for no apparent reason it
would change its rate of radiation. So far as those inhabitants of Sthor
and her sister world Asthor knew, there was no reason. It just did it.
Perhaps with malicious intent to be annoying. If so, it was
exceptionally successful. Sthor and Asthor experienced, periodically, a
young ice age. When Mira decided to take a rest, Sthor and Asthor froze
up, from the poles most of the way to the equators. Then Mira would
stretch herself a little, move about restlessly and Sthor and Asthor
would become uninhabitably hot, anywhere within twenty degrees of the
equator.

Those Sthorian people had evolved in a way that made the conditions
endurable for savage or uncivilized people, but when a scientific
civilization with a well-ordered mode of existence tried to establish
itself, Mira was all sorts of a nuisance.

Gresth Gkae was a peculiar individual to human ways of thinking. He
stood some seven feet tall, on his strange, double-kneed legs and his
four toed feet. His body was covered with little, short feather-like
things that moved now with a volition of their own. They were moving
very slowly and regularly. The space-ship was heated to a comfortable
temperature, and the little fans were helping to cool Gresth Gkae. Had
it been cold, every little feather would have lain down close against
its neighbors, forming an admirable, wind-proof and cold-proof blanket.

Nature, on Sthor, had original ideas of arrangement too. Sthorians
possessed two eyes--one directly above the other, in the center of their
faces. The face was so long, and narrow, it resembled a blunt hatchet,
with the two eyes on the edge. To counter-balance this vertical
arrangement of the eyes, the nostrils had been separated some four
inches, with one on each of the sloping cheeks. His ears were little
pink-flesh cups on short, muscular stems. His mouth was narrow, and
small, but armed with quite solid teeth adapted to his diet, a diet
consisting of almost anything any creature had ever considered edible.
Like most successful forms of intelligent life, Gresth Gkae was
omnivorous. An intelligent form of life is necessarily adaptable, and
adaptation meant being able to eat what was at hand.

One of his eyes, the upper one, was fully twice the size of the lower
one. This was his telescopic eye. The lower, or microscopic eye was
adapted to work for which a human being would have required a low power
microscope, the upper eye possessed a more n