“It will take a few minutes to get a report from the station on Toorey. Suppose I call you back about sunrise. I can give you the weather forecast, and there’ll be light enough for you to show me your Bowl. All right?”

“That will be excellent. I will wait.” Barlennan crouched where he was beside the radio while the storm shrieked on around him. The pellets of methane that splattered against his armored back failed to bother him — they hit a lot harder in the high latitudes. Occasionally he stirred to push away the fine drift of ammonia that kept accumulating on the raft, but even that was only a minor annoyance — at least, so far. Toward midwinter, in five or six thousand days, the stuff would be melting in full sunlight, and rather shortly thereafter would be freezing again. The main idea was to get the liquid away from the vessel or vice versa before the second freeze, or Barlennan’s crew would be chipping a couple of hundred rafts clear of the beach. The Bree was no river boat, but a full-sized oceangoing ship. It took the Flyer only the promised few minutes to get the required information, and his voice sounded once more from the tiny speaker as the clouds over the bay lightened with the rising sun. “I’m afraid I was right, Barl. There is no letup in sight. Practically the whole northern hemisphere — which doesn’t mean a thing to you — is boiling off its icecap. I understand the storms in general last all winter. The fact that they come separately in the higher southern latitudes is because they get broken up into very small cells by Coriolis deflection as they get away from the equator.”

“By what?”

“By the same force that makes any projectile you throw swerve so noticeably to the left — at least, while I’ve never seen it under your conditions, it would practically have to on this planet.”