Elephant had the scope at highest magnification. At first, as I peered into the eyepiece, I couldn’t see what he was talking about. There was a dull white plain, all the same color except for a few blobs of blue. The blobs wouldn’t have stood out except for the uniformity of the surface around them.

Then one of them moved. Very slowly, but it was moving.

“Right,” I said. “Let me run a temperature check.”

The surface temperature in that region was about right for helium II. And on the rest of the planet as well; the protosun wasn’t putting out much energy, though it was very gung ho on radiation.

“I don’t think they match any species I know.”

“I can’t tell,” said Elephant. He had the telescope and the library screen going at the same time, with a Sirius VIII blob on the library screen. “There are twenty different species of helium life in this book, and they all look exactly alike.”

“Not quite. They must have a vacuumproof integument. And you’ll notice those granules in the—”

“I treasure my ignorance on this subject, Bey. Anyway, we aren’t going to find any species we know on this world. Even a stage-tree seed would explode the moment it hit.”

I let the subject die.

Once again Elephant ran the scope over “his” planet, this time looking for the blobby life-forms. They were fairly big for helium II life, but not abnormally so. Lots of cold worlds develop life using the peculiar properties of helium II, but because it hasn’t much use for complexity, it usually stays in the amoeba stage.

There was one peculiarity, which I duly noted. Every animal was on the back side of the planet with relation to the planet’s course through the galaxy. They weren’t afraid of protosun sunlight, but they seemed to fear interstellar dust.

“You promised to scream.”

“It’s not odd enough. I’ll wait.”

Two hours passed.

The red glow of the radiator fin became more pronounced. So did the dull uniformity of the planetary surface. The planet was a disk now beyond the front window; if you watched it for a while you could see it grow. Turning ship to face the planet had made no difference to the gravity drag.

“Cue Ball,” said Elephant.

“No good. It’s been used. Beta Lyrae I.”

“Cannonball Express, then.”

“Elephant, what are you doing here?”

He turned, startled. “What do you mean?”

“Look, you know by now I’m with you all the way. But I do wonder. You spent a million stars getting here, and you’d have spent two if you had to. You could be home in the Rockies with Dianna or hovering near Beta Lyrae, which is unusual enough and better scenery than this snowball. You could be sampling oddball drugs in Crashlanding or looking for Mist Demons on Plateau. Why here?”

“Because it is there.”

“What the blazes is that supposed to mean?”