Tex looked at it and said, "Great leaping balk of fire! It can't be."
Matt stared and whispered, "It must be. The lost first expedition. They didn't fad-they got here."
Oscar stared and said nothing at all until the city mother repeated her question impatiently. "Is this thine?"
"Huh? What? Oh, sure! Wise and gracious mother, this thing belonged to my 'mother's mother's mother.' We are her 'daughters'"
"Then it is thine."
Oscar took it from, her and gingerly opened the brittle pages. They stared at the original entry for "raise ship"-but most especially at the year entry in the date column-"1971." "Holy Moses!" breathed Tex. "Look at that-just look at it. More than a hundred years ago."
They thumbed through it. There was page after page of one line entries of "free fall, position according to plan" which they skipped over rapidly, except for one: "Christmas day. Carols were sung after the mid-day meal."
It was the entries after grounding they were after. They were forced to skim them as the mother-of-many was beginning to show impatience: "- climate no worse than the most extreme terrestrial tropics in the rainy season, the dominant life form seems to be a large amphibian. This planet is definitely possible of colonization."
"-the amphibians have considerable intelligence and seem to talk with each other. They are friendly and an attempt is being made to bridge the semantic gap."
"Margraves has contracted an infection, apparently fun-goid, which is unpleasantly reminiscent of leprosy. The surgeon is treating it experimentally."