"Think my job's exciting?" he asked. "Skipper of an exploration ship. Poking my nose into odd corners of the Galaxy. Seeing what's over the hill."
"Of course," I said.
"Well, you'd be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred. It's just a job. Most of it is checking—or did you know that only one sun in ten has planets, and only one in ten thousand has a spectrum that will support human life, and that only one in ten thousand planets has Earthlike qualities? So you can imagine how we felt when we ran across Lyrane." He grimaced wryly. "I had it on the log as Halsey's Planet for nearly two weeks before we discovered it was inhabited." He shrugged. "So the name was changed. Too bad. Always did want to have a planet named after me. But I'll make it yet."
I clucked sympathetically. Capt. Halsey sighed, and this is what he told me.
II
It's a beautiful world, Lyrane is. Like Earth must have been before it got cluttered up with people. No cities, no smoke, no industrial complexes—just green plains, snowy mountains, dark forests, blue seas, and white polar caps all wrapped in cotton clouds swimming in the clearest atmosphere you ever saw. It made my eyes ache to look at it. And it affected the crew the same way.
We were wild to land. We came straight in along the equatorial plane until we hit the Van Allen Belt and the automatics took over. We stopped dead, matched intrinsics and skirted the outer band, checking the radiation quality and the shape of the Belt. It was a pure band that dipped down at the poles to form entry zones. There was not a sign of bulges or industrial contaminants.
Naturally we had everything trained on the planet while we made our sweeps—organic detectors, radar, spectroanalytic probes—all the gadgets the BEE equips us with to make analysis easy and complete. The readings were so homelike that every man was landsick. I wasn't any different from the rest of them, but I was in command and I had to be cautious about setting the Two Two Four down until we'd really wrung the analytic data dry.
So, while the crew grumbled about hanging outside on a skyhook, we kept swinging around in a polar orbit until we knew that world below us like a baby knows its mother. It checked clean to five decimal places, which is the limit of our gadgetry. Paradise, that's what it was—a paradise untrod by human foot. And every foot on the ship was itching.