For here lay no frozen wastes, no icy crags and barrens.
Instead, a blaze of living color spread before him, kaleidoscopic in its brilliance. Huge flowers like none that he had ever seen carpeted the foreground in clumps of yellow, red, green, purple—every color of the rainbow. Strange trees stretched upward towards the shining blue vault of the sky, rustling and swaying in the gentle breeze.
"Fred—!" Eileen's hand rested on his shoulder. "Fred, it's beautiful!"
Her words broke the spell. "Beautiful? Yes, of course it is," Boone nodded, frowning. "But the question is, where are we? There's no planet like this anywhere in our whole solar system, so far as I know—"
He broke off; moved out into the carrier-cradle proper, where he could get a broader field of vision.
To the right, the flowerland stretched away to rolling hills that spread as far as he could see.
To the left—
He went rigid.
Beyond the flower-fields, strange, low domes rose—grey-silver domes whose very lines and curves bespoke an alien pattern. One atop the other they piled in a jumbled, sprawling mass like bubbles trapped in cooling lava. Boone could only guess how many miles of ground they covered.
Yet it was a scene of a kind he'd seen before, once, on microreels in IC's confidential archives.