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to the window. He stared up. After a three-day trip through five Bose Network nodes and a subluminal final stage, he had finally landed on the Starside hemisphere of Opal. But Starside was a bad joke—even before dawn there was not a star to be seen. At that time of year, close to Summertide, cloud breaks on Opal were rare. Approaching the planet, he had seen nothing but a uniform, shining globe. The whole world was water, and when Dobelle swung in at its closest to its stellar primary, Mandel, the summer tides reached their peak and the oceans of Opal never saw the sun. Safety lay only on the Slings, natural floating rafts of earth and tangled vegetation that moved across Opal's surface at the prompting of winds and tides.
    The biggest Slings were hundreds of kilometers across. The Starside spaceport was situated on one of the largest. Even so, Rebka wondered how it would fare at Summertide. Where would it go, and would it survive when the main tides came?
    If his birthworld of Teufel had been Fire, then Opal was surely Water.
    And Quake, the other half of the Dobelle planetary doublet?
    Hell, from what he had heard of it. Nothing that Rebka had read or had been told in his briefings had had one good word to say about Quake. Events on Opal at Summertide were said to be spectacular and hair-raising—but survivable. On Quake they were deadly.
    He looked up at the sky again and was startled to see that it was light. Opal and Quake were tidally locked to each other, and they spun around their common center of mass at a furious rate. One day in the Dobelle system was only eight standard hours. His morning musings had taken him well past dawn. He would just have time for a quick breakfast; then an aircar would carry him around the planet to Quakeside—and to the most stupid and least productive job of his life.
    Rebka swore, cursing the name of Max Perry, and walked across to the door. He had not yet met the man, but he was ready to dislike him.
     
ARTIFCT: PARADOX
UAC#: 35
Galactic Coordinat es: 27,312.443/15,917.902/+135.66
Name: Paradox Star/planet association: Darien/Kleindienst
Bose Access Node: 139 Estimated age: 9.112 ± 0.11 Megayears
    Exploration History : It is not known how many times Paradox was discovered, and all knowledge of it then lost. What is known is that in E. 1379 Ruttledge, Kaminski, Parzen, and Lu-lan organized a two-ship expedition to investigate the light-refraction anomaly now known as Paradox.
 
    Arriving first, Ruttledge and Kaminski recorded on their ship's main computer the intention of entering the Paradox sphere using the exploration pinnace, while the main ship remained well clear. Five days later, Parzen and Lu-lan arrived and found the other ship and its pinnace, both in perfect working condition. Ruttledge and Kaminski were in the pinnace, alive but suffering from dehydration and malnutrition. They were incapable of speech or simple motor movement, and subsequent tests showed that their memories held no more information than the mind of a newborn baby. The data banks and computer memory on the pinnace were wiped clean.
 
    Following a review of the other ship's records, Parzen and Lu-lan drew lots to decide who would make a second trip inside the Paradox sphere. Lu-lan won and made the descent. No signals were received from him by Parzen, although there had been prior agreement to send a message every four hours. Lu-lan returned, physically unharmed, after three days. His memory was empty of all learned information, though somatic (instinctive) knowledge was unchanged.
 
    Paradox was declared off-limits to all but trained investigators in E. 1557.
 
    Physical Description: Paradox is a spherical region, fifty kilometers in diameter. Its outer boundary displays "soap bubble" color shifts across the surface, reflecting or transmitting different wavelength radiation apparently randomly.
 
    The sphere is opaque in certain spectral regions (1.2-223 meters) and perfectly transparent in others