ths each way. When the smash finally came, two
hundred and fifty thousand colonists were left stranded. They lost
everything they'd put into the company, which, for most of them, was
all they had. Not a few lost their lives before the Federation Space
Navy could get ships here to evacuate them.

But about a thousand, who were too poor to make a fresh start
elsewhere and too tough for Fenris to kill, refused evacuation, took
over all the equipment and installations the Fenris Company had
abandoned, and tried to make a living out of the planet. At least,
they stayed alive. There are now twenty-odd thousand of us, and while
we are still very poor, we are very tough, and we brag about it.

There were about two thousand people--ten per cent of the planetary
population--on the wide concrete promenade around the spaceport
landing pit. I came out among them and set down the hamper with my
telecast cameras and recorders, wishing, as usual, that I could find
some ten or twelve-year-old kid weak-minded enough to want to be a
reporter when he grew up, so that I could have an apprentice to help
me with my junk.

As the star--and only--reporter of the greatest--and only--paper on
the planet, I was always on hand when either of the two ships on the
Terra-Odin milk run, the _Peenemuende_ and the _Cape Canaveral_,
landed. Of course, we always talk to them by screen as soon as they
come out of hyperspace and into radio range, and get the passenger
list, and a speed-recording of any news they are carrying, from the
latest native uprising on Thor to the latest political scandal on
Venus. Sometime the natives of Thor won't be fighting anybody at all,
or the Federation Member Republic of Venus will have some
nonscandalous politics, and either will be the man-bites-dog story to
end man-bites-dog stories. All the news is at least six months old,
some more than a year. A spaceship can log a light-year in sixty-odd
hours, but radio waves still crawl along at the same old 186,000 mps.

I still have to meet the ships. There's always something that has to
be picked up personally, usually an interview with some VIP traveling
through. This time, though, the big story coming in on the
_Peenemuende_ was a local item. Paradox? Dad says there is no such
thing. He says a paradox is either a verbal contradiction, and you get
rid of it by restating it correctly, or it's a structural
contradiction, and you just call it an impossibility and let it go at