He looked at her appraisingly. "Which way will you fall?"

"Hush."

They laughed. The sun shone more brightly than usual.

"Golden fields. Silver rivers."

Cadmann laughed. "I suppose. I see a year-round water supply and fertile croplands."

"You would."

Somebody ‘d better.

The stream flowed past the camp and over the bluff above Miskatonic River, the greatest body of running water on the island. Eight kilometers to the south the grasslands ended in a burnt, blackened semicircle of firebreak and beyond that the crest of giant brambles began. The colonists had chosen a beautiful place to start a new world, lovely enough to make him feel... almost at peace. Times like this confused him. It was a fight not to shut down his thoughts and find some project totally involving, and preferably a little risky.

Slender fingers dug into his arm. "Hey, big guy. Don't go brooding on me. This was supposed to be our walk day. Stay with me for a while, hmm?" He was still quiet. "Tau Ceti Four. Avalon." She rolled the words over her tongue.

"It's a good name."

"But?"

"Don't know."

"Not poetic enough?"

He helped her over a rock. It took effort to focus on the game she was inviting him to play. "I've read poetry—"

"Kipling." She laughed. "It's all right. I know you're better read than me. And I'll keep your secret. I don't know, Avalon's all right. But there are others. Beautiful, exciting places from history, or legend. Shangri-La, Babylon..."

"Xanadu?"

"Sure. Pellinore."

He shook his head. "You must mean Pellucidar. Pellinore was a king.

One of Arthur's Knights of the Round Table."

"Well... maybe so. But I don't mean Pellucidar, either. There aren't really any predators on the island. Except for the turkeys and other critters we've seeded, there just isn't a damn thing bigger than an insect. Even the plant life. Low grass and thorn trees. It's like a blank slate. Or a park. Cadmann—"

He asked, "Does that bother you?"

"Well, the worst we can do is mess up one island. It isn't like we'd turned all those Earth creatures loose on the mainland."

"I meant too perfect. Why do you care?"

"Well—"

Ernst ran up, pointing. "Birds. Big Birds." Two of the fan-winged shapes swooped past. Cadmann watched as they circled out over the plain, then vanished in the mist that reached halfway down the face of Mucking Great Mountain. "Nest there?" Ernst asked. "Why there?" He frowned again.

"See? We do have company."

"The pterodons? They're way more frightened of us than we are of them.

And the biggest of them is hardly strong enough to carry off a good-sized samlon, let alone a sheep."

"How about a baby?" he asked.

She took it seriously. "I don't think so. To tell you the truth, I haven't seen anything much bigger than a sea gull, and that bothers me. The ecology is just too damned simple. Take out the pterodons and all you've got is small insects and these big local fish."

"The samlon."

"Of course they aren't really fish. What with the trout and the catfish and the turkeys, we've added more animals than we found. Spooky." Sylvia turned thoughtful as they picked their way down a steep slope. "You know, there's something funny about the pterodons."

"What's that?"

"Well, remember the one we saw hunting samlon in the pool?"

"Sure. Reminded me of albatross in the South Pacific." Sailing aboard

Ariadne with a fair wind north, a million years—no, not a million years, but a lot more than a million miles ago. With luck we'll build schooners here before I'm dead.

"Didn't that look funny to you? I can't quite put my finger on it, but it reminded me of an old Walt Disney nature film, with the action run in reverse, to be comical."

"Reverse?"

"A bird hits the water hard and fast, makes its grab, then takes off at its leisure. That bird hit the water slow and took off fast, almost as if..." She frowned, shaking her head like someone trying to rattle cobwebs off a thought. "Never mind, I'm trying to force something."

"Or see something that isn't there. You'd love to put some mystery into this system."

"How'd you get to know me so well?"

"I always understand other men's women."

"Ah."

Without warning Cadmann began to run, pulling Sylvia down the last twenty meters of slope. She skidded on her heels to slow herself, nonplused but exhilarated by his sudden burst of energy.

He glanced back and realized that Ernst was running too. Ernst looked frightened. "Hold up," Cadmann said. He called, "Ernst! It's okay, Ernst. We're just running for fun. Want to race?"

Ernst's brow cleared; his run slowed. "Race. Sure, Cadmann. Start even?"

They lined up, gave Sylvia a hundred meters of head start, and ran.

Even this far out from the camp, there was a blackened strip of road for them to follow. It was brittle and glassy.

"Your road," Ernst shouted. "Yours."

"Sure." It was. The last time they really needed me. Ernst led with the weed burner, a converted military flame-thrower. Cadmann had driven the bulldozer, wishing all along that there had been enough fuel to use a landing craft. That would have made a road! Hover across the ground on the Minerva, fuse the rock forever—Even so, he felt pride when he scanned the kilometers of dark ribbon he had created with his own sweat and skill. He bent to look closer at the surface of the road. A few tiny bluish sprigs were nosing their way out of the ground.

Sylvia came up puffing. "Maybe we should sow the ground with salt before you make your next pass."

"I'm not even sure it matters. Not much of the heavy machinery comes out this far."

Thin clouds of dust raised by the tractors puffed like tiny fires in the distant fields. The crops had been established. Now they must be expanded. Prepare the ground for new crop tests, lay away grain and seeds against the possibility of a bad year.

The Colony was a success. Zack Moscowitz—administrator, all-around good guy, everybody loves Zack—Zack had done it. The Colony was a success, and nothing short of disaster could stop its expansion across the island and eventually over all of Tau Ceti Four.

Agriculture. Food, vitamins, some comforts. We have those, and now comes prospecting. Iron ore had been discovered on the island itself, and the orbiting laboratory had found what looked very much like a deposit of pitchblende. It was deep in the interior of the continent, across thousands of kilometers of ocean and through badlands—but it was there.

Iron and uranium. The foundations of empire. "The sons of Martha."

"Eh?" Sylvia giggled.

"Kipling. Sorry. Politicians are the sons of Mary. Then there are the others, the ones who keep civilization going. ‘They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose—‘ Oh, never mind."

Today seemed more tolerable, more like the First Days, when Cadmann and Sylvia and the other First Ones thundered down from the heavens in their winged landing craft. All the gliding characteristics of a brick. We left a line of fire and thunder that circled the sky. A hundred and fifty colonists waited in orbit, cold as corpses and no more active, while we scanned a strange planet from end to end, and chose the place to set our city, and set our feet in the rock of this world.

The National Geographic Society's probes told a lot. Tau Ceti Four had oxygen and water and nitrogen. The planet was cooler than Earth, so the temperate zones were smaller, but a lot of the planet was livable. They'd known there would be plants, and guessed at animals. Humans could live there—or could they? Probably, but the only certainty would come when people tried it.

Civilization on Earth was rich, comfortable, satisfying; and crowded, and dull. Forty million university graduates had volunteered for the expedition. The first winnowing had eliminated compulsive volunteers, flakes whose horoscopes had told them to find a different sky, candidates with allergies or other handicaps, geniuses who couldn't tolerate cramped conditions or human company or people who gave orders... Perhaps a hundred thousand had been seriously considered; and two hundred had set forth to conquer Tau Ceti Four. Eight had died along the way.