“Me?” Marie Quesnay shrugged. “No one would get so angry with one little spaceship stewardess, n’est-ce-pas? Or if so—ah, I do remember one Raoul in Marseilles, that was the episode of excitement!—he would surely not elect this coldblooded means.” She nodded at Teresina. “Are you not in a like situation, Ma’m’selle Fabricant?”

  Teresina nodded back, ruefully. “Even more so.” She wondered with a certain wistfulness how girls got involved in the episodes of excitement. She had been snowbound with a boy in a ski cabin once, when they were about fifteen, but he had been so terrified of her they scarcely exchanged a word. Then there was her present dilemma, but to date it had only involved sitting in a cushioned recoil chair.

  “And Ma’m’selle Trumbull,” continued Marie.

  “Well,” simpered Hedwig, “I won’t say there haven’t been men who might—”

  “But not with all this sabotage and danger to innocent people. It would be so much simpler to stuff you out an airlock,” said Marie rather yearningly.

  All eyes moved to Fred, who blushed and murmured, “Oh, now!”

  “I don’t believe I remember your name,” said Hedwig.

  “Fred.”

  “What?”

  “Fred. A perfectly good name in the language of my nation. Why shouldn’t it be?” His annoyance moderated, Fred continued: “I am a citizen of the Gombar Road. My world we call Kefflach. It is the second planet of the star Groombridge 1830.”

  “And were you on some important mission?” asked Newhouse.

  “I certainly was!” Fred erected his comb and switched his tufted tail. “I was studying Terrestrial poetry.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t understand. At our last national election, the Poetic Party won a clear victory. The Prosaicists retained hardly a dozen saddles in the Assembly.”

  “Even so—” Newhouse looked back to Kamala with rather more pleasure. “That seems to leave you, Miss Chatterji.”

  The Indian girl frowned, thoughtful rather than disturbed. “I cannot make logic out of that proposition,” she said.

  “Speaking of propositions—” Newhouse shut his mouth hastily.

  “My family in Calcutta has money,” went on Kamala, “but what is the use of kidnapping me with no prospect of returning me? I am engaged in missionary work for the Inner Reformist movement, but that is not likely to arouse fanatical opposition, since one of our major tenets is that all creeds are equally acceptable.”

  “But there must be some reason—” began Marie.

  “Indeed,” said Kamala, ignoring her, “creed is irrelevant, except in the universals common to all, such as charity and peace of self. We do, to be sure, rely on the much misunderstood concept of Nirvana, but in somewhat the same sense as Zen Buddhism, in fact still more so, and hence our ideal of oneness with reality is by no means incompatible with, say, Judaeo-Christo-Moslem eschatology, Hindu poly-pantheism, Confucian—”

  “I see,” interrupted Newhouse.

  “—ethics, and so on. You certainly do not see, and since there are, as you say, days to wait before we approach our destination, you all have an unparalleled opportunity to attain a degree of enlightenment. Now to begin with first principles, consider—”

  The star had changed from a point of light to a blaze when Newhouse switched over to sublight primary drive. He locked himself in the pilot’s turret and forbade interruptions, though it would take some hours to close in on the possibly Terrestroid planet his instruments had registered.

  Teresina leaned back wearily and stared at a blank wall. It had been a bad ten days. In retrospect it hazed into a nightmare of monotony and petty bickering. Were it not for Marie, who organized enough activities to keep thought at bay, God knew what would have happened. Now, though, nothing remained but a waiting and the hope that someone’s overloaded nerves wouldn’t snap.

  Such as my own, thought Teresina.

  Tension led to silence, and silence was a blessing she had never fully appreciated before. Not even Arsang was as bad as that eternal female clack-clack-clack. Fred’s bass and Newhouse’s baritone had been such a relief she could have wept to listen. It was wonderful, she reflected that men had deep voices. Otherwise the human race would long ago have died out…She choked off that train of thought in a hurry, jumped back to her Wisconsin girlhood (no, that wouldn’t do either, it brought tears too close to the surface), her college and the intoxication of really learning, the times they sat up all night drinking beer and settling the problems of the universe, the unbelievable day when notification came, she could go to Xenophon University for a year, teach, study, see a new planet and get paid for doing so—

  And now what? Teresina plugged astrographical statistics into the laws of probability. The usual cheerless answer came out. The star ahead definitely had planets. There was a reasonably good chance that one would lie in a more or less Terrestroid radiation zone. (But a few degrees of average temperature either way could make for frightful danger and discomfort.) The chance was not bad that it would be of roughly Earth’s mass. (However, the long-range effects of a gravity or air pressure different by more than, say, 25 percent from that for which man was evolved, were not pleasant to contemplate.) There was a fair probability of protoplasmic, photosynthesizing life, leading to an oxynitrogen atmosphere. Granted such a biochemistry, there was a smaller likelihood that it would be close enough to her own so that she could walk around freely and eat most of the native species.

  The trouble was, mathematical law is so inconsiderate as to decree that such probabilities must be multiplied together to get a net result. That still left quite a few planets hospitable to man, even in this one arm of the galaxy. But the individual chance of stumbling on one was somewhere below a single percent.

  Wherefore the lifeboat would doubtless make a hasty survey and then start out again for another star; and after that another, and then another; and finally the supplies would all be eaten, though the searchers would have gone crazy long before then—

  I will not think this way. Teresina thrust out a small firm chin and began a resolute mental integration of log log arc tan (x3−k) dx.

  Marie, beside her smiled wryly and made a thumbs-up sign. “Bon,” she murmured.

  And the hours passed. Teresina had almost dozed off when Newhouse’s voice came from the intercom to jar her conscious: “We’re very close to the planet—No, stay where you are. I can’t be bothered now, it’s dangerous. I’m making a tight approach curve, taking readings as I go. Don’t get your hopes up too much, but it’s definitely Earthlike. Mass, surface gravity, gross atmospheric composition; mean overall temperature a little higher, but the subarctic regions should be ideal for—”

  “I want to see!” Hedwig leaped to her feet.

  “No, I said!” cried Newhouse. “There’s something wrong, a flutter in the meter readings. I didn’t want to scare you by admitting it, but there is. I haven’t the engineering skill to—I’m going to land. It’s either that or risk hanging in orbit with a burned-out primary.”

  “Is it civilized?” whistled Arsang. “I do not mean, is it civilized to hang in orbit, for certainly that is not the case. Nor do I ask if the place itself is civilized, since I know that the United States of Korlaband has no extraplanetary colonies. But do you see any trace of intelligent life?”

  “No interstellar colonists,” said Newhouse. “The neutrino detector would register their atomic energy plant if that were the case. I haven’t seen anything in the viewscreens either—no trace of native culture—Our path will carry us clear around the globe and I’ll keep watching. But I’m afraid the chances are against any highly developed autochthons.”

  “Just to set down, though,” whispered Teresina. “To get outdoors!”

  “And we will still have the boat,” Marie reminded eagerly. “If we can establish a base here, we can make expeditions to other stars hoping in time to find—”

  “If the boat hangs together!” Newhouse’s voice harshened. “I don’t want to frighten you, but the deeper we get into this gravity field, the more the meters are fluttering. Perhaps our saboteur was more thorough than I realized.”

  “Ohhh!” shrieked Hedwig.

  “Do be quiet,” said Kamala. “How can our pilot have the requisite inner peace to land successfully under such a handicap, if you fail to show confidence in him?”

  “Oh, I’m confident enough in him, dearie,” blubbered Hedwig. “It’s the machinery that I don’t trust.”

  Kamala frowned. “It is true,” she admitted, “that a means of giving inward serenity to a machine has not yet been discovered.”

  Presently a thin keening sounded through the walls. It became a roar, and Teresina felt waves of frictional heat. Pseudograv could not smooth out all the jerking and buffeting which rocked the boat. “I know it’s a lousy landing!” Newhouse called once, raggedly. “But the primary drive is going to pieces! I haven’t any more control over the phasing!”

  And then at last there was an impact which smacked teeth together, a blunt roar, a scorched smell, and silence.

  A wide green valley, where flowers nodded in grass and trees murmured under a gentle wing, swept past a river to forested hills. The sun was a wheel of gold, low in a sky blue and dizzyingly tall, white clouds scudded, birds were a brightness that swooped and darted overhead. Distantly could be seen a herd of animals slender and burning red, with proud horns.

  Teresina sighed. “It could almost be Wisconsin.”

  “Long ago, however,” added Fred. “Back when the great pullulating, or perhaps ululating, tide of America which I, Fred of Groombridge 1830 II, sing, had not yet swept west, O pioneers!”

  “I know it’s wrong of me,” said Teresina. “I should be frightened or miserable or something, if only on Mother’s and Dad’s account.” She shook her yellow tresses loose to the wind. “But I’m happy!” After a moment she decided: “I suppose it’s due to the exercise and fresh air.”

  They topped a long ridge and saw the spaceboat flash metallic below them. John Jacob Newhouse came hurrying uphill as the girl and the Kefflachian strode downward. His hair was rumpled and his shirt stained with grease. “What kept you?” he puffed. “I was about to organize a search party. I thought you two were only going to look around a little.”

  “We did,” said Teresina, “and it’s unbelievably beautiful. Fertile, too. If they’re only edible, we’ll have more nuts and berries and wild grains and game than—”

  “They are. I’ve had the analyzers from our survival kit working hard,” said Newhouse. “Naturally, we’ll want to test an individual specimen of everything before eating it; and doubtless we’ll need a larger variety of foods here than we would on Earth, to get all the vitamins and so on. But it’s already obvious that this is our kind of biochemistry.”

  Fred rolled small devout eyes downward. The gods of the Gombar Road are chthonic. “A miracle,” he said.

  Newhouse caught Teresina’s hand. “But you were gone so long!” he protested.

  “Oh?” the girl felt confused. “I didn’t have a watch…No, it can’t be. The sun has hardly moved.”

  “2° 36´ 14˝,” said Fred.

  Newhouse started. “What? Can you gauge it that close?”

  “Why, of course,” said the Groombridgean, astonished. “Can’t everybody?” “You’ve been away more than four hours,” said Newhouse, turning back to the girl.

  “Good Euler! I must have—” Teresina realized Newhouse was still holding her hands. She jerked them back. Angrily: “I don’t see what difference it makes to you!”

  “Ah, much, my dear.” The man smiled and fell into step with her. “We must all stick close together now. Very close.”

  “I’m sure Fred could have handled anything dangerous.”

  “Quite likely.” Newhouse ran an approving eye along the gigantic centauroid form. “We’re going to be glad that Mr. Fred is with us. We’ll need his strength.”

  “What do you—Wait!” Teresina stopped dead. The blood seemed to drain from her. “Do you mean the boat—”

  “Beyond repair,” sighed Newhouse. “The central polyphasic of the primary drive has been so mangled we were lucky to get down before it blew out altogether. We’ve no facilities for making a replacement, even if any of us knew how.”

  “But—I mean—the secondary—”

  “It’s all right. That does us no good now, though. You must know we can’t try quantum-jumping a mass as great as a spaceboat, or a man, faster than light, when we’re this deep, in a gravitational field. Not unless we want to commit suicide. And without a primary, we can’t get off the ground and into space.” Newhouse paused a moment, then added: “The radio is sabotaged too.”

  “But—why—”

  “The saboteur, of course. Whoever wanted to get rid of one of us. Wrecking the radio was an added precaution. If we landed safely on a planet where we could live…as we’ve done, in defiance of probability…we might sometime have a faint hope that a search party would come past. The chances are all against that, you realize. No one will know which way we headed; there are so many stars; our prima facie chance of survival was so small that they won’t spend much time looking. But if we had a radio, we could keep it tuned, and if ever we picked up a signal, we could answer. Now even that tiny possibility has been eliminated. Suppose a rescue vessel should chance on this planet, what is the likelihood of its detecting a flyspeck like our camp by visual means?”

  Teresina closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the landscape was blurred for a while.

  Fred, who seemed more phlegmatic than most humans, except where poetry was concerned, rumbled calmly: “Is there any trace of native civilization, Mr. Newhouse?”

  “I saw nothing in the viewscreens that looked like a road or a city or even like cultivated fields,” replied the officer. “If anything exists, it must be on a low paleolithic level, no use to us. We’re on our own.”

  “What conditions can we expect?”

  “Favorable. I took care to land in an area whose climate would be good for our type of life. It’s near the vernal equinox, so we have summer ahead of us. But as the axial tilt is only some 10°, even the winter will be mild, little more than a rainy season. As you’ve seen, this world rotates very slowly, the period is more than three Terrestrial weeks. But the nights won’t be terribly dark, even if there isn’t a moon. This is a rather thickly starred region of space, a loose cluster. Also, we’re in a high latitude, the planet has a strong magnetic field in spite of the rotation, and it’s closer to its sun than Earth—so we can expect some brilliant auroral displays the year ’round. In short, we’ll be able to see what we’re about after sunset. And as I said, we’ll have no trouble about food. We’ll practice agriculture, but won’t have to work unduly hard at it.”

  “Have we tools?”

  “Yes, a good assortment, including some guns. Terrestrial seeds, too, in biostatic containers. Regulation survival equipment. Though as far as I know, this is the first time any tourists have ever had need of it.”

  They were close to the boat now. Newhouse waved at the others. Marie, fed up with the petulant incompetence of Hedwig and Arsang, had taken a hatchet and chopped some firewood herself; Kamala had a small blaze going, and the smell from a kettle suspended above was savory. Teresina realized with a jolt how hungry she was.

  “We can bunk in the craft as long as need be,” said Newhouse, “but of course we’d like more space and comfort. Tomorrow—I mean later today, local time!—suppose we set up the crane and the power saw. We can erect a very comfortable log cabin, with a private room for everybody, in a week or so. Next sunrise we can begin some basic farming. Why, in a few months we’ll all be living like kings!”

  “What kind of kings?” asked Fred suspiciously. “I know some tribes on Kefflach who sacrifice the king every harvest season.”

  “Oh,” said Newhouse, “it was only a figure—”

  “Not to mention those which have been infected with republicanism and are starting revolutions against their monarchies.”

  “—a figure of speech—”

  “And then there is the King of the Venruth Way. He’s always in debt. He can’t walk two steps without some moneylender seizing him by the tail and demanding repayment.”

  “Forget it!”

  “And poor old King Horrok of the Jungar Trail. He’s expected to lead his warriors in battle, and he’s such a coward, and the expensive psychiatrist he imported from Earth got so interested in the symbolism of a nomadic civilization that—”

  “Never mind! Never mind!”

  “Is it any wonder that I sing the spaciousness of Democracy, I, Fred, contained in all and all-containing, warm and unwashed as the veritable mob?”

  Suddenly Teresina giggled.

  Life looked more hopeful after a sleep period. The sun remained at late afternoon, the same low winds blew the same woolly clouds, but grief, anger, and hysterics were over with. It was almost a calm group which met outside the boat when breakfast was done.

  Newhouse mounted the second rung of the access ladder and looked down on the others, who sat or stood in tree-shaded grass. He made a dashing figure, his hair rumpled by the breeze, shirt open, pants skin-tight above gleaming boots. Teresina suspected he had put in half an hour or better achieving the effect. At least, that was the only way she could account for the riding boots on a planet without horses.

  “Ladies and gentlebeings,” said Newhouse in his most vibrant voice. “You know now that we’re probably here for the rest of our lives. You know how lucky we’ve been in finding such a Garden of Eden as this. It’s up to us to deserve that luck, to be worthy of the human race.”

  “And the Numan race,” piped Arsang.

  “Of course,” said Newhouse, annoyed. “I wasn’t forgetting the Kefflachian race either. But, well, anyhow, to continue. We can make what we will of this planet. Right now we’re a community with no definite authority, no clear-cut legal rights, no…uh…anything. We have work to do. It won’t be backbreaking: We have basic power tools, and the boat’s converter will supply all the energy we can ever use. But it will be work. A challenge!” he cried, trumpetlike.