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on the planet seven minutes.
    “Depends.” The floater had been launched a little over five minutes after the Tamer team. It was somewhere on the planet, probably in the same hemisphere. But it was impossible to say exactly where it had appeared.
    The floater would home in on a signal from Tania’s suit, the same signal that would be the focus for the returning LMT field when their time was up. If Groom-bridge’s atmosphere had something like a Heaviside layer so that the signal could bounce over the horizon, then it would take only a few minutes for the floater to get to them. If not, the vehicle would have to lift into orbit and quarter the planet, searching for the signal.
    A few minutes later, the floater did appear, with an impressive sonic boom. It sensed the positions of all five Tamers and landed a safe distance away-in deep mud, unfortunately.
    So Jacque spent his first couple of hours on Groom-bridge helping the others drag the heavy machine out of the muck, then laboriously scraping it clean.
    Tania walked around the glittering floater, inspecting it. “I don’t know. The nozzles look clear.” It was powered by superheated steam from a fusion mirror; one main jet and eight steering ports. “But I don’t have any idea how critical it is. Maybe they could be packed full of mud and still work. Just blast clear.”
    “Or a small obstruction could start an eddy in the exhaust plasma,” Ch’ing said. “Shaking the floater to pieces in one instant.”
    “Does anybody know for sure?”
    Nobody did. “One thing sure,” Jacque said. “I want to be someplace else when we start it up. If it goes it’ll make a hole big enough to-“
    “Oh, the mirror will not blow up,” Ch’ing said. “It might break up, but not explode. It has safeguards.”
    “Okay, you stay here and watch the goddam thing. I’m going to-“
    “Look, it’s not worth arguing about-“
    “Who’s arguing?”
    “Turn down the volume, Jacque!”
    Tania continued. “We have to make a preliminary ground survey, anyhow. When we get a few kilometers away, I’ll call the floater. If it explodes, we give Jacque a medal. If it homes in, we give Ch’ing a medal.”
    For the ground survey, the five of them functioned simply as specimen collectors. There was a little box on the front of the GPEM suits that automatically evaluated a specimen as to appearance, density, tensile strength, crystal structure if any, melting and boiling points, chemical composition, presence of microorganisms, and so forth. The data were automatically transmitted to the personnel recorder on Tania’s suit.
    (The recorder also etched on its data crystals a running record of everybody’s body temperature, blood pressure and chemistry, brain waves, respiration, urine and stool analysis, conductivity of skin and mucous membranes, Kirlian field, and hat size. This was not to protect their health-the nearest medical treatment was fourteen light-years away-but to record what had happened in case they were suddenly to die. Which, though the recruiting brochures failed to mention it, was the way most Tamers retired.)
    They synchronized their compasses, inertial rather than magnetic, then spread out in a hundred-meter line, east and west, and started plodding north. Anything that looked interesting they picked up and put in the analysis box. Every hundred or so steps they tossed in a handful of dirt or, more often, mud. In this way they formed a fairly complete profile of the geologic and biological properties of a strip of Groom-bridge one-tenth of a kilometer wide by five long. It wasn’t too impressive in the biological department: various kinds of gray plants that were similar enough to known forms not to be exciting, and dissimilar enough from earth plants to cause geoformy headaches.
    After about five kilometers, they found a river. The current was sluggish and the water held a fine suspension of light-colored mud. It looked like dirty milk. Along the bank was a