Oomphel in the Sky

Since Logic derives from postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate.

And a religious belief is a system of postulates ... so how can a man fight a native

superstition with logic? Or anything else ...?

Miles Gilbert watched the landscape slide away below him, its quilt of rounded treetops

mottled red and orange in the double sunlight and, in shaded places, with the natural

yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. The aircar began a slow swing to the left, and

Gettler Alpha came into view, a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical

diameter of two feet at arm's length, slightly flattened on the bottom by the western

horizon. In another couple of hours it would be completely set, but by that time Beta,

the planet's G-class primary, would be at its midafternoon hottest. He glanced at his

watch. It was 1005, but that was Galactic Standard Time, and had no relevance to

anything that was happening in the local sky. It did mean, though, that it was five

minutes short of two hours to 'cast-time.

He snapped on the communication screen in front of him, and Harry Walsh, the news

editor, looked out of it at him from the office in Bluelake, halfway across the continent.

He wanted to know how things were going.