When they find a worm they look for jade-light, the bright glow of a cyst through the worm’s translucent body. The Velox member of the team then uses blades and prongs to cut the cyst out of the worm’s flesh. The worm doesn’t mind; it doesn’t even notice. What is likely to mind is the insect within the cyst, which, if it hasn’t starved to death yet, is apt to be extremely hostile. The cyst becomes brittle when exposed to the air of the tunnel and the insect, if it’s alive, batters its way out and attacks anything in reach with its ferocious beak. That’s what the Elowan member of the team is there for.

  The Velox, it seems feel queasy about killing insects of any kind whatever, even murderous parasitic ones like these.

  It’s an ancestral taboo of some sort: sisters beneath the exoskeleton, or something. Elowan don’t have such inhibitions. They’re essentially plants, after all – delicate two-legged photosynthetic creatures with prehensile vines instead of limbs. So when the Velox pulls the cyst out, her Elowan companion is standing by with a laser in firing prime. If the parasite’s alive, the Elowan hits it with a hard burn. Sometimes the parasite is faster than the Elowan and then there are fatalities. A good part of the cost of a fine nebula jade necklace represents the staggering salaries that the jade miners are paid for risking their lives this way on so dreary and disagreeable a planet as Jathamassa Six.

  We spent half a day in the worm-tunnels, watching a team of jade-miners collect about half a million MU worth of jade from three different worms. Of the five cysts that the miners found, four contained dead parasites, but the fifth was alive and it came storming out beak-first, chomping as it came.

  Our Elowan was quick, though. Its prehensile vines barely fluttered as it cut the immense bug down with a quick blast. The Velox waggled her antennae in an expression of approval. Even if she felt a tribal taboo against killing fellow insects herself, she certainly seemed to admire the efficiency with which the Elowan took care of the job. Never expect a lot of sentimentality out of Velox. In a few days our vane job and repairs were finished so we paid our bill and left without any great regret.

  We called across to the Thrynn on Jathamassa Seven and asked them for landing coordinates. That was when we found that the Thrynn colony on Seven wasn’t actually on the planet, but in a habitat sphere in low orbit around it. Instead of making a planetary landing as we had expected we would be docking at a small satellite some ten thousand kilometers out. That made us a little edgy. It seemed the Thrynn were sending us down to inspect a world that they didn’t care to set foot on themselves.

  Jathamassa Seven turned out to be a small, ordinary-looking planet with no distinctive visual features. Optical scans showed a dull red surface, an endless sandy waste. Mean temperature, temperate-to-tropical. Gravity was on the light side, .8 or so. Atmospheric conditions were calm and the atmosphere itself was mostly nitrogen and CO2 with just enough oxygen to remind us of what a habitable world was like. Spectrographic analysis said there was very little water, if any. Bio readings were ambiguous: there seemed to be life down there, but not a lot of it, and the numbers were odd ones, hard to interpret.

  Great. A hot, dry, dusty desert world!

  As for minerals – forget it. At least any that had significant commercial value. Sensor readings told us that what we had down there was a planet made up of light, essentially worthless elements: silicon, carbon, boron, sodium, stuff like that. All very fine elements in their way, but there’s no profit to be had in hauling them across galactic distances for resale. So much for our mining concessions. Goodbye platinum, goodbye promethium, goodbye plutonium!

  A worthless planet. And we would own twenty-five percent of it! Great!

  “Snookered again,” Mik Gahune muttered.

  “We should have known,’’ said Gabe Vicinanza. “The Velox and the Elowan who colonized Jathamassa Six must have had a look at this place too, when they first came through here. And they didn’t even bother filing a claim on it.”

  “But the Thrynn did,” Nikko Clark pointed out. “They must have seen something that the earlier explorers didn’t.”

  “After all,” said Ned Stackman, the science officer, “Six doesn’t look so terrific from space either. Who’d ever guess that underneath those miserable tangled vines are disgusting monstrous worms that just happen to generate the most desirable jewelry substance in the galaxy?”

  ‘‘In any case,” I said, “we’ve signed a contract and we’re here. Let’s go talk to the Thrynn. No use crying in our beer until we know the full story, all right?”

  Navigator Vicinanza handled the docking maneuver with his usual adroitness and soon we were safely coupled aboard.

  A dozen or so Thrynn were waiting to welcome us inside the airlock.

  The Thrynn may be a slippery bunch of snakes at heart but their manner is impeccably suave and cultured. They greeted us as though we were visiting dignitaries and not just a bunch of worse-than-penniless space jockeys trying to turn a quick mega-MU or two doing odd jobs wherever we could find them. They had taken the trouble to adjust the habitat’s gravity to our comfort level, which must have meant a little discomfort for them, and though the food and drink offered us was of course, synthetic, it was elaborately prepared in a way worthy of the finest chef on Arth. Not that most of us were in any position to judge, but Science Officer Slackman, who fancied himself a great gourmet, was impressed.

  “This wine,” he said, holding his goblet up to let light shine through the lovely amber fluid. “Surely it’s a Mount Glimin cabernet...the ‘07 vintage, I would guess!”

  Our hosts made little swooshing sounds of Thrynn pleasure, and smiled that toothy Thrynn smile that inspires so little warmth in people of other races.

  Their sapphire eyes were agleam with obvious delight at the flattery Slackman was so copiously providing. Naturally the wine, like everything else aboard the little habitat, had been manufactured in the converter chamber at the core of the satellite, but flattery is the lubricant that keeps the gears of inter-species galactic diplomacy from making nasty crunching noises. I asked Slackman later whether the wine was really that good and he said that in fact it hadn’t been half bad, that back on Arth he would have regarded it as quite decent picnic wine. Apparently the Thrynn were going out of their way to soften us up for the job that we had been hired to do. After we took the time to relax and unwind, they got down to business.

  The head of the Thrynn operation was a tall, impressive looking number named Ssspikik, whose rich-toned covering of iron-gray scales was absolutely magnificent from snout to tail.

  I looked at him and found myself thinking, What a glorious set of luggage he’d make! Ssspikik took us to a port from which we could see the surface of the planet below and pointed with the tip of his tail.

  “Behold Jathamassa Seven,” he said. “A truly fascinating planet, but one which, alas, is a very difficult environment for the Thrynn. Unable to explore it ourselves, we are convinced of the high value of the artifacts it contains.”

  “Artifacts? How absolutely wonderful!” That was Fran Jibor, ship’s doctor. Archaeology is her hobby – her passion, in fact. Her cabin is full of bits and scraps of the galactic past, collected hither and yon – even a little collection of battered, fragmentary objects that Fran insists come from our legendary ancestral world of Earth in the Sol system. She looked excited. The rest of us were something less than thrilled, though, which is putting it mildly. The Thrynn had invited us here to do archaeology for them? Well, ancient artifacts are interesting things, and sometimes the lnterstel folks will give you a decent price for one, if it happens to light them up the right way. But you stack up the profit quotient of a cargo pod full of quaint artifacts against that of a few tons of plutonium and there’s just no comparison. Things were looking worse and worse.

  We stared out at the great red disk of the planet, which at this distance seemed almost to fill the sky. We saw broad plains, lofty mountain ranges, what appeared to be the beds of huge rivers, though apparently the rivers themselves had dried up long ago. Then something that had the appearance of a colossal pink stain came into view.

  “What you observe passing below us now,” said Ssspikik, “is the living Sea of Jathamassa: a single immense semi-liquid life-form, spanning more than ten thousand kilometers. Take care, when you descend to the surface, to avoid any contact with this entity. It is the obstacle that prevents us from touching down on the planet ourselves.”

  We knew we were looking at something extraordinary. It went on and on and on as our orbiting satellite, hovering over the planet’s equator, moved swiftly westward. Even from ten thousand kilometers up we were able to tell that it wasn’t a true sea at all, but rather something solid, a quivering mass, a continent-size glob of matter...an entity.

  Ssspikik said, “What appears to be a pink ocean is actually a gigantic creature with some sort of low-level intelligence. Or perhaps, for all we are able to tell, intelligence on the genius level. It thinks. It perceives. From an airborne flier you can actually observe its mental workings, in the form of questing ripples on its surface rising in little interrogative quivers – puckered bubbling orifices that come and go, short-lived interrogative protuberances. Scoop a section out to study it and all you have is a lump of watery mud, rapidly growing cool as it dies. But the thing itself, whatever it is, has a mind. And that mind, unfortunately, broadcasts a constant flow of malevolent energy that we Thrynn are unable to withstand. Half an hour’s exposure to it seriously scrambles our synapses. An hour and we lose all vestige of sanity. Six hours is fatal for us.”

  “But not for us?” I asked.

  “So we believe,” the Thrynn said.

  “So – you – believe –?”

  “We have every reason to think that the neural emanation of the Living Sea is harmless to the Human nervous system. We have measured the wavelength of the emanation. It is not one on which the Human mind functions.”

  “Ah,” I said, not feeling very reassured.

  “As a result of the information brought back by our first landing teams before they succumbed,” Ssspikik said, “we have sent android exploring parties to the surface to examine the remains left behind by this planet’s extinct civilization. They reported the presence of ancient sites of potentially high value, but were incapable of penetrating them. Androids, of course, have great limitations of intellect.”

  “And therefore you thought it would be a better idea to send a team of Humans down there.”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded. “And if it turns out that you were wrong about our immunity to whatever kind of mental radiation it is that the Living Sea puts out?”

  “We are prepared to post a generous liability bond to compensate your beneficiaries.”

  “Ah,” I said again.

  I looked across at Mik Gahune. He looked back at me and neither of us looked very happy

  I glanced at Gabe Vicinanza, at Fran Jibor, at Nikko Clark. We were all thinking the same thing.

  Ssspikik said, “And what is now coming into view is the feature which leads us to think that there may be great rewards to reap here. Do you see the border between the Living Sea and the land, where there appears to be a kind of cliff? Are you able to make out a structure at the edge of that cliff? Here: allow me to show you a magnified image.” He made an optical adjustment.

  A structure, yes. A ruin, but a magnificent one.

  We were peering at what seemed to be a great stone fortress, looming like a colossal crouching beast atop a rugged cliff. Even at this distance it looked gigantic, terrifying, mysterious, incredibly ancient. I heard Fran Jibor catch her breath in awe.

  “We think it’s thousands of years old at the minimum,” said Ssspikik. “Millions, perhaps. Certainly it goes back beyond Old Empire times, and it may be very much more ancient than that, a relic of some prehistoric civilization of which nothing at all is known. Sonic scans indicate that there’s material inside that building. Artifacts, we think, of that lost civilization. But the building is surrounded by a security field that so far has rebuffed all our attempts at penetrating it. It generates what appears to be a relatively simple matching code interrogative wave. But the heroic members of our First Expedition who attempted to solve it were unable to retain their sanity long enough to supply the required answers. The Second Expedition and the Third perished the same way. And when we sent androids, they lacked the requisite flexibility of intelligence to deal with the codes.”

  It made sense. The Thrynn very likely had figured that the Velox, bustling hive-creatures that they are, didn’t have much more smarts than androids when it came to the sort of intellectual challenge that getting into this ruin posed. And for obvious reasons Thrynn weren’t going to want to strike up a business relationship with the Elowan. Whereas some nice clever Humans – especially Humans so down on their luck that they were willing to take on a risky job which carried only the most speculative of payoffs.

  “Well,” I said, with an enthusiasm I was a long way from feeling. “We’ll give it a try.”

  As we set up the coordinates for our landing approach we kept saying to each other in a compulsive way, “Seriously scrambles synapses. Seriously scrambles synapses.” With a thick Thrynn accent, heavy on the triple sibilants. “Sseriousssly ssscramblesss sssynapsssesss.” Followed by a lot of wild, hysterical laughter. We were really manic. Call it a defense mechanism, I guess. What if the emanations of the Living Sea were just as deadly to Humans as they were to Thrynn?

  Below us, that strange sea was looking stranger.

  At close range we could see it was plainly not water at all: it had a stiff texture, like some kind of ghastly steaming custard. Its surface was rough and gritty. There was nothing like surf or waves. It lay almost inert, pressing up against the shore, making small, sinister rippling motions.

  “Anybody feel anything?’’ I asked.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” was the answer I got all around. So far so good.

  We landed on the clifftop a few kilometers from the edge.

  The zone of ruins lay just to the west of us, a vast sprawling maze. We could see the broken and weathered stubs of giant stone buildings, the stumps of delicate bridges that had collapsed eons ago into mounds of rubble, the outlines of roadways long since taken over by the harsh scaly stuff that passed for vegetation here. On the edge of the cliff was the great building itself, the citadel, a fortress: massive greenishblack walls, gigantic stone columns, a heavy sloping roof, still intact after unknown hundreds of centuries.

  And now that we had actually touched down on Jathamassa Seven we sensed the mental force of the Living Sea for the first time. There was a definite pressure. Not overwhelming, not lethal. More of a tickle than a blast.

  “You feel it?” Fran Jibor asked.

  I nodded.

  “Me too,” said Gahune. “But it seems manageable.”

  “Even so, we oughtn’t stay here a long time,” Ned Stackman said. “The effects may not be as strong on us as they are for the Thrynn, but they might be cumulative. Quick in and out, that’s what I say.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “All right. I want two volunteers to go over there in the terrain vehicle and –”

  “Me,” Fran Jibor peeped.

  “And me,” said Stackman.

  Gahune, Vicinanza, and Nikko chimed in, but they were too late.

  “You guys draw lots for the second trip,” I told them. We readied the terrain vehicle for its outing. “If you start feeling strange in the head, turn back right away,” I warned Stackman and Jibor. “Is that clear?”

  “I always feel strange in the head,” Fran said.

  “Ssseriousssly ssscramblesss sssynapsssesss,” said Ned Slackman, and we had a good laugh as we sent them out to have a look at the antiquities.

  The risk was that they wouldn’t know they were experiencing mental distortions until the effects became serious. If that happened, we could try to bring the terrain vehicle back using automatic override – but it could be too late. I ordered them to keep up a constant flow of talk as they went, which we monitored carefully for signs of inner disturbance.

  “Bumpy road,” Fran reported. “Ruts you wouldn’t believe.

  Uh-oh – an abandoned Thrynn vehicle. Bad sign.

  We’re moving through a kind of sculpture garden now, not much left of it, and what’s here is badly corroded and pitted. Not much museum value. Approaching the big stone building.”

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Terrific, Captain!”

  “And you, Slackman?”

  ‘‘Ssstackman,” he said, and giggled.

  “Keep it together,” I told him.

  Fran said, “We’re right up underneath the big building now. It’s about forty meters high and solid as a rock. No windows. Ornamentation on the walls, very alien designs, strange curves and peculiar angles. Almost as though it’s half jutting into some other dimension.’’

  “Any sign of an entrance?”

  “Not yet. We’re heading around to the far side now, overlooking the sea. The sea seems a little agitated – surface movement, a slow stirring. No mental effects on us yet. Just that tickling – right, Ned?”

  “That’sss right,” Slackman said.

  His fake Thrynn accent was definitely starting to wear thin for us.

  Fran said, “Ah – here’s a gate in the wall. Drum-tight and solid.

  And – wait – a light’s beginning to flash. High up over the door, some kind of luminescent cell, very bright. Rhythmic bursts – a few quick flashes, then off, flash, off, a few more – now it’s stopped altogether – there it goes again –”

  “The interrogative code that Ssspikik was talking about,” I said. I gestured to Gabe Vicinanza to jack the audio line into the ship’s computer. “The pattern of blinks and darks must be the thing we’re supposed to crack,” I told Fran. “Read them to us as they come, and we’ll see if we can run an analysis for you, and then maybe you can use the vehicle laser to signal back at it.”