otic Organics was going to keep
him here on Fenris as a resident buyer and his job was going to be to
deal with the hunters, either individually or through their
co-operative organization, if they could get rid of Ravick and set up
something he could do business with, and he wanted to be able to talk
the hunters' language and understand their problems.

So I took him around over the boat, showing him everything and
conscripting any crew members I came across to explain what I
couldn't. I showed him the scout boat in its berth, and we climbed
into it and looked around. I showed him the machine that packed the
wax into skins, and the cargo holds, and the electrolytic gills that
extracted oxygen from sea water while we were submerged, and the
ship's armament. Finally, we got to the engine room, forward. He
whistled when he saw the engines.

"Why, those things are big enough for a five-thousand-ton freighter,"
he said.

"They have to be," I said. "Running submerged isn't the same as
running in atmosphere. You ever done any swimming?"

He shook his head. "I was born in Antarctica, on Terra. The water's a
little too cold to do much swimming there. And I've spent most of my
time since then in central Argentine, in the pampas country. The
sports there are horseback riding and polo and things like that."

Well, whattaya know! Here was a man who had not only seen a horse, but
actually ridden one. That in itself was worth a story in the _Times_.

Tom and Abdullah, who were fussing around the engines, heard that.
They knocked off what they were doing and began asking him
questions--I suppose he thought they were awfully silly, but he
answered all of them patiently--about horses and riding. I was looking
at a couple of spare power-unit cartridges, like the one Al Devis had
strained his back on, clamped to the deck out of the way.

They were only as big as a one-liter jar, rounded at one end and flat
at the other where the power cable was connected, but they weighed
close to two hundred pounds apiece. Most of the weight was on the
outside; a dazzlingly bright plating of collapsium--collapsed matter,
the electron shell collapsed onto the nucleus and the atoms in actual
physical contact--and absolutely nothing but nothing could get through
it. Inside was about a kilogram of strontium-90; it would keep on
emitting electrons for twenty-five years, normally, but there was a
miniature plutonium reactor, itself shielded with collaps