It was funny, but he couldn't even visualize the Sweeneys without thinking of a little sleepy town, the kind of town he'd left himself as a kid to strike out across the great curve of the universe. Dry dust of Kansas and the Dakotas that would still be blowing after a thousand years!
"They've had time to build a town, Ned!" Cynthia said. "A really fine town with broad streets and modern, dust-proof buildings!"
Ned Jackson awoke from his reverie with a wry start. He nodded again, remembering the many other colonists and the equipment which had been shipped to the little green world across the years. Plastic materials to build houses and schools and roadways, educational materials to build eager young minds.
Every ten years a contact rocket went out from Earth by interstellar warp-drive to make a routine check. The trip was a long one—eight months—but the Central Colonization Bureau had to make sure that anarchy did not take the place of law on worlds where teeming jungles encouraged the free exercise of man's best qualities—and his worst.
From end to end of the Galaxy, on large planets and small, progress had to be measured in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number. There could be no other yardstick, for when man ceased to be a social animal his star-conquering genius shriveled to the vanishing point.
"The friends we made here were very special, Ned," Cynthia said. "I guess people who dare greatly have to be a bit keener than the stay-at-homes, a bit more eager and alive. But the Sweeneys had such a tremendous zest for living—"
"I know," Ned said.
"They were wonderful—generous and kind. It will be good to see them again. Good to—" Cynthia laughed. "I don't know why, but I was about to say: 'Good to be home.'"
Ned thought he knew why.
They'd made their first flight for the Bureau exactly ten years before. It had been a combined "official business" and honeymoon flight, and almost the whole of it had been spent on the little green world.