Shrouded Planet

Nidor.

Nidor, one of two continents on a water-covered planet.

Nidor, a planet, a people, a nation. Nidor, a religion.

The primary was a B class star, a huge, blue-white stellar engine, pouring out its radiation at a rate that made Earth's yellow Sol look picayune by comparison. The planet Nidor swung round its sun at a distance so great that it took nearly three thousand years for the world to complete one revolution—and even so, the planet was hot. The continents, on the Eastern hemisphere just south of the equator, had a mean temperature of 110° Fahrenheit, and continually sweltered beneath the eternal cloud layer that swathed the planet.

Of solid land there was little; more than eighty-five percent of the planet's surface was covered by the shallow sea.

It had not always been so. Geological evidence indicated that the planet had recently gone through a period of upheaval, during which whole continents had sunk beneath the waters.

It had happened within historical time, some four or five thousand years previous to the planet's discovery by Earth. It was upon the legend of the happenings at the time of the Cataclysm that the religion of the surviving Nidorians was based. Before the Cataclysm, the planet had evolved humanoids very similar physically to man: to the eye the only major difference was that instead of the irregular distribution of hair over the human body, the Nidorian was fairly evenly covered with light, curly down that ranged in color from platinum blonde to light brown.

When the Cataclysm occurred, the sole remaining group of civilized beings on the planet were on the continent of Nidor—and they had carried with them a myth of the terror of the Great Cataclysm, and of demons that lived beyond the sea.

And thus they were when they were discovered by the roving interstellar scout ships of Man— Earthman.