he
supplies and the hydroponic tanks and carniculture vats and so on for
a four- to six-month voyage. I can't see the economy of altering
anything that small for interstellar work. Why, the smallest of these
tramp freighters that come in here will run about fifteen hundred
feet."

They didn't just disintegrate when peace broke out, that was for sure.
And there certainly weren't any of them left on Poictesme. He puzzled
over it briefly, then shoved it aside. He had more important things to
think about.

In his spare time he was studying, along with his other work,
everything he could find on Koshchei, with an intensity he had not
given to anything since cramming for examinations at the University.
There was a lot of it.

The fourth planet of Alpha Gartner was older than Poictesme;
geologists claimed that it was the oldest thing, the sun excepted, in
the system, and astrophysicists were far from convinced that it hadn't
been captured from either Beta or Gamma when the three stars had been
much closer together. It had certainly been formed at a much higher
temperature than Janicot or Poictesme or Jurgen or Horvendile. For
better than a billion years, it had been molten-hot, and it had lost
most of its lighter elements in gaseous form along with its primary
atmosphere, leaving little to form a light-rock crust. All that had
remained had been a core of almost pure iron and a mantle that was
mostly high-grade iron ore.

The same process had gone on, as it cooled, as on any Terra-size
planet. After the surface had started to congeal, gases, mostly carbon
dioxide and water vapor, had come up to form a secondary atmosphere,
the water vapor forming a cloud envelope, condensing, and sending down
rain that returned immediately as steam. Solar radiations and electric
discharges broke some of that into oxygen and hydrogen; most of the
hydrogen escaped into space. Finally, the surface cooled further and
the rain no longer steamed off.

The whole planet started to rust. It had been rusting, slowly, for the
billion or so years that had followed, and almost all the free oxygen
had become locked in iron oxide. The air was almost pure carbon
dioxide. It would have been different if life had ever appeared on
Koshchei, but apparently the right amino acids never assembled. Some
attempts had been made to introduce vegetation after the colonization
of Poictesme, but they had all failed.

Men went to Koshchei; they worked out of doors i