"Sure, Pop. Lots of times."
The woman laughed. "About a thousand times, I'd imagine.... Those pictures have been looked at so much, they're frayed at the corners."
They landed on a concrete apron, nestled between ridges of rolling hills. The jets belched, hissed, went out, and from a ranch type structure at the edge of the area, a jeep, towing a portable ramp moved out to meet them.
There was a gentle bump. Hatches hissed open. And then the passengers began to move down the ramp.
Among the last to emerge into the bright, warm sunshine, were Claude and Joan Marshall. Each clasping a hand of their son, they stood at the top of the ramp, breathing deep gulps of sweet-smelling air, and staring at the boundless horizon of the fresh, new world.
Clean and unspoiled it was, like an immense green carpet, dotted with clear, blue lakes, and billions of wildflowers that soaked nourishment out of topsoil twenty inches deep.
A paradise planet, free of bustling crowds and concrete cities. Untainted by littered alleyways, and dirty kiosks, and the abominable smells of cosmopolitan chaos.... In place of these was a sun-soaked, fairy-like landscape capped by fleecy white clouds that hung motionless in a sky of robin's-egg blue.
Claude stabbed an index finger at the patchwork quilt of green and yellow.
"Look Joan.... Our land! You can see it from here!"