"But do you know anything is wrong?" Hayes asked incredulously. He was having the same trouble facing the reality as the ship's crew.
"If you were flying to Los Angeles and found only desert where the city is supposed to be, you might assume something was wrong," Cal answered drily. "But I don't know what it is. Do you have a recorder set up, so I can begin trying to find out?"
"Yes, yes, E Gray," Hayes said hurriedly. He was suddenly conscious that he had been interrupting an E conversation, not once but several times. "Pardon the intrusions. It was just that ..."
"I understand," Cal reassured him.
When Cal stood up from the communicator, the eyes of the crew were on him. Overhearing his conversation with Earth had sobered them, made reality come closer.
"You think it might be a mirage?" Tom asked. "Some freak air current reflecting from another island and superimposing over this one?" Then he answered himself. "No. I guess it isn't. There aren't enough discrepancies."
"Let's pan down to the ground with the scanner," Cal said. "Take it slow over the area where the village is supposed to be."
Glad to be doing something with his hands, Lynwood twisted the controls to take them instantly, in magnification, to a distance slightly above the tops of the trees. The automatic pilot caused the ship to drift with the rotation of the planet, keeping them in fixed relative position.
They scanned the ground rod by rod. There were expanses of heavy tree and bush growth that they could not penetrate. Some of these trees grew where the pictures showed cleared fields, buildings, truck gardens, cattle pastures.
"Those big trees didn't grow up in a month, since the last colonist report," Louie said positively. He still clung to his belief that it was all a hoax.