Ruth's eyes crinkled in puzzled thought. "Harvey, weren't there any people here at all?"
"Nope. Not a soul. Not till the good gray colonel stepped out of his ship onto one of these golden hills, about fifteen years ago."
"It seems incredible," Ruth whispered.
"Hey, fellows," came the booming voice of big Red Brace, but it was promptly lost in the roar of a loudspeaker:
"Attention! Everyone will please assemble in the main reception room. Follow the red arrows down the ramp to the green doors. Please fill up all the front seats. Colonel Baker will address you. Leave your baggage where it is. Everybody now—follow the red arrows."
Excited, high-hearted talk frothed up from the immigrants as they moved down the ramp. After being confined for ten months in the narrow, dreadfully sound-proofed rooms and corridors of the spaceship, every sound, every bit of motion was an intense delight.
Green doors opened on a long, low-ceilinged room with paneled wooden walls painted in mottled green and gold. Large windows threw shafts of light across the rows of rough-hewn benches. The babble of voices swelled around them, grew louder and more excited as the minutes passed. Then abruptly the voices in the front of the auditorium quieted, and silence flooded backward. Heads began to turn to the right side of the stage where something seemed to be happening in the wing—and then, at last, Colonel Martin E. Baker came into sight and walked slowly to the center of the stage.
He stood there smiling, a middle-sized man in a light brown suit, with a friendly bulge in the abdomen, and small, neat feet. His cheeks were round and sunburned; his hair was brilliantly white, though thinning at the temples and the back of his skull. He held a lemon-colored cane in front of him and leaned on it slightly.
"Well," he said, a concealed microphone carrying his voice through the auditorium, "what do you think?"