Four-Day Planet | Page 3

absent-minded with.
The chartered company that colonized it, back at the end of the Fourth
Century A.E., went bankrupt in ten years, and it wouldn't have taken
that long if communication between Terra and Fenris hadn't been a
matter of six months 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 Peenemünde 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 Peenemünde
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 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