This comforting conclusion took a long time to work out. Meanwhile Babs and Cochrane had swung down to the ground and went hiking. Cochrane was armed as before, though he had no experience as a marksman. In television shows he had directed the firing of weapons shooting blank charges—cut to a minimum so they wouldn't blast the mikes. He knew what motions to go through, but nothing else.
They did not explore in the same direction as their first excursion. The ship was to take off presently, as soon as this planet had turned enough for the space-ship's nose to point nearly in the direction of their next target. They had two hours for exploration.
They came upon something which lay still across their path, like a great serpent. Cochrane looked at it startledly. Then he saw that the round, glistening seeming snake was fastened to the ground by rootlets. It was a plant which grew like a creeper, absorbing nourishment from a vast root-area. Somewhere, no doubt, it would rear upward and spread out leaves to absorb the sun's light. It used, in a way, the principle of those lateral wells which in dry climates gather water too scarce to collect in merely vertical holes.
They went on and on, admiring and amazed. All about them were curiosities of adaptation, freaks of ecological adjustment, marvels of symbiotic cooperation. A botanist would have swooned with joy at the material all about. A biologist would have babbled happily. Babs and Cochrane admired without information. They walked interestedly but unawed among the unparalleled. Back on Earth they knew as much as most people about nature—practically nothing at all. Babs had never seen any wild plants before. She was fascinated by what she saw, and exclaimed at everything. But she did not realize a fraction of the marvels on which her eyes rested. On the whole, she survived.
"It's a pity we haven't got a helicopter," Cochrane said regretfully. "If we could fly around from place to place, and send back pictures ... We can't do it in the ship ... It would burn more fuel than we've got."
Babs wrinkled her forehead.
"Doctor Holden's badly worried because we can't make as alluring a picture as he'd like."
Cochrane halted, to watch something which was flat like a disk of gray-green flesh and which moved slowly out of their path with disquieting writhing motions. It vanished, and he said:
"Yes. Bill's an honest man, even if he is a psychiatrist. He wants desperately to do something for the poor devils back home who're so pitifully frustrated. There are tens of millions of men who can't hope for anything better than to keep the food and shelter supply intact for themselves and their families. They can't even pretend to hope for more than that. There isn't more than so much to go around. But Bill wants to give them hope. He figures that without hope the world will turn madhouse in another generation. It will."
"You're trying to do something about that!" said Babs quickly. "Don't you think you're offering hope to everybody back on Earth?"