Anything You Can Do! is a Scienc Fiction Story Book. Like some great silver pink fish, the ship sang on through the eternal night. There was no impression of swimming; the fish shape had neither fins nor a tail. It was as though it were hovering in wait for a member of some smaller species to swoop suddenly down from nowhere, so that it, in turn, could pounce and kill. But still it moved. Only a being who was thoroughly familiar with the type could have told that this fish was dying. In shape, the ship was rather like a narrow flounder long, tapered, and oval in cross section but it showed none of the exterior markings one might expect of either a living thing or of a spaceship. With one exception, the smooth, silver pink exterior was featureless. That one exception was a long, purplish black, roughened discoloration that ran along one side for almost half of the ship's seventeen meters of length. It was the only external sign that the ship was dying. Inside the ship, the Nipe neither knew nor cared about the discoloration. Had he thought about it, he would have deduced the presence of the burn, but it was the least of his worries. The internal damage that had been done to the ship was by far the more serious. It could, quite possibly, kill him.
