Close to Critical

Coverart by Dean Ellis

"Who is Fagin?

Fagin is a robot, an alltogether new kind of teacher, whose nine-foot pupils, each weighing posssible a ton, were busy leaning how to cope with peculiarities of their native planet Temelra.

Temelra's tempeture averaged 370', eight hundred atmospheres of pressure, "air" consisting of water heavily laced with oxygen and oxide of sulphur, and a constantly shifting crust.

Fagin was a good teacher, but he was not built to cope with the life and death problem of two young creatures, one human and one extra-terrestrial, who managed to catapult themselves into this enormously difficult environment."

Close to Critical, Hal Clement, 1970.

Close to Critical was first published in 1958 in Astounding Science Fiction Magazine.