Josiah stood silently, watching as the final team returned to the shuttle. To his dismay, neither the chief engineer nor the doctor wasted so much of a glance in his direction as they returned to the shuttle, ascending the ramp and stepping inside, presumably to report to the captain. Josiah caught a quick glance at Salynn, whose face seemed flushed with what looked like the Thrynn equivalent of shame, and he wondered what MOTO had done to convince the young crewman to go along with his plan. Once it was clear that the rest of the crew was not going to be an issue, MOTO and Josiah entered the terrain vehicle, and returned to the landing site. MOTO and Josiah disembarked, waiting in the clearing while the rest of the crew loaded the lander up the disembarkation ramp, and several minutes later the captain returned.

  Captain Russell gave MOTO a pleased nod. “I have the rest of the crew preparing for takeoff. MOTO, please move the supplies off the shuttle for the examiner here. We want to make his stay as comfortable as possible.”

  The android’s photoreceptors seemed to darken momentarily in agreement, and then he headed up the ramp, taking the piled supplies that he had readied in the lander bay. Josiah’s eyes searched the captain’s face for some sign of anything that he was thinking, but found nothing.

  MOTO had just brought down a crate of emergency rations, laying them down just outside the clearing, when everything happened at once.

  MOTO straightened suddenly, keenly aware of a threat Josiah had not sensed. A single blast came from the doorway of the landing bay. The chief engineer had fired the laser rifle he held with precision, taking the android in what would be the kneecap for a Human being.

  “GO!” The captain was already pushing Josiah towards the ramp, which had started to ascend, and the younger man ran at full speed. To his horror, the android had taken no time at all to react. Dropping the supplies he had been carrying, MOTO bolted into pursuit, but even with his enhanced speed he was too far to make it in time in his injured condition.

  The chief engineer seemed like he wanted to fire another shot, but clearly thought better of it, simply hitting the hatch close. Josiah felt himself being shoved from behind, and the captain fell atop him, slamming him into the far bulkhead of the landing bay. From behind him, a metallic sounding strike against the lower hull made him realize how close he had come to death, and the memory of the glowing photoreceptors seemed to haunt him when he closed his eyes.

  The captain didn’t allow him time to think about it. “Liftoff!”

  Xixptrixx didn’t need to be told twice. With a dull roar, the ship shot into the sky, and Josiah felt another sharp pain as he slammed into the terrain vehicle, holding on desperately to avoid sliding further down the bay. A strong grip wrapped around his arm, and Salynn, already braced against one of the seats, kept him in place with a strength few Humans could have matched. The captain, having better prepared himself, maintained his own balance with one of handholds on the terrain vehicle’s exterior.

  In a moment, the ship leveled out, and Josiah was able to get his feet under him again in the artificial gravity. From the far end of the bay, the doctor sent over a withering glare that seemed to encompass all four men. “Now, would someone like to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  The captain gave a brief retelling, and Josiah had the dubious pleasure of seeing the doctor at a loss for words for once. "I just can't believe it."

  "It makes sense, in a convoluted sort of way," Josiah replied, watching the stars as well. "MOTO was just as alone as the rest of you, perhaps more so, and was processing it the best way that he knew how.”

  The doctor looked at Josiah strangely. “And what if MOTO had not been the threat, or if the captain had gone along with his idea?”

  The examiner smiled. "I never doubted him for an instant."

  The communications console took that moment to activate, and Josiah glanced over, wondering if the android had found a way to make contact.

  "Redoubtable Lander," the voice that came back was not familiar, and shockingly enough, not Human, the dulcet tones of a Thrynn clear even through the light comm distortion. "This is Captain Pyash T’threissiiioi of the Fortune. We have come at the behest of Examiner Benton. Is he available?"

  The captain glanced over at him sharply, and the examiner could not help but to shrug slightly. "Maybe for an instant, at least..."

  Through The Time Lens

  By Robert Silverberg

  There’s an ancient Elowan proverb, said to go back to the days of the long-vanished Old Empire:

  Don’t ever trust a Thrynn bearing gifts.

  There’s no love lost between Elowan and Thrynn and never has been, but even the most trusting Humans are leery of them. My grandmother used to say, “If you have a Thrynn as a dinner guest, be on your best behavior, but count the spoons afterward.”

  I suppose it’s because the Thrynn are reptilian lifeforms that we’re uneasy. Most Humans simply aren’t comfortable around reptiles, an attitude that stems from an ancient Earth legend about some difficulty involving a snake, an apple, and the first female Human. The snake tempted her with an apple and all kinds of trouble followed. So when we found out that a Thrynn colony on a planet called Jathamassa Seven was looking to hire a mostly Human crew for a lot of MU, our first reaction was suspicion.

  The price is too good, that’s the problem.

  They’re only offering basic expenses, but they’re willing to cough up a twenty-five percent royalty interest for any discoveries we make on their behalf – mineral, biological, whatever. It’s like handing us a quarter of the planet. We had visions of glorious mining concessions that would pour forth billions of monetary units’ worth of promethium, platinum, plutonium, even endurium – you name it – unto the Nth generation. So what’s the catch? We couldn’t understand why they’d be willing to pay so much. It was their planet, after all. They claimed and colonized it and whatever was there belonged to them. And why did the Thrynn want Humans for the exploration job? Why not do it themselves, or send a bunch of androids in?

  Well, we were an all-Human crew. That fits the requirements. Not that we intended any racial prejudice – Humans, Elowan, Velox, and Thrynn manage to live serenely side by side on our home world of Arth – but it just happened that the six of us all belonged to the same species.

  Despite any suspicions we have had about the job, we weren’t in a position to be picky.

  We six – Mik Gahune, Gabe Vicinanza, Fran Jibor, Nikko Clark, Ned Stackman, and I – had been partners for nine years. Our basic notion was to go into a line of work that would let us tour the far reaches of the universe, see a lot of fantastically wonderful places, and make a bundle of money through exploration and mining. We’re still pretty poor, but two out of three ain’t bad.

  Our last expedition had been a disaster and a half. The rodnium turned out to be a spectrographic error; the planet we went looking for was one of those gravity-trap places, where you think you’re dealing with the optimal gravity and suddenly discover that you aren’t; and the flux that we very hastily jumped into sent us right down the chute into the Squeeze Zone that lies upspin of Uhlek Central.

  By the time we came limping back into Starport a year-and· a-half later, our beloved ISS Indomitable looked like a reject from the Galactic Garbage Museum.

  We weren’t in much better shape ourselves.

  The bank kindly worked out an arrangement that allowed us to finance a new set of engines, replacements for our cargo pods, a complete shielding makeover, and an assortment of trifling medical work: Three joint jobs, two limb regrows, a couple of optical implants, five sets of teflon/platinum eardrums – well, you get the idea. We were a mess and it took a bank loan of hyper-galactic size to put us back together again. Now all we had to do was turn approximately nine monetary units out of every ten we earned over to the financial folks for the next couple of eternities–unless we strike something really big that would let us retire the loan a little sooner. It’s sheer and simple indentured servitude. Our only alternative was to file for bankruptcy and go into some mundane line of work among the Groundlings as scanning clerks, say, or wiper technicians. Anyone who’s ever ridden the flux lines will understand why we weren’t about to do that. There wasn’t one of us who wouldn’t rather be in hock for the rest of his life than have to endure the daily grind of Groundside existence.

  That’s why we took the Jathamassa Seven job.

  You didn’t need a mental augmentation implant to suspect that there was something fishy about it.

  But what if there wasn’t? What if we were overestimating, for once, the devious, cunning nature of the Thrynn? And what if we could somehow manage to score the big strike that would rescue us from debt eternal?

  It was worth the gamble, we thought.

  We found out later that the job was on the board for five months and we were the first crew who ever nibbled at it. Well, it did look too good to be true, and very little that looks that way actually is. I guess there’s something about carrying a debt that could take you five lifetimes to pay off that makes you do funny things.

  Jathamassa was an F-class sun that lay outward and downspin from Arth, somewhere below the 50th parallel.

  According to our starmap, the system has eight planets. The inner four are bunched very close to the sun and have climates ranging from searing to inferno. The outer two are very far out and frigid indeed. But Jathamassa Six and Jathamassa Seven, whose orbits both lay in a central band quite distinct from those of the inner and outer worlds, were well within the acceptable climatic range and their gravity was reasonable, so both worlds had been claimed and colonized in relatively recent times–Six about twenty years back and Seven somewhat later.

  When the Indomitable emerged from the flux in the Jathamassa system, we unexpectedly found ourselves nose to nose with a disagreeable bunch of Spemin pirates who preferred immediate combat to any sort of parleying. That’s one of the little surprises you often get in a galaxy full of intelligent alien races that don’t necessarily respect each other’s right-of-way.

  The Spemin weren’t members of the Old Empire and they seem to regard other species as fair game.

  A bad mistake on the part of these Spemin, because our new shielding was state-of-the-art stuff and Gabe Vicinanza, our navigator and weapons man, has a 250 aptitude trigger finger. The Spemin subsequently departed from the material plane in a flash, and we came out of the short but nasty little battle needing only some minor refitting around the vanes. Nikko Clark, our engineer, reported that any competent body shop would be able to handle the job, but our Thrynn employers weren’t able to help us out. We made contact with Jathamassa Seven and a Thrynn named Vryssh, with icy blue eyes and glossy green skin that looked like extremely high-quality leather, came on screen. He was an elegant creature, with the long neck and whiplike tail characteristic of his species. He held himself bolt upright. “We are sorry,” he said, in a soft, hissing Thrynn tone that made him sound not sorry in the slightest, “but we have no such repair facilities here. You will have to make a stop at Jathamassa Six for whatever work you need.”

  Oddly enough, Six and Seven were under separate colonial administration. Seven, of course, belonged to the reptilian Thrynn. But Six was a joint Elowan-Velox operation. Ordinarily you wouldn’t find Elowan setting foot within a dozen parsecs of a Thrynn world, but I suppose the profits they were pulling out of Jathamassa Six were sufficient consolation for any psychic discomfort they might be experiencing as a result of the presence of their ancient enemies on the next planet over.

  Jathamassa Six, you see, is the only place in the known universe where nebula jade is found.

  Aside from endurium–the near-miraculous substance that makes super-photonic galactic travel possible–I doubt that there’s any commodity traded anywhere in the galaxy which is quite as expensive, kilogram for kilogram, as nebula jade.

  A Velox communications officer was on duty when we called Six for permission to land and repair the ship. The Velox officer gave us a chilly bug-eyed stare of appraisal and wanted to know what we were doing in their vicinity.

  I’ve never really warmed to the Velox–it’s hard for me to take a chummy attitude toward red insects with compound eyes, even if they are a hard-working and highly intelligent species–but Mik Gahune handled the call, and Mik knows all about how to deal with the Velox. He immediately adopted a posture of high obsequiousness, an attitude which brings good results during transactions with the Velox.

  In a galaxy where Humans are just one of many races, you need to keep the quirks of the other species dearly in mind if you want to get anything accomplished.

  Mik said straightforwardly that we were here to do a job for the Thrynn on Seven but we had run into a little trouble with some Spemin and needed to have our vanes scraped and realigned. The Velox seemed to respond well to the obsequiousness but pointed out that Six was a jointly owned world and the local Elowan would not countenance a landing if any Thrynn were on board. We assured her that we had an all-Human crew, but before she let us land, she wanted to run a credit check on us.

  That was the last thing we wanted her to do, considering the state of our bank account, so while Gahune killed some time conversing, I got on the subspace horn to our friend Vryssh and told him to advance us enough to cover our repair bills.

  Vryssh didn’t seem to understand the concept of an “advance.”

  Matters got a little tense as I spelled everything out, up to and including, that if he wanted his goddamned job handled at all he better see to it that our ship was made whole, and we didn’t have the MU to pay for it ourselves.

  He hissed concession and said they’d pay for the repairs and deduct the cost from our share of profits, if any. We could bill the repair job–so long as it didn’t exceed 8000 mu’s–to an account at the Rock of Truth Bank in Vimipotin on Arth. Mik Gahune passed this information along to the Velox who ran a confirm on it by sub-etheric wave–the Velox pinch every monetary unit until it screams–and after a lot of long distance, back-and-forth palaver we were permitted to land.

  Jathamassa Six was not one of the great beauty spots of the galaxy. What you see at the surface isn’t solid ground, but only a bewildering tangle of long rubbery blue-green vines thick as a man’s thigh, tightly interwoven to form a kind of gigantic trampoline that stretches from pole to pole.

  The vines are rough and sticky, with warts and humps rising everywhere, and constantly contract and expand, giving off a strange breathy sound like a sigh of agony.

  Anyone who works at the surface travels from place to place over these vines using vehicles that have, instead of wheels, long thin legs ending in huge hand-shaped clamps. The vehicles make their way around like giant insects, grasping and then releasing the strands of the planetary vines as they pull themselves forward.

  A veil of thick soupy clouds hides the sun the whole day long, giving the place a steamy, dismal, oppressive feel. A warm clammy rain falls all the time. The gravity on Six is light, but instead of giving you an exhilarating feeling, it simply adds to the general feeling of instability and gloom.

  What passes for a spaceport there is somewhere deep down in the bowels of the planet. You are guided in for landing in the middle of a huge symplexium disk sitting atop the mat of vines, and then the disk rises open and an elevator conveys you, ship and all, into the hideous subterranean depths. Below is all one great, spongy mass, hundreds of kilometers deep. Wide low-roofed tunnels run through it, crossing and crossing again. The walls of those tunnels are moist and pink, like intestines, and a kind of sickly phosphorescent illumination comes from them, a feeble glow that cuts through the darkness without giving comfort to the eyes. The whole planet is like that.

  The spongy underground is the substructure of the vines, the mother-substance.

  The vines that spring from it are actually its roots – which reach up, not down, so they can convey moisture to the substructure and carry on some kind of photosynthetic process in the open air.

  As for the tunnels through the substructure, they are the work of enormous worm-like creatures who spend their entire lifespan gnawing through the spongy stuff and excreting rivers of slime. These things have been eating their way through the underground world of Jathamassa Six since the beginning of time, leaving the tunnels behind. They’re nothing more than live eating-machines, a couple of kilometers long, mindless, unstoppable. These are the creatures that produce nebula jade.

  The Velox, seeing how restless we were becoming after a couple of days waiting for repairs and cooling our heels at the spaceport, offered us a tour of the jade mines. I’ll give them credit for that much: they treated us decently enough once we had gone through the rituals of friendliness. (Their Elowan partners, by contrast, wouldn’t have anything to do with us. I suppose because they knew we were hirelings of the detested Thrynn of Jathamassa Seven.)

  The jade-mine tour was – well – interesting.

  I suppose that’s as tactful a word as any.

  It seems that one of the other life-forms of Jathamassa Six is a huge insect with tremendous golden-green eyes and a great hooked beak. These things use their beaks to inject the worms with their gastric juices and actually tunnel into their bodies, where they feed on the worms’ tissues and, in time, lay their eggs. It takes years before a worm’s dull brain realizes that it has been invaded in this way. But finally it gets the news, and then it defends itself by secreting a substance that hardens to a stony mass around the parasitic insect, trapping it in a kind of cyst, causing the parasite to starve. The stony material that forms these cysts is the rich, lustrous substance known commercially as nebula jade, which is cut and polished into the sublime jewelry that is coveted on every world of the starways.

  A collecting team – one Velox, one Elowan – tracks the worms through the tunnels constantly wading in nauseating streams of worm-slime.