The ground was nearly bare rock, a grayspeckled, wind-polished reddish mass which the voice from the tank had been calling a “sediment.” It was dotted every few yards with low, wide-spreading, rubbery bushes whose roots had somehow eaten their way into a surface which the students’ own claws could barely scratch. Of course the plants themselves could provide anchorage if necessary. The ex-sailor’s nippers were tensed, ready to seize any branch that might come in handy if he did slip. While the gusts of hydrogen sweeping up from the sea at his right wouldn’t have provided much thrust for a sail, the feeble gravity of Mesklin’s equator—less than two percent of what he was used to in the higher latitudes—made Estnerdole feel as though anything at all could send him flying. It took a long time, as he had been warned, to get used to conditions at the world’s Rim; even the bulky metal tank crawling beside him seemed somehow unsteady. He was beginning to wonder whether he had been right to sign on for the College—the weird establishment where beings from the sky taught things that only the most imaginative Mesklinites had ever dreamed of.
