Holden panted,
"Jed! Creatures outside! They look like men!"
The communicator-screen faithfully monitored the end of the commercial. Two charming girls, radiant and lovely, raised their voices in grateful song, hymning the virtues of Rayglo Shampoo. There followed brisk reminders of the superlative, magical results obtained by those who used Rayglo Foundation Cream, Rayglo Kisspruf Lipstick, and Rayglo home permanent—in four strengths; for normal, hard-to-wave, easy-to-wave, and children's hair.
Cochrane heard the clanking of the airlock door.
CHAPTER NINE
He made for the control-room, where the ports offered the highest and widest and best views of everything outside. When he arrived, Babs and Alicia stood together, staring out and down. Bell frantically worked a camera. Jamison gaped at the outer world. Al the pilot made frustrated gestures, not quite daring to leave his controls while there was even an outside chance the ship's landing-fins might find flaws in their support. Jones adjusted something on the new set of controls he had established for the extra Dabney field. Jones was not wholly normal in some ways. He was absorbed in technical matters even more fully than Cochrane in his own commercial enterprises.
Cochrane pushed to a port to see.
The ship had landed in a small glade. There were trees nearby. The trees had extremely long, lanceolate leaves, roughly the shape of grass-blades stretched out even longer. In the gentle breeze that blew outside, they waved extravagantly. There were hills in the distance, and nearby out-croppings of gray rocks. This sky was blue like the sky of Earth. It was, of course, inevitable that any colorless atmosphere with dust-particles suspended in it would establish a blue sky.