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UNDOWN burned across great waters. Far to the west, the clouds banked tall above New Zealand threw hot gold

into the sky. In that direction, the sea was too bright to look upon. Eastward it faded through green and royal blue to night, where the first stars trod forth and trembled. There was just enough wind to ruffle the surface, send wavelets lapping against the hull of the ketch, flow down the idle mainsail and stir the girl’s loosened pale hair.

Terangi Maclaren pointed north. “The kelp beds are that way,” he drawled. “Main source of the family income, y’ know. They mutate, crossbreed, and get seaweed which furnishes all kind of useful products. It’s beyond me, thank the honorable

ancestors. Biochemistry is an organized mess. I’ll stick to something simple, like the degenerate nucleus.”

The girl giggled. “And if it is~i’t degenerate, will you make it so?” she asked.

She was a technic like himself, of course: he would never have let a common on his boat, since a few machines were, in effect, a sizable crew. Her rank was higher than his, so high that no one in her family worked productively—whereas Mac­laren was one of the few in his who did not. She was of care­fully selected mutant Burmese strain, with amber skin, exqui­site small features, and greenish-blond hair. Maclaren had been angling for weeks to get her alone like this. Not that General Feng, her drug-torpid null of a guardian, cared how much scandal she made, flying about the planet without so much as an amazon for chaperone. But she was more a crea­ture of the Citadel and its hectic lights than of the sunset ocean.

Maclaren chuckled. “I wasn’t swearing at the nucleus,” he said. “Degeneracy is a state of matter under certain extreme conditions. Not too well understood, even after three hundred years of quantum theory. But I wander, and I would rather wonder. At you, naturally.”

He padded barefoot across the deck and sat down by her. He was a tall man in his early thirties, slender, with wide shoul­ders and big hands, dark-haired and brown-skinned like all Oceanians; but there was an aquiline beak on the broad high­cheeked face, and some forgotten English ancestor looked out of hazel eyes. Like her, he wore merely an informal sarong and a few jewels.

“You’re talking like a scholar, Terangi,” she said. It was not a compliment. There was a growing element in the richest fami­lies who found Confucius, Plato, Einstein, and the other clas­sics a thundering bore.

“Oh, but I am one,” said Maclaren. “You’d be amazed how parched and stuffy I can get. Why, as a student—”

“But you were the amateur swim-wrestling champion!” she protested.

“True. I could also drink any two men under the table and knew every dive on Earth and the Moon. However, d’ you imagine my father, bless his dreary collection of old-fashioned

virtues, would have subsidized me all these years if I didn’t bring some credit to the family? It’s kudos, having an astro­physicist for a son. Even if I am a rather expensive astrophysi­cist.” He grinned through the gathering dusk. “Every so often, when I’d been on a particularly outrageous binge, he would threaten to cut my allowance off. Then I’d have no choice but to come up with a new observation or a brilliant new theory, or at least a book.”

She snuggled a little closer. “Is that why you are going out to space now?” she asked.

“Well, no,” said Maclaren. “That’s purely my own idea. My notion of fun. I told you I was getting stuffy in my dotage.”

E haven’t seen you very often in the Citadel, the last few years,” she agreed. “And you were so busy when

you did show.”

“Politics, of a sort. The ship’s course couldn’t be changed without an order from a reluctant Exploration Authority, which meant bribing the right people, heading off the opposi­tion, wheedling the Protector himself . . . d’ you know, I dis­covered it was fun. I might even take up politics as a hobby, when I get back.”

“How long will you be gone?” she asked.

“Can’t say for certain, but probably just a month. That ought to furnish me with enough material for several years of study. Might dash back to the ship at odd moments for the rest of my life, of course. It’ll take up permanent residence around that star.”