Sharon Levoy was lecturing for the record, nobody else was listening. "That solves thaL Levoy's Star is an old neutron star, half a billion to a billion years beyond its pulsar stage. It's still hotter than hell, but it's only twenty kilometers across. The radiating surface is almost negligible. It must have been losing its spin and its residual heat for all of that time. We didn't see it because it isn't putting out enough light.

"The yellow dwarf star might have planets, but we can expect that their atmospheres were boiled away by the supernova event of which Levoy's Star is the ashes-"

Goldblatt snarled, "We're supposed to be the first expedition here! Prikazyvat Kendy!"

The crew were not supposed to be aware that the ship's computer and its recorded personality could eavesdrop on them. Therefore Kendy said, "Hello, Sam. What's up?"

Sam Goldblatt was a large, round man with a bushy, carefully tended moustache. He'd been chewing it ever since Levoy found and named the

neutron star. Now his frustration had a target. "Kendy, do you have records of a previous expedition?"

"Well, check me out. Those are absorption lines for oxygen and water, here, aren't they? Which means there's green life somewhere in that system, doesn't it? And that means the State sent a seeder here!"

"I noticed the spectrum. After all, Sam, why shouldn't plant life develop somewhere on its own? Earth's did. Besides, those lines can't represent an Earthlike world. They're too sharp. There's too much oxygen, too much water."

"Kendy, if it isn't a planet, what is it?"

"We'll learn that when we're closer."

"11mph. Not at this speed. Kendy, I think we should slow down.

Decelerate to the minimum at which the Bussard ramjet will work. We won't waste onboard fuel, we'll get a better look, and we can accelerate again when we've got the solar wind for fuel."

"Dangerous," said Kendy. "I recommend against it." And that should have been that.

For five hundred and twelve years Kendy had been editing clumps of experience from his memory wherever he decided they weren't needed. He didn't remember deciding to follow Goldblatt's suggestions. Goldblatt must have persuaded Captain Quinn and the rest of the crew, and Kendy had given in . . . to them? or to his own curiosity?

Kendy remembered:

Levoy's Star and T3 circled a common point in eccentric orbits, at a distance averaging 2.5 x lO~ kilometers, with an orbital period of 2.77 Earth years. The neutron star had been behind the yellow dwarf while Discipline backed into the system. Now it emerged into view of Discipline's telescope array.

He saw a ring of white cloud, touched with green, with a bright spark at its center. The spectral absorption lines of water and oxygen were coming from there. It was tiny by astronomical standards: the region of greatest density circled the neutron star at 26,000 kilometers-about four times the radius of the Earth.