schedule chosen, we have to stop to see if there is any modulated electromagnetic radiation in the system. If there is, we've found the enemy."

"And if there isn't?"

"Then we haven't found him. And I get tired of sitting for eight hours while the communications boys mess around looking for something that isn't there." He spread his hands. "That's life. We look all over the galaxy for vibrations we can locate but can't find, and we find all kinds of communications we can't locate. I think I'll stick my nose in my ear and blow my brains out."

Parmay grinned. "Do me a favor; wait till we get to Therbis. That colony is scarcely twenty years old, and they might be worried if their contacts with the rest of civilization go around splattering their cerebrum over the insides of their own ships."

Seven times during the next few days, the HC-36 approached a star and listened for electromagnetic disturbances in space.

Seven times, they got nothing but normal static.

Then came Therbis.

Someone once defined eternity as the time required for everything to happen once. If you toss a coin enough times, it will eventually land on edge; if you shuffle a deck of cards enough times, they will eventually deal out in any predetermined order. And, by the inherently unprovable laws of probabilities, if you watch a glass of water long enough, all the high-velocity molecules will congregate in one place and boil off, leaving the remainder of the water frozen solid. You may have to wait some ten to the twentieth years, or it may happen tomorrow. But, however improbable, each of them can happen.

Take a spaceship. In order for one spaceship to spot another, via radar, they must be within a million or so miles of each other and have low velocities relative to each other. An Earth vessel might never see another Earth vessel in space unless they had arranged it beforehand. And arranging things beforehand is stacking the deck, a reversal of normal entropy that only intelligent beings can bring about.

The Thirty-six approached the Therbis sun at something less than a thousand miles per second, the actual difference in velocity between that sun and Sol. Therbis itself was the fourth planet of the system; cold and bleak. It was somewhat bigger than Terra, with plenty of water and a high percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so the greenhouse 

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