that. In this case, what was coming in was a real live author, who was
going to write a travel book about Fenris, the planet with the
four-day year. Glenn Murell, which sounded suspiciously like a nom de
plume, and nobody here had ever heard of him.

That was odd, too. One thing we can really be proud of here, besides
the toughness of our citizens, is our public library. When people have
to stay underground most of the time to avoid being fried and/or
frozen to death, they have a lot of time to kill, and reading is one
of the cheaper and more harmless and profitable ways of doing it. And
travel books are a special favorite here. I suppose because everybody
is hoping to read about a worse place than Fenris. I had checked on
Glenn Murell at the library. None of the librarians had ever heard of
him, and there wasn't a single mention of him in any of the big
catalogues of publications.

The first and obvious conclusion would be that Mr. Glenn Murell was
some swindler posing as an author. The only objection to that was that
I couldn't quite see why any swindler would come to Fenris, or what
he'd expect to swindle the Fenrisians out of. Of course, he could be
on the lam from somewhere, but in that case why bother with all the
cover story? Some of our better-known citizens came here dodging
warrants on other planets.

I was still wondering about Murell when somebody behind me greeted me,
and I turned around. It was Tom Kivelson.

Tom and I are buddies, when he's in port. He's just a shade older than
I am; he was eighteen around noon, and my eighteenth birthday won't
come till midnight, Fenris Standard Sundial Time. His father is Joe
Kivelson, the skipper of the _Javelin_; Tom is sort of junior
engineer, second gunner, and about third harpooner. We went to school
together, which is to say a couple of years at Professor
Hartzenbosch's, learning to read and write and put figures together.
That is all the schooling anybody on Fenris gets, although Joe
Kivelson sent Tom's older sister, Linda, to school on Terra. Anybody
who stays here has to dig out education for himself. Tom and I were
still digging for ours.

Each of us envied the other, when we weren't thinking seriously about
it. I imagined that sea-monster hunting was wonderfully thrilling and
romantic, and Tom had the idea that being a newsman was real hot
stuff. When we actually stopped to think about it, though, we realized
that neither of us would trade jobs and take