Venus was the most miserable planet in the system, peopled by miserable excuses for human beings. And somewhere among this conglomeration of boiling protoplasm there was a being unlike the others, a being who walked and talked like the others but who was different--and afraid the difference would be discovered. You'll remember this short story.
Fenris isn't a hell planet, but it's nobody's bargain. With 2,000-hour days and an 8,000-hour year, it alternates blazing heat with killing cold. A planet like that tends to breed a special kind of person: tough enough to stay alive and smart enough to make the best of it. When that kind of person discovers he's being cheated of wealth he's risked his life for, that kind of planet is ripe for revolution.
Ezekiel, they say, "saw de wheel"--but he saw somewhat more than that. And Orton suggests that what he saw made perfectly good sense. to the understanding!
Psychopathology has offered possible answers to why, from time to time, people in large quantities "see" strange things in the sky which manage to evade trained scientific observers, or conform to what is known about the behavior of falling or flying bodies. And mass hysteria is by no means a product of the present century. But--what if these human foibles were deliberately being exploited?
