"No, but he's sleeping so sweetly I know he's all right," she answered.
They sat down and began eating. After finishing, Jak said, "Well, we might as well go out and work some more on our townsite."
"Call us when Pop wakes up, will you, please?" Jon took a last sip of his juice-concentrate.
"That'd be silly." Jak frowned. "We know he can't come and help us, so why should we run several miles back here when we can see him when we get back?"
Jon opened his mouth to reply, his eyes flashing almost angrily, but their mother interrupted quickly with a question, "Boys, just why do you have to lay out such a site?"
"The Board requires it," Jon answered shortly.
"In the early days of exploration," Jak explained more patiently, "some of the space crews used to make their reports after merely flying above the surface of the planets of a new system. In fact, some of them didn't even go that close, and merely made up sketchy reports."
"Then when colonists got there," Jon, who had simmered down by now, took up the explanation, "they often found conditions very different, and many times quite dangerous to them."
"Yes, sometimes there were even intelligent inhabitants who hadn't been reported, so their planets couldn't be used for colonization. So the Board made this new ruling," Jak continued. "Now we have to have so many photos taken from various heights and at different places all over the surface of each planet, and each moon more than one hundred miles in diameter. And we have to lay out a townsite on the most Earthlike planet, mostly to show we actually have been there and spent some time there...."
"And it really doesn't make any difference whether the people who'll come here to live use it or not...."