"There may be someone there," said Caroline.
Someone, Gary thought, was not quite the word. Something would be more like it. Something.
The planet was flat, a world without mountains, without rivers, without seas. There were great green bogs instead of seas and flat arid plains with splotches of color that might be vegetation or might be no more than the outcropping of different geological strata.
The ship took up its descent spiral and Gary and Caroline hung close above the visor, watching for some sign of habitation, for some hint of life. A road, perhaps. Or a building. Or a vehicle moving on the ground or in the air. But there was nothing.
Finally Gary shook his head. "There's nothing here," he said. "We might as well go down. One place on this planet is as good as any other.”
They landed on a flat expanse of sand between the shore of one of the green bogs and the edge of a patch of splotched vegetation, for by now it was apparent that the color spots on the planet's surface were vegetation of a sort.
"Toadstools," said Caroline, looking out the vision plate. "Toadstools and that other kind of funny stuff, like asparagus spears, only it's not asparagus.”
"Like something out of a goblin book," said Gary.
Like something that you thought about when you were a kid and couldn't go to sleep after grandmother had read you some story about a shivery place and you had pulled the covers up over your head and listened for the footsteps to start coming through the dark.
They made the tests and the planet was livable without their suits — slightly high in oxygen, a little colder and a slighter gravity than Earth, but livable.