Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the type could have told
that this particular fish was dying.

In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder--long, tapered, and
oval in cross-section--but it showed none of the exterior markings one
might expect of either a living thing or a spaceship. With one
exception, the smooth silver-pink exterior was featureless.

That one exception was a long, purplish-black, roughened discoloration
that ran along one side for almost half of the ship's seventeen meters
of length. It was the only external sign that the ship was dying.

Inside the ship, the Nipe neither knew nor cared about the
discoloration. Had he thought about it, he would have deduced the
presence of the burn, but it was by far the least of his worries.

The ship sang, and the song was a song of death.

The internal damage that had been done to the ship was far more serious
than the burn on the surface of the hull. It was that internal damage
which occupied the thoughts of the Nipe, for it could, quite possibly,
kill him.

He had, of course, no intention of dying. Not out here. Not so far, so
very far, from his own people. Not out here, where his death would be so
very improper.

He looked at the ball of the yellow-white sun ahead and wondered that
such a relatively stable, inactive star could have produced such a
tremendously energetic plasmoid, one that could still do such damage so
far out. It had been a freak, of course. Such suns as this did not
normally produce such energetic swirls of magnetohydrodynamic force.

But the thing had been there, nonetheless, and the ship had hit it at
high velocity. Fortunately the ship had only touched the edge of the
swirling cloud--otherwise the ship would have vanished in a puff of
incandescence. But it had done enough. The power plants that drove the
ship at ultralight velocities through the depths of interstellar space
had been so badly damaged that they could only be used in short bursts,
and each burst brought them closer to the fusion point. Even when they
were not being used they sang away their energies in ululations of
wavering vibration that would have been nerve-racking to a human being.

The Nipe had heard the singing of the engines, recognized it for what it
was, realized that he could do nothing about it, and dismissed it from
his mind.

Most of the instruments were powerless; the Nipe was not even sure he
could land the vessel. Any attempt