Outside, there waved long green tresses of extraordinarily elongated leaves. The patches of reed-like stuff stirred in the breeze. Jamison appeared in the control-room. He began to question Holden hopefully about the ground-cover outside. It was not grass. It was broad-leaved. There would be, Jamison decided happily, an infinitude of under-leaf forms of life. They would most likely be insects, and there would be carnivorous other insects to prey upon them. Some species would find it advantageous to be burrowing insects. There must be other kinds of birds than the giant specimens that looked like men at a distance, too. On the glacier planet there had been few birds but many furry creatures. Possibly the situation was reversed here, though of course it need not be ...
"Hm," said Cochrane when the films were all run through. "Ice-caps and land and seas. Plenty of green vegetation, so presumably the air is normal for humans. Since you're alive, Holden, we can assume it isn't instantly fatal, can't we? The gravity's tolerable—a little on the light side, maybe, compared to the glacier planet."
He was silent, staring at the blank wall of the control-room. He frowned. Suddenly he said:
"Does anybody back on Earth know that Babs and I were castaways?"
"No," said Holden, still very quiet indeed. "Alicia ran the control-board. She told everybody you were too busy to be called to the communicator. It was queer with you away! Jamison and Bell tied themselves in chairs and spliced tape. Johnny, of course"—his voice was very carefully toneless—"wouldn't do anything useful. I was space-sick a lot of the time. But I did help Alicia figure out what to say on the communicator. There must be hundreds of calls backed up for you to take."
"Good!" said Cochrane. "I'll go take some of them. Jones, could we make a flit to somewhere else on this planet?"
Jones said negligently,
"I told you we've got fuel to reach the Milky Way. Where do you want to go?"
"Anywhere," said Cochrane. "The scenery isn't dramatic enough here for a new broadcast. We've got to have some lurid stuff for our next show. Things are shaping up except for the need of just the right scenery to send back to Earth."
"What kind of scenery do you want?"