His name was Curanov, and as was the custom of his kind, he roamed the earth in search of interesting things to do. Curanov had climbed the highest mountains in the world, with the aid of special body attachments (spikes in his metal feet, tiny but strong hooks on the ends of his twelve fingers, an emergency grappling rope coiled inside his chest-area storage compartment and ready for a swift ejection if he should fall); his small, antigravity flight motors were removed to make the climb as dangerous and, therefore, as interesting as possible. Having submitted to heavy-duty component-sealing procedures, Curanov had once spent eighteen months under water, exploring a large portion of the Pacific Ocean, until he was bored even by the mating of whales and by the ever-shifting beauty of the sea bottom. Curanov had crossed deserts, explored the Arctic Circle on foot, gone spelunking in countless different subterranean systems. He had been caught in a blizzard, in a major flood, in a hurricane, and in the middle of an earthquake that would have registered nine on the Richter scale, if the Richter scale had still been in use.
