The Smoke Ring had altered Discipline's descendants. The tribes of London Tree and Dalton-Quinn Tree had all looked like that. The jungle giants who had grown up without tidal gravity were hardly human: freakishly tall, with long, fragile, agile fingers and toes; and one of the twelve was a cripple, and others had legs of different length. Only Mark the Silver Man had looked like a normal State citizen. They had called him "dwarf."

They were savages; but they had learned to use State technology in the form of the CARM. Still human. Perhaps they could be made citizens again.

To Kendy, who thought with the speed of a computer, the "Scientist" moved much too slowly. Now he was at the controls, auditing a cassette; now checking the camera views in present time . . .

The incoming CARM records showed clouds and ponds and trees and trilaterally symmetric fishlike birds swirling across the sky. Natives flickered through the CARM cabin: the same savages, growing older; a growing handful of children.

At fifteen years minus-time the CARM backed out of its timber dock for a journey of exploration. It visited a green puffball several kilometers across, and when it emerged there was vegetation like a houseful of green spaghetti bound to its dorsal surface. It hovered in the open sky while men darted among a flock of birds-real birds with real wings: turkeys-and returned to its dock with prisoners.

At thirteen years minus-time it left the trunk to return with a dubious prize: several tons of black mud.

There were no more such forays. The Cargo and Repair Module had become a motor for the tree.

It was docked when the main drive fired for several hours. Kendy watched side views as the integral tree drifted across the sky. It had been circling too far from the neutron star. Air grew thin away from the Smoke Ring median.

The tree was lower now; the air would be as thick as mountain air on Earth. And now the CARM was not being used at all; but there was plenty to watch. The Smoke Ring environment was fascinating. Huge spheres of water, storms, jungles like tremendous puffs of green cotton candy.

In present time, the aft CARM camera showed nearly thirty natives maneuvering between the tree and a tremendous globule of water. They were using the free-fall environment better than any State astronaut. The State had need of these people!

Discipline's own telescope had found the foreshortened tree, with the pond to mark it. And what was that on the opposite side of the tree? Infrared light glowed near its center . . .

Half a thousand years of sensory deprivation were being compensated in a few minutes. After more than five hundred years, Sharls Kendy had left the stable point behind Goldblatt's World. He had burned irreplaceable fuel, and it was worth it! Sharls tried to absorb it all, integrate it all... but that could wait. The "Scientist" might leave at any minute!