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you have for us, isn’t it, Kitty?”
    The Greek girl rose, preening herself very slightly as always. “More or less. Temperatures will remain high for probably about another two months, but you’ll see from the programme Dan Sakky has prepared that we need to put storm precautions in hand shortly. We’re buying our summer comfort for the usual price—the turn of the season is likely to be accompanied by gales which may peak at eighty or ninety miles an hour. However, we can milk them for winter power, I believe. And we designed from the beginning with this risk in mind.”
    “Dan?” Hassan said.
    The big Negro rose in his turn. “Yes, our site here is high enough and sufficiently sheltered by the ridges either side”—he gestured, and heads turned—”to escape the worst we foresee. This morning I’ve been laying out some boat-sheds down by the harbour, which we can knock together during the next week or two and which will resist any gales. I’m proposing to anchor our houses a little more securely, with guys bedded in heavy concrete blocks, and it looks as though we shall need to fit cyclone shutters over the doors and windows. But in general we ought to ride out the gale period with a minimum of trouble, provided people take the proper care over what they’re doing.”
    “How about the effect on our crops?” Hassan demanded.In answer, Silvana Borelli rose, the husky North Italian girl who specialised in agronomic chemistry and agriculture, one of Tai Men’s staff.
    “Since we selected crops which normally grow in climatic regions similar to this at home, we don’t foresee very serious trouble. We’re going to stake and wire the most vulnerable plants, and we’re laying out some faired wind-deflectors on the windward slopes. It should be all under control.”
    “Are the crops coming on satisfactorily?” Hassan asked. Parvati, intently watching the reactions betrayed by their audience, noted a slight tension developing. Hassan knew the answer, of course, and so did she, but it was psychologically better for the colonists at large to hear the spoken assurance of the expert responsible than to read an impersonal written document.
    “Yes, the soil is proving perfectly suitable for root and leaf vegetables. It’s a trifle early to be sure about the fruits—even the plants we transferred from the ship’s own hydroponic trays into the local soil are still showing the shock-effect of the move. But generally speaking all our results are promising, and for the past three weeks a control group of our experimental animals have been living exclusively off native-grown fodder.”
    Eyebrows rose, and impressed nods made the ranked heads move like grass under a light breeze. Parvati concealed a smile. Trivial little tricks, such as keeping secrets within one specialised section of the community and making announcements like this one, were working magnificently to buoy up the colonists’ morale.
    So it progressed, through Hassan’s own summary of the stores position—better than they had allowed for, so that they were becoming able to divert some of the scrap from the
Niña
to a reserve instead of putting it straight to work—and Ulla’s enthusiastic report on mineral resources, to her own psychological report.
    Rising, she said, “All I need to do is congratulate you, friends. Maybe you recall, back on Earth, that some people expressed doubts about the ability of our team tostart on a new world from scratch. It was said that after so many generations in a technological society, where everyone specialised to the point of depending on millions of others to stay alive, no group as small as ours could make out. Well, we’re even smaller than was expected, aren’t we?”
    That reference to the loss of the
Pinta
was deliberate, too, and produced a stir of reaction.
    “And in spite of that,” Parvati continued, “we’re doing
better
than was expected. Keep it up!”
    As she sat down again, she noted that she