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Butour ragged, hungry, sweaty crew got more out of
The Bastard King of England
. Rorn alone didn’t laugh and join in the choruses; however, he kept his despair quiet.
    Over a period of standard days, Bren and Galmer accumulated quite a bit of information. Though the red sun was still aloft,
     their photoscreen ’scope could pick out other galaxies for astronomical reference points. Their laser-beam transit and oscilloscope
     could accurately measure that sun’s creep down the sky. In calm weather they had a flat western horizon, out where the lake
     ran beyond vision. The short year enabled them to take a good sample of our orbit. And so on and so on. When added to what
     little the Yonderfolk had reported (they’d visited this world in the past, but were really no more interested in it than Earthmen
     in Sol I), and to general scientific principles, these data enabled us to make a fairly good sketch.
    We were in the middle northern latitudes of a planet which had a diameter three percent greater than Earth’s. The size was
     no cause for astonishment. Dim stars haven’t enough radiation pressure to inhibit such masses from condensing close to them
     out of the original dust cloud. Nor were we surprised that weight was only 0.655 standard. The very old systems, formed in
     early generations, have little in the way of heavy elements like iron. This planet lacked a metallic core, must in fact be
     sima clear to the center. Hence the low mean specific gravity and the absence of a magnetic field.
    Nor did it own any satellites. Solar gravitation had served to prevent that. This force had also, over billions of years,
     slowed rotation until one hemisphere faced inward. Then tides in water and atmosphere continued to act, until now the globe
     had a slow retrograde rotation. Combined with a sidereal year of ninety-four and a half Earth-days, this spin gave us a diurnal
     period of forty-four Earth-days on the surface: three weeks of lights, three weeks of dark.
    Coreless, the; planet had no vertical tectonic and orogenicforces worth mentioning. Once the mountains formed by surface distortion had eroded away, no new ones got built. Nor were
     there great ocean basins. We were lucky to have come down by this wet land; we wouldn’t likely find anything much better anywhere,
     and most of the world must be submerged.
    Though the total irradiation received was only slightly less than what Earth gets, it lay heavily in the red and infrared.
     The sun’s wavelength of maximum emission was, in fact, about 6600 ångströms, near the end of the human-visible spectrum. This
     accounted for the steamy heat we lived with. Scarcely any ultraviolet light was given off, and none of that penetrated to
     us; we needed artificial irradiation as much as our plankton did. Nor does a red dwarf spit out many energetic charged particles.
     Accordingly, while the planet was ancient indeed—fifteen billion years at a conservative guess—it still had plenty of water,
     and an atmosphere corresponding at sea level to a medium-high terrestrial mountaintop.
    Given air, a hydrosphere, and an infrared oven in the sky, you don’t have to have actinic radiation (what we would call actinic,
     I mean) for nature’s primeval chemicals to become life. It simply takes longer. As we had noted, since we could breathe, there
     were photosynthetic plants. They probably utilized one of the low-level enzyme-chain processes which have been observed in
     similar cases within the galaxies. Likewise the animals. In spite of having less energetic biochemistries than we did, they
     seemed to be just about as active. Shooting and dissecting some, we found elaborate multiple hearts and huge, convoluted lungs,
     as well as organs whose purposes we couldn’t guess. Evolution eventually produces all possible capabilities.
    Including intelligence. The sun was touching the lake’s rim when Urduga shouted us to him. From camp nobody could make out
     our ship very well,