ook a man just as long to walk across a room today as it
had taken Pharaoh the First, or Homo Sap.

In the telescopic screen Tanith looked like any picture of any
Terra-type planet from space, with cloud-blurred contours of seas
and continents and a vague mottling of gray and brown and green,
topped at the pole by an icecap. None of the surface features, not
even the major mountain ranges or rivers, were yet distinguishable,
but Harkaman and Sharll Renner and Alvyn Karffard and the other old
hands seemed to recognize it. Karffard was talking by phone to Paul
Koreff, the signals-and-detection officer, who could detect nothing
from the moon and nothing that was getting through the Van Allen
belt from the planet.

Maybe they'd guessed wrong, at that. Maybe Dunnan hadn't gone to
Tanith at all.

Harkaman, who had the knack of putting himself to sleep at will,
with some sixth or _n_-th sense posted as a sentry, leaned back in
his chair and closed his eyes. Trask wished he could, too. It would
be hours before anything happened, and until then he needed all the
rest he could get. He drank more coffee, chain-smoked cigarettes;
he rose and prowled about the command room, looking at screens.
Signals-and-detection was getting a lot of routine stuff--Van Allen
count, micrometeor count, surface temperature, gravitation-field
strength, radar and scanner echoes. He went back to his chair and
sat down, staring at the screen-image. The planet didn't seem to be
getting any closer at all, and it ought to; they were approaching
it at better than escape velocity. He sat and stared at it.

He woke with a start. The screen-image was much larger, now. River
courses and the shadow lines of mountains were clearly visible. It
must be early autumn in the northern hemisphere; there was snow down
to the sixtieth parallel and a belt of brown was pushing south
against the green. Harkaman was sitting up, eating lunch. By the
clock, it was four hours later.

"Have a good nap?" he asked. "We're picking up some stuff, now.
Radio and screen signals. Not much, but some. The locals wouldn't
have learned enough for that in the five years since I was here.
We didn't stay long enough, for one thing."

On decivilized planets that were visited by Space Vikings, the
locals picked up bits and scraps of technology very quickly. In the
four months of idleness and long conversations while they were in
hyperspace he had heard many stories confirming that. But fr