Cerberus, at 240.161 million kilometers, was colder, harsher, and the strangest of the four. It appeared to be covered by an enormous deep ocean without any land masses. However, the ocean was covered by a dense growth of plants so gigantic they rose more than two or three kilometers from the seabed to the surface and beyond, forming a riot of colors and supporting a surface plant ecosystem growing on the tops of the great plants themselves. You could build cities in those treetops, and, in the temperate zones, live very comfortably from a climate point of view. But with natural resources other than wood so far out of sight as to be unreachable if available at all and with such an odd place for living, the planet was something of a dog as far as possible settlement was concerned.

Finally there was Medusa, at 307.768 million kilometers, a cold, frozen world dotted with a few forests but covered mostly with tundra and polar ice. The only one of the four with obvious signs of volcanism, it was a hard, harsh land whose only inhabitants seemed to be a mammalian assembly of Wandering herbivores preyed upon by some particularly nasty-looking carnivores. Medusa was ugly, bitter cold, and stark, compared not just to Lilith but to any of the others; the early explorers had to agree that anybody who voluntarily went to such a world to live and work would most likely have rocks in his head.

The Exploiter Team had chosen Lilith for its main base, naturally, and settled in. Nothing happened for about six months, as they lived and worked and studied under a rigid quarantine, although with their shuttlecraft they had established preliminary camps on the other three worlds as well. They were just beginning to relax when Lilith’s snake struck.

By the time all their machinery had ceased to function it was already too late. They watched first as the power drained out of all their equipment, then, frantically, as that same equipment and all other offworld artifacts started to break up into so much junk, rotting before their eyes.