The passengers have been well advised about contact with inhabited planets. But here comes another warning.

        "This is supposed to be a cruise-ship," groans Lohar.

        A young crewmember moves to the front of the SpaceBar Lounge and turns off the entertainment holospace. She reads the following.

        "According to law, no cruise-ship may orbit a planet which has declared a State of Environmental Emergency. This is for the well being of its inhabitants, and ourselves. Thank you."

        Holospace back on, the buzz resumes immediately. SpaceBar's theme is dinosaur-tech and features things like 8-Track tapeplayers, and in the MINI ―the bar-food section for non-thinkers featuring 360-vision-and-sound―there are mini VCRs and four-inch TVs at the tables.

        In the SideBar, which caters to drinkers and thinkers, Lohar makes the next move in his game of QUAD with Nadiel. "How many times do they have to say it?" 

        "The situation is bad there. My heart goes out to them."

        "You gotta' die sometime. Nothin' lasts forever."

        "Isn't that a little insensitive?"

        "It's reality. You gonna' make your move anytime today?"  

        Nadiel makes his move.

        The holospace is now showing live-TV news from the planet.

        "I like seeing the old Television," says a SpaceBarite mid sip.

        "The subject matter could be more pleasant," says the bartender, trained to gently generate conversation.

        "Yeah, we were the same in our early stages."

        "True." Others nod and sip.

        Now a news story comes on the dinosaur television set about an oil spill...they are happening with increased frequency since the oil crisis which started in 2005--some say 2004--that was caused by the increased costs involved in getting oil out of the ground once you have used more than half of all of it. In the same way that profits had geometrically increased when oil seemed infinite, now the decrease was just as geometrically severe. The curves are symmetrical. As you know

        "Gaah, that stuff is a mess," says bartender. "Can you believe it? They still burned fossil fuel after 2000."

        "The big fuel corporations delayed the switch to solar cars," says a drinker-thinker.

        "That's part of a larger picture," says another. But no one takes up the thought.

        At the QUAD game, Nadiel is also in-and-out watching. "They certainly are an irrational bunch. They have digital notebooks but they still chop down every tree in sight so they can scratch words on paper. At least our planet escaped that mistake, who knows why.

        "A random variation," declares Nadiel. "They could just as well have had twice as much oil. History has long learned the lesson of not including random in its calculations."

        TV news moves on another subject, and Nadiel wins the game.

        Up on the observation deck, only a small group, mostly nondrinkers, gathers for today's fast fly-by, a regular feature of the cruise. They usually take fifteen minutes, and usually include a look at terrain, a quick spin over the biggest city, and then warp-speed to the next star-planet system. Sure, they’ll ponder Planet Three's fate, but only for a while. After all, this is a cruise.