A green fog in the ever-changing pattern of Inverspace. Green, roiling, oily dark fog.

A speck of crimson that flickered and steadied and exploded into sharp golden fragments.

A lurch, a twist, the guts heaving and the puke-masks: filling, and the eyeballs burning without heat. The roots of the hair straining, and the arches of the cheekbones stretching the skin tight as a corpse’s. Then a grey-out, a black-out, a white-and-black-out and the ship was traveling in the normal universe again.

They were in sight of the cold, chiselled stars and the steady multi-colored stars. They were a Catalog Ship and there was work to be done. The constellation firmed out in the plot-tank, superimposing itself almost exactly over Calk’s lined-in course. The CourseComp chattered eerily and the few discrepancies in course variation were merged, so that the wing-shaped constellation was directly on the Captain’s pattern.

Dembois and Kradter knocked politely on the door to the control cabin, and slid it open when Calk said absently, “Come.”

“How’s it set?” Dembois asked.

“About three points off, but we’ve corrected already,” Calk replied, indicating the plot-tank. He slipped the infrared goggles off and stuck them on their pad. “You start undogging the gear yet?”

Kradter nodded, addressing the nod totally to Calk, and Dembois’s lips pursed in annoyance that the conversation had been stolen away from him. He thrust back into it with, “I hope we don’t run up against any eetees. The last batch was enough to turn my stomach for quite a while.”

Kradter whirled on him again. “I thought we had this out once and for all, man. I thought you understood our job is to befriend and aid these unfortunate—”

“Bull!” Dembois snarled. “Show me in the Regs where it says that? Show me, or shut your Heinie trap— eetee lover.”

Kradter had swung before Calk could stop him. He caught Dembois along the cheekbone and spun the smaller man. The Ensign II staggered backward, crashed into the bulkhead and slid to one knee, shaking his head. Kradter was moving forward when Calk caught him, slipping his hands under the Prussian’s armpits and up behind his neck, where they locked. He dragged Kradter half off the floor in a full-nelson and shook him solidly, taking the Lieutenant’s breath away.

“Now…knock…off…that…stuff!” Calk whispered loudly in Kradter’s ear. He held the man completely paralyzed, his feet dangling a quarter inch off the floor. Tremendous muscles stood out on Calk’s arms, beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt, and a blue pulse of nerve throbbed at his right temple.

Dembois staggered erect, clutching his face, and made a few idle stepping motions; then, in a blur, he hurled himself at Kradter and sank a doubled fist into the Lieutenant’s belly. Kradter gasped and moaned softly and slumped in Calk’s grasp.

The Captain dropped him, reached over with one hand and brought a judo cut down on the Ensign’s neck. Dembois clattered to the deckplates beside his adversary.

Calk returned to the plotting seat, and snapped his goggles back on. Once more he murmured softly to himself:

“Homo superior!”

The three outer planets were catalogued without difficulty. The blue dwarf was not able to reach them with its rays, and they were frozen; but there were deep treasures of pitchblende and phosphorous and trace elements from which ferro-zinc could be collandered and strained with little effort. They were marked in the Jog as triple-A planets, well worth the trouble to reach and mine.

The center ring of planets—fifteen of them—was not as worthwhile. There were three desert worlds (too much harsh silicon), seven barren rock worlds without atmosphere, and ignored by the hand of God (nothing grew there, nothing of value), four jungle planets (one with technicolored tyrannosauri), and one oddity. They saved the oddity for last.

Before they would catalogue the inner round of worlds—there appeared to be nineteen, though one of those they credited as being a moon of a blue and white planet might have had an atmosphere of its own—they would set down and explore the oddity.

The oddity was a pale silver globe without ground feature and without atmosphere. It was a great ball of smooth tinfoil set in the black of space, a featureless plain without hump or depression, mountain or valley, stream or even rock formation. No grass and no clouds. In fact, nothing.

They stared down at the planet inching its way to greatness in the ports. It was as though they were settling toward a gigantic beachball.

“That’s impossible!” Dembois gasped.

“How can it be impossible, you clown? It’s there, isn’t it?” Kradter was spoiling for another fight. The pains in his stomach had not yet completely left him.

“Break!” Calk snapped. “Not this close to landfall, you, two. And it may be impossible, but it’s there, and we have to check it out. No telling what a planet like that might have beneath the surface.”

Dembois cast a sharp glance at the potentiometer and the gauging devices for composition. “They say you’re wrong, Captain.”

Calk turned to the dials and studied them at length. They read zero. Not negative, as they read in space, but zero. But that, too, was impossible. The planet had to be made of something.

They looked at each other, and said nothing, for there was nothing to say. They had encountered a phenomenon. “Could it be contra-terrene?” The question hung unasked in the air of the control room. The only way to answer it was to test.

They shot out the missile when they were still ten miles above the smooth silver surface, and it sped down down down without hindrance of air or course correction. It hit, and exploded. But its indestructible plasteel devices continued to register on the Circe’s banks, so it was apparent the planet was of matter, not the anti-matter that would disintegrate the rocket on ‘contact.

They landed.

When the three men emerged from the ship, sliding down the landing ramp as children on a playground slide, they were encased in bulky pressure suits and clear bubble helmets. Each carried a triple-thread stun-rifle, for despite the utterly safe appearance of the planet, there was no question as to carrying weapons. Space was deep and angry at Man. Its creatures were varied and utterly unpredictable. So they never took a chance.

As they walked out across the featureless plain, their chest-consoles humming and gauging and studying, they moved in a tight triangle.

Calk, in the front, as the apex of the triangle, cast about warily, his triple-threader swinging in lazy arcs.

“Have you noticed the ground?” Kradter asked, his voice hushed and solemn as a man in a cathedral, transmitted over the intercom system.

Calk nodded, but Dembois put it into words.

“It’s spongey. Springy. Like the ‘giving’ floors back at SeekServ Central. What’s it made of?” “I don’t know,” Calk answered, and that was the final word any of them said.

There was a shivering in the planet. A soft trembling, like a bowl of jelly. It shivered and pulsed and seemed to deepen as they stopped.

Then, through their intercoms, they heard a distinct crunch and clang, and as one they spun around. Half a mile behind them the Circe was trembling, tottering, falling, and then The planet swallowed the ship.

They screamed. Each of them, and the pitch was the same. The meaning behind the screams was the same. They were lost, stranded out here, somewhere out in the nowhere, with only the oxygen in their tanks to sustain them, and their transportation gone!

Then…they realized the greater danger. The planet was carnivorous!

They realized it too late.

Beneath their feet, the ground swelled, like a bubble bursting, and abruptly opened with a wet, smacking sound…

Their screams were cut short as they fell fell fell—and the silver, featureless, spongey ground closed without a break. Without an indication that a ship of space and three men had been there.