 Why does Matt feel the need to warn people about the Chingsi?
The most dangerous of weapons is the one you don't know is loaded. Illustrated by Schoenherr The wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. All the way up the half-mile precipice it fingered and wrenched away at groaning ice-slabs. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness. But the thing in the hollow was stirring in stiff jerks like a snake with its back broken or a clockwork toy running down. When the movements stopped, there was a click and a strange sound began. It's well on the cards that I'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don't see how it could happen. You probably know we're back and wonder what went wrong. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you'll remember, and James pushed the button marked 'Jump'. Two months later your time, one second later by us. Matt Hennessy, from Farside Observatory, back of the Moon, just back from a proving flight cum astronomical survey in the starship Whale . Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere at fifteen p.s.i. The odds against finding Chang on a six-sun survey on the first star jump ever must be up in the googols. "The Chang natives aren't very technical—haven't got space travel for instance. We were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes. Look more like cats than people, but they're people all right. "One, they learned our language in four weeks. When I say they, I mean a ten-man team of them. "Two, they brew a near-beer that's a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the Whale . "Four, the ten-man language team also learned chess and table tennis. People who talk English, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers in trousers. Maybe that ten per cent extra gravity put us off our strokes.
 Matt is convinced the Chingsi are bad luck.
 Matt is convinced the Chingsi are bad luck.  Matt is convinced that Charlie deliberately destroyed the Whale.  Matt is convinced the Chingsi are evil.  Matt is convinced that Charlie deliberately destroyed the Minnow.