ATTRITION

By JIM WANNAMAKER

Of course if Man is to survive, he must be adaptable,as any life form must. But that's not enough; he mustadapt faster than the competing forms. And on newplanets, that can be tricky....

Illustrated by Krenkel

he faxgram read: REPORTMA IS INSTANTERGRAVIS. The news obelisk justoff the express stripoutside Mega Angeles' Galactic SurveyBuilding was flashing: ONE OFOUR STAR SHIPS IS MISSING!

Going up in the lift, I recalledwhat I had seen once scrawled uponthe bulkhead of a GS trainer: Spaceis kind to those who respect her. Andunderneath, in different handwriting:Fear is the word, my boy.

The look given me by the onlyother passenger, a husky youngster inGS gray, when I punched Interstel'slevel, didn't help. It was on the tip ofmy tongue to retaliate: Yes, and I'dturn in my own mother if she were astar chaser and I caught her doingsomething stupid. But I let it ride;obviously, it was a general-principlesreaction; he couldn't have known theparticulars of my last assignment:the seldom kind that had given Interstelits reputation.

The lumer over the main entranceglowed: INTERSTELLAR SECURITY,INVESTIGATION, ANDSPECIAL SERVICES BRANCH,GALACTIC SURVEY, NORTHAMERICAN FEDERATION.

At the end of the long corridor betweenoffices was a door labeled:CHIEF SPECIAL AGENT.

Gravis hadn't changed a bit in thethirty-six hours since I'd last seenhim: a large, rumpled man whoshowed every year of the twentyhe'd spent in Interstel.

"It's a nasty job, Ivy."

"Always has been," I said, completingthe little interchange thathad been reiterated so often that ithad become almost a shibboleth.

I took advantage of his momentarysilence. I'd had an hour duringthe air-taxi hop from Xanadu, the resorttwo hundred miles off the coastof California, to prepare my bitterstatement. Words come fluentlywhen an earned leave has been pulledperemptorily out from beneath you;a leave that still had twenty-ninedays to go. But I was brief; the newsflasher had canceled much of thebite of my anger; it took me somethingunder one hundred and twentyseconds, including repetition of certainwords and phrases.

Gravis lived up to his name; hedidn't bat an eye. He handed me athin folder; three of its sheets werefacsimile extrapolations of probot reports;the fourth was an evaluation-and-assignmentdraft; all were fromGalactic Survey Headquarters, NAF,in Montreal. The top three wereidentical, excepting probot serialnumbers and departure and arrivaltimes. GSS 231 had been located inits command orbit above a planetthat had not yet been officially namedbut was well within the exploredlimits of the space sector assignedNAFGS by the interfederationalbody, had been monitored by threerobot probes—described as being inoptimum mechanical condition—onthree distinctly separate occasions,and all devices that could be interrogatedfrom outside had triggeredsafe and secure. But no human contacthad been accomplished. Thefourth sheet—which bore the calligraphyon its upper right corner: AttentionCallum—assumed that thecrew of 231, a survey team and conalternate, had met with an accidentor series of accidents of undeterminedorigin and extent in thecourse of carrying out the duty describedas