“Yah.” I reached for my list.

“If we find one more anomaly, I’ll scream.”

Half an hour later we found life.

By then we were close enough to use the gravity drag to slow us. The beautiful thing about a gravity drag is that it uses very little power. It converts a ship’s momentum relative to the nearest powerful mass into heat, and all you have to do is get rid of the heat. Since the ST∞’s hull would pass only various ranges of radiation corresponding to what the puppeteers’ varied customers considered visible light, the shipbuilders had run a great big radiator fin out from the gravity drag. It glowed dull red behind us. And the fusion drive was off. There was no white fusion flame to hurt visibility.

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.