Produced by Greg Weeks, Geoffrey Kidd, Stephen Blundell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net ANYTHING YOU CAN DO ... DARREL T. LANGART _anything you can do ..._ 1963 _Doubleday & Company, Inc._ _Garden City, New York_ A shorter version of this work appeared in _ANALOG Science Fact--Science Fiction_. _All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental._ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 62-7710 COPYRIGHT (C) 1963 BY DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. COPYRIGHT (C) 1962 BY THE CONDE NAST PUBLICATIONS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FIRST EDITION Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. For _mon cher ami_ Frere Gasce a man whom I may truly call ... ... my brother _[1]_ Like some great silver-pink fish, the ship sang on through the eternal night. There was no impression of swimming; the fish shape had neither fins nor a tail. It was as though it were hovering in wait for a member of some smaller species to swoop suddenly down from nowhere, so that it, in turn, could pounce and kill. But still it moved and sang. Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the type could have told that this particular fish was dying. In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder--long, tapered, and oval in cross-section--but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth silver-pink exterior was featureless. That one exception was a long, purplish-black, roughened discoloration that ran along one side for almost half of the ship's seventeen meters of length. It was the only external sign that the ship was dying. Inside the ship, the Nipe neither knew nor cared about the discoloration. Had he thought about it, he would have deduced the presence of the burn, but it was by far the least of his worries. The ship sang, and the song was a song of death. The internal damage that had been done to the ship was far more serious than the burn on the surface of the hull. It was that internal damage which occupied the thoughts of the Nipe, for it could, quite possibly, kill him.