the spaceship, Muddlin' Through, pumps heat from her nuclear power plant into her landing jacks to counteract the cold of the planetary surface;
going EVA, Falkayn needs thick soles attached to his boots and cannot stay outside for long;
at the same time, the sheilding in his armor can protect him for only half an hour from the heat of Beta Crucis;
when Beta Crucis rises, his self-darkening faceplate goes almost black;
the combination of glare and protection from it handicaps his eyesight;
the lethal radiation level mounts rapidly;
Falkayn deploys a Geiger counter, a neutron-analysis spike and a sonic prose;
he is buried in an avalanche - but rescued by Muddlin' Through - when an unstable dry ice glacier sublimes, the kind of catastrophe that we have come to expect for Anderson's space explorers, e.g., see "The Saturn Game."
When Falkayn names the planet Satan, he mentions that there is already a planet called Lucifer, which we encountered in "The Problem of Pain." When he explains to Chee Lan that Satan is an enemy of the divine and a source of evil, she starts to say that the divine itself is - and breaks off. The divine itself is the source of all things and therefore also the source of evil? She knows that, mythologically, there are anti-gods who can bestow wealth but that it is not a good idea to bargain with them. Will this be true of the planet Satan?
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