"He told me he hates plants," Olleroo said with a giggle.
"You'd think he'd like them, since they don't bother him like we do."
"Can't say I much like these plants myself," said Porlock, looking down at the purple undulations of the North Cir-cumpolar Forest "All the same. No mind. No change. A man alone in it would go right off his head."
"But it's all alive," Jenny Chong said. "And if it lives, Osden hates it"
"He's not really so bad," Olleroo said, magnanimous.
Porlock looked at her sidelong and asked, "You ever slept with him, Olleroo?" Olleroo burst into tears and cried, "You Terrans are obscene!"
"No she hasn't," Jenny Chong said, prompt to defend. "Have you, Porlock?"
The chemist laughed uneasily: ha, ha, ha Flecks of spittle appeared on his mustache.
"Osden can't bear to be touched," Olleroo said shakily. "I just brushed against him once by accident and he knocked me off like I was some sort of dirty... thing. We're all just things, to him,"
"He's evil," Porlock said in a strained voice, startling the two women. "Hell end up shattering this team, sabotaging it, one way or another. Mark my words. He's not fit to live with other people!" They landed on the North Pole. A midnight sun smoldered over low hills. Short, dry, greenish-pink bryoform grasses stretched away in every direction, which was all one direction, south. Subdued by the incredible silence, the three Surveyors set up their instruments and set to work, three viruses twitching minutely on the hide of an unmoving giant
Nobody asked Osden along on runs as pilot or photographer or recorder, and he never volunteered, so he seldom left base camp. He ran Harfex's botanical taxonomic data through the onship computers, and served as assistant to Eskwana, whose job here was mainly repair and maintenance.