Whatever you might say about Grayson, he was a good colonial official. He was forty, which is a bit old for an Earthman to hold down an in-country post on Venus, but he had been in the Service eighteen years and his record as controllers was unimpeachable.
In those eighteen years he had banged about quite a bit, yet one would never guess it to hear him talk. Personal reminiscences were rare with him; he much preferred a game of chess or simply his pipe and a chair on the veranda, the last an architectural addition he had insisted on before taking over the Residency here at Blue Mold.
It had made the post odd looking, to say the least. There was the white walled dome, fashioned of steel-bound concrete, set down in the midst of that swamp wilderness like a half-submerged baseball. There we
