gave me a direct blue look. His tone was soft: “That is, you feel the paradoxes don’t arise if we don’t insist on believing?”

  “Yes. I respect your faith, Pete, but it’s not mine. And if I did suppose a, well, a spiritual principle or something is behind the universe—” I gestured at the high and terrible sky “—in the name of reason, can we confine, can we understand whatever made that, in the bounds of one little dogma?”

  “No. Agreed. How could finite minds grasp the infinite? We can see parts of it, though, that’ve been revealed to us.” He drew breath. “Way back before space travel, the Church decided Jesus had come only to Earth, to man. If other intelligent races need salvation—and obviously a lot of them do!—God will have made His suitable arrangements for them. Sure. However, this does not mean Christianity is not true, or that certain different beliefs are not false.”

  “Like, say, polytheism, wherever you find it?”

  “I think so. Besides, religions evolve. The primitive faiths see God, or the gods, as power; the higher ones see Him as justice; the highest see Him as love.” Abruptly he fell silent. I saw his fist clench, until he grabbed up his glass and drained it and refilled it in nearly a single savage motion.

  “I must believe that,” he whispered.

  I waited a few seconds, in Lucifer’s crackling night stillness, before saying: “An experience made you wonder?”

  “Made me...disturbed. Mind if I tell you?”

  “Certainly not.” I saw he was about to open himself; and I may be an unbeliever, but I know what is sacred.

  “Happened about five years ago. I was on my first real job. So was the—” his voice stumbled the least bit—“the wife I had then. We were fresh out of school and apprenticeship, fresh into marriage.” In an effort at detachment: “Our employers weren’t human. They were Ythrians. Ever heard of them?”

  I sought through my head. The worlds, races, beings are unknowably many, in this tiny corner of this one dust-mote galaxy which we have begun to explore a little. “Ythrians, Ythrians...wait. Do they fly?”

  “Yes. Surely one of the most glorious sights in creation. Your Ythrian isn’t as heavy as a man, of course; adults mass around twenty-five or thirty kilos—but his wingspan goes up to six meters, and when he soars with those feathers shining gold-brown in the light, or stoops in a crack of thunder and whistle of wind—”

  “Hold on,” I said. “I take it Ythri’s a terrestroid planet?”

  “Pretty much. Somewhat smaller and drier than Earth, somewhat thinner atmosphere—about like Aeneas, in fact, which it’s not too far from as interstellar spaces go. You can live there without special protection. The biochemistry’s quite similar to ours.”

  “Then how the devil can those creatures be that size? The wing loading’s impossible, when you have only cell tissue to oxidize for power. They’d never get off the ground.”

  “Ah, but they have antlibranchs as well.” Pete smiled, though it didn’t go deep. “Those look like three gills, sort of, on either side, below the wings. They’re actually more like bellows, pumped by the wing muscles. Extra oxygen is forced directly into the bloodstream during flight. A biological supercharger system.”

  “Well, I’ll be a...never mind what.” I considered, in delight, this new facet of nature’s inventiveness. “Um-m-m...if they spend energy at that rate, they’ve got to have appetites to match.”

  “Right. They’re carnivores. A number of them are still hunters. The advanced societies are based on ranching. In either case, obviously, it takes a lot of meat animals, a lot of square kilometers, to support one Ythrian. So they’re fiercely territorial. They live in small groups—single families or extended households—which attack, with intent to kill, any uninvited outsider who doesn’t obey an order to leave.”

  “And still they’re civilized enough to hire humans for space exploration?”

  “Uh-huh. Remember, being flyers, they’ve never needed to huddle in cities in order to have ready communication. They do keep a few towns, mining or manufacturing centers, but those are inhabited mostly by wing-clipped slaves. I’m glad to say that institution’s dying out as they get modern machinery.”

  “By trade?” I guessed.

  “Yes,” Pete replied. “When the first Grand Survey discovered them, their most advanced culture was at an Iron Age level of technology; no industrial revolution, but plenty of sophisticated minds around, and subtle philosophies.” He paused. “That’s important to my question—that the Ythrians, at least of the Planha-speaking choths, are not barbarians and have not been for many centuries. They’ve had their equivalents of Socrates, Aristotle, Confucius, Galileo, yes, and their prophets and seers.”

  After another mute moment: “They realized early what the visitors from Earth implied, and set about attracting traders and teachers. Once they had some funds, they sent their promising young folk off-planet to study. I met several at my own university, which is why I got my job offer. By now they have a few spacecraft and native crews. But you’ll understand, their technical people are spread thin, and in several branches of knowledge they have no experts. So they employ humans.”

  He went on to describe the typical Ythrian: warm-blooded, feathered like a golden eagle (though more intricately) save for a crest on the head, and yet not a bird. Instead of a beak, a blunt muzzle full of fangs juts before two great eyes. The female bears her young alive. While she does not nurse them, they have lips to suck the juices of meat and fruits, wherefore their speech is not hopelessly unlike man’s. What were formerly the legs have evolved into arms bearing three taloned fingers, flanked by two thumbs, on each hand. Aground, the huge wings fold downward and, with the help of claws at the angles, give locomotion. That is slow and awkward—but aloft, ah!

  “They become more alive, flying, than we ever do,” Pete murmured. His gaze had lost itself in the shuddering auroras overhead. “They must: the metabolic rate they have then, and the space around them, speed, sky, a hundred winds to ride on and be kissed by…That’s what made me think Enherrian, in particular, believed more keenly than I could hope to. I saw him and others dancing, high, high in the air, swoops, glides, hoverings, sunshine molten on their plumes; I asked what they did, and was told they were honoring God.”

  He sighed. “Or that’s how I translated the Planha phrase, rightly or wrongly,” he went on. “Olga and I had taken a cram course, and our Ythrian teammates all knew Anglic; but nobody’s command of the foreign tongue was perfect. It couldn’t be. Multiple billion years of separate existence, evolution, history—what a miracle that we could think as alike as we did!

  “However, you could call Enherrian religious, same as you could call me that, and not be too grotesquely off the mark. The rest varied, just like humans. Some were also devout, some less, some agnostics or atheists; two were pagans, following the bloody rites of what was called the Old Faith. For that matter, my Olga—” the knuckles stood forth where he grasped his tumbler of brandy—“had tried, for my sake, to believe as I did, and couldn’t.

  “Well. The New Faith interested me more. It was new only by comparison—at least half as ancient as mine. I hoped for a chance to study it, to ask questions and compare ideas. I really knew nothing except that it was monotheistic, had sacraments and a theology though no official priesthood, upheld a high ethical and moral standard—for Ythrians, I mean. You can’t expect a race which can only live by killing animals, and has an oestrous cycle, and is incapable by instinct of maintaining what we’d recognize as a true nation or government, and on and on—you can’t expect them to resemble Christians much. God has given them a different message. I wished to know what. Surely we could learn from it.” Again he paused. “After all...being a faith with a long tradition…and not static but seeking, a history of prophets and saints and believers…I thought it must know God is love. Now what form would God’s love take to an Ythrian?”

  He drank. I did too, before asking cautiously: “Uh, where was this expedition?”

  Pete stirred in his lounger. “To a system about eighty light-years from Ythri’s,” he answered. “The original Survey crew had discovered a terrestroid planet there. They didn’t bother to name it. Prospective colonists would choose their own name anyway. Those could be human or Ythrian, conceivably both—if the environment proved out.

  “Offhand, the world—our group called it, unofficially, Gray, after that old captain—the world looked brilliantly promising. It’s intermediate in size between Earth and Ythri, surface gravity 0.8 terrestrial; slightly more irradiation, from a somewhat yellower sun, than Earth gets, which simply makes it a little warmer; axial tilt, therefore seasonal variations, a bit less than terrestrial; length of year about three-quarters of ours, length of day a bit under half; one small, close-in, bright moon; biochemistry similar to ours—we could eat most native things, though we’d require imported crops and livestock to supplement the diet. All in all, seemingly well-nigh perfect.”

  “Rather remote to attract Earthlings at this early date,” I remarked. “And from your description, the Ythrians won’t be able to settle it for quite a while either.”

  “They think ahead,” Pete responded. “Besides, they have scientific curiosity and, yes, in them perhaps even more than in the humans who went along, a spirit of adventure. Oh, it was a wonderful thing to be young in that band!”

  He had not yet reached thirty, but somehow his cry was not funny.

  He shook himself. “Well, we had to make sure,” he said. “Besides planetology, ecology, chemistry, oceanography, meteorology, a million and a million mysteries to unravel for their own sakes—we must scout out the death traps, whatever those might be.

  “At first everything went like Mary’s smile on Christmas morning. The spaceship set us off—it couldn’t be spared to linger in orbit—and we established base on the largest continent. Soon our hundred-odd dispersed across the globe, investigating this or that. Olga and I made part of a group on the southern shore, where a great gulf swarmed with life. A strong current ran eastward from there, eventually striking an archipelago which deflected it north. Flying over those waters, we spied immense, I mean immense, patches—no, floating islands—of vegetation, densely interwoven, grazed on by monstrous marine creatures, no doubt supporting any number of lesser plant and animal species.

  “We wanted a close look. Our camp’s sole aircraft wasn’t good for that. Anyhow, it was already in demand for a dozen jobs. We had boats, though, and launched one. Our crew was Enherrian, his wife Whell, their grown children Rusa and Arrach, my beautiful new bride Olga, and me. We’d take three or four Gray days to reach the nearest atlantis weed, as Olga dubbed it. Then we’d be at least a week exploring before we turned back—a vacation, a lark, a joy.”

  He tossed off his drink and reached for the bottle. “You ran into grief,” I prompted.

  “No.” He bent his lips upward, stiffly. “It ran into us. A hurricane. Unpredicted; we knew very little about that planet. Given the higher solar energy input and, especially, the rapid rotation, the storm was more violent than would’ve been possible on Earth. We could only run before it and pray.

  “At least, I prayed, and imagined that Enherrian did.”

  Wind shrieked, hooted, yammered, hit flesh with fists and cold knives. Waves rumbled in that driven air, black and green and fang-white, fading from view as the sun sank behind the cloud-roil whieh hid it. Often a monster among them loomed castlelike over the gunwale. The boat slipped by, spilled into the troughs, rocked onto the crests and down again. Spindrift, icy, stinging, bitter on lips and tongue, made a fog across her length.