It is a small bay backed by tumbled cliffs. A shelving beach can be deduced from contour and occasional boulders big enough to stick through the snow that smothers it all. A sort of mess of rocks and mud at the back may be glacial moraine. Over the sea the ice is split in all directions by jagged rifts and channels; the whole thing is a bit like Antarctica but nothing is high enough or white enough to uplift the spirit, it looks not only chilly but kind of mean.
"This place," says the colonel, "is the only one, about which we have any topographical information, that seems to meet the requirements. Got to know about it through an elementary planetography. One of the observers had the sense to see we might need something of the sort. This place"—the stereo jigs as he taps his projector—"seems it's the center of a rising movement in the crust ... that's not to the point. Neither side has bothered to claim the land at the poles...."
I see their point if it's all like this—
"... And a ship trying to land on those cliffs might very well pitch over into the sea. That is, if she were trying to land on emergency rockets."
Rockets—that brings home the ancientness of this ship Gilgamesh—but after all the ships that settled Incognita probably carried emergency rockets, too.
This settled, the meeting turns into a briefing session and merges imperceptibly with the beginning of the job.
The job of course is Faking the background of the crash; working out the past history and present aims of the Lost Kafoozalum. We have to invent a planet and what's more difficult convey all the essential information about it by the sort of sideways hints you gather among peoples' personal possessions; diaries, letters et cetera; and what is even more difficult we have to leave out anything that could lead to definite identification of our unknown world with any known one.
We never gave that world a name; it might be dangerous. Who speaks of their world by name, except to strangers? They call it "home"—or "Earth," as often as not.
Some things have been decided for us. Language, for instance—one of two thousand or so Earth tongues that went out of use late enough to be plausible as the main language of a colonized planet. The settlers on Incognita were not of the sort to take along dictionaries of the lesser-known tongues, so the computers at Russett had a fairly wide choice.