On The Planet Lucifer

This post, like the preceding (see here) and some earlier ones, is illustrated with the magazine cover for Poul Anderson's "The Problem of Pain." I wondered who the chess players were and whether they were human. However, the cover image in fact illustrates this story. The unnamed first person narrator says of Peter Berg:

"...he plays chess at just about my level of skill."
-Poul Anderson, "The Problem of Pain" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 103-134 AT p. 106.

Like any good installment of a future history series, "The Problem of Pain" performs more than one function:

it recounts a specific story about the one-off character, Peter Berg;

it increases our knowledge of the Ythrians, introduced in the previous story, introduces the planet that will be renamed Avalon and presents some information about Berg's home planet, Aeneas.

But it does more than this: Berg is introduced by another character, the unnamed narrator, and their conversation occurs on yet another planet, Lucifer, which is never to be seen again but which nevertheless makes its own small contribution to the Technic History.