New bodies were an everyday affair to him. He had, indeed, managed to ski with no obvious problems from the residence area along the snowy, and often icy, streets of Pitville and even to herringbone up the slope to the top of the jumping ramp. He had still been standing completely at ease when she started her run. Now, as she approached its lowest part, she had to focus all her attention on her own technique and forget the Samian. Her husband would have to provide any help his boss might need.

The jump ramp itself was of packed snow, some of it natural and some the pulverized ice excavated from the two shafts which gave Pitville its name. They were only about a hundred and fifty kilometers from sunlight, so the general temperature, while extremely variable like all of Habranha’s weather, was usually high enough to let a reasonably strong Erthuma make snowballs out of water ice powder by squeezing. The ramp was therefore fairly hard and even moderately slippery, though its skiing surface was constantly changing as the natural precipitation which tried to cover it competed with the equally variable winds which strove to sweep it clear.

The falloff at either side was stabilized by native vegetation, carefully selected for deep roots and lack of explosive quality. There were two basically different types of life on Habranha; one had a biochemistry enough like that of the Erthumoi to use ATP as its “battery.” The other and more common employed azide ion for the same general purposes, so that much of the world’s vegetation and some of its animal life was either explosive or electrically hazardous or both. The winged natives belonged to the first category, lending strength to the mounting belief among the Six Races that they had not actually evolved on Habranha.