On the tapes this is lumped in with the other psychoses you'll learn about. But this morning they found another derelict, in which the chief pilot had scrawled 'WARE HELL HOLE IN SP' across a plate. Connection with the other derelicts, if any, is obscure. If the pilot was sane when he wrote that message, it means something—but nobody knows what. If he wasn't, it doesn't, any more than the dozens of obviously senseless—excuse me, I should say apparently senseless—messages which we have already recorded."

"Hm-m-m. Interesting. I'll bear it in mind and tape it in its place. But speaking of peculiar things, I've got one I wanted to discuss with you—getting my Release was such a shock that I almost forgot it. Reported it, but nobody thought it was anything important. Maybe ... probably ... it isn't. Tune your mind up to the top of the range ... there, did you ever hear of a race that thinks upon that band?"

"I never did—it's practically unreachable. Why—have you?"

"Yes and no. Only once, and that only a touch. Or, rather, a burst; as though a hard-held mind-block had exploded, or the creature had just died a violent, instantaneous death. Not enough of it to trace, and I never found any more of it."

"Any characteristics? Bursts can be quite revealing at times."

"A few. It was on my last break-in trip in the Second Galaxy, out beyond Thrale—about here." Kit marked the spot upon a mental chart. "Mentality very high—precisionist grade—possibly beyond social needs, as the planet was a bare desert. No thought of cities. Nor of water, although both may have existed without appearing in that burst of thought. The thing's bodily structure was RTSL, to four places. No gross digestive tract—atmosphere-nourished or an energy-converter, perhaps. The sun was a blue giant. No spectral data, of course, but at a rough guess I'd say somewhere around class B5 or A0. Although the temperature was normal for him, it was quite evident that the planet would be unbearably hot for us. That's all I could get."

"That's a lot to get from one burst. It doesn't mean a thing to me right now—but I'll watch for a chance to fit it in somewhere."

How casually they dismissed as unimportant that cryptic burst of thought! But if they both, right then, together, had been authoritatively informed that the description fitted exactly the physical form forced upon its denizens in its summer by the accurately-described, simply hellish climatic conditions obtaining during that 

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