Ileth was saying, "You can have your old cabins back. I won't see you again until tomorrow. We—we're still on Earth time because of the peculiar daylight hours. Until tomorrow."
She turned, head bent and hurried abruptly through the door.
The prisoners looked at each other in vague alarm, unconsciously drawing closer together. In each of their minds, Saxon read the same thing—the blind unspoken terror of deep space!
The helicopter whispered scarcely a hundred feet above the rolling plain, while Saxon stared hungrily out of the windows, unable to satisfy his eyes.
Alpha Centauri A, a scintillating yellow orb like Sol, stood in mid-sky. The orange disc that was Alpha Centauri B, the second half of the binary, was just rising. Proxima was not in sight.
Directly below he could see a flock of plants that looked like tumble weeds except that they were a weirdly mottled yellow and green. They rolled along in a herd pausing to nibble at new shoots of the pale green grass. "Cannibal Plants," their botanist had named them because of their feeding habits.
Herbivorous plants!
Their botanist, Saxon thought, was going quietly insane trying to classify the staggering complexity of utterly alien forms of plant growth.
"Weird, isn't it?" A woman's rich husky voice addressed Saxon. "It sends goose flesh up my spine." Saxon tore his eyes away from the window.