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time—and a quarter century would have passed on Earth. You didn’t want to dwell on what time might have done meanwhile. Nansen forgave the tactlessness. He was too glad that his friend lived.
    Anxiety: “Are you well otherwise, Mike?”
    “I am. I did take a tumble on landing, which split my transceiver apart. We need a design more robust. Otherwise just bruises, not like my poor flyer. I’m afraid my fellow airmen will have fewer missions in future, Rico, for I’ll be claiming my share of them.”
    “They’ll get enough other work to keep them out of mischief. So will you.” The groundside teams were turning up more surprises than they could handle. All extra help would be jubilantly welcomed. “Have you any idea what caused this?”
    “I have a guess, after prowling and poking. I recorded it, in case I didn’t survive, but indeed I’d rather speak it in person over a mug of beer.”
    “I can supply the person. The beer will have to wait.” A tingle went along Nansen’s spine. “What was it?”
    “To my eye, the airscoop has corroded. You may recall, earlier I deposited chemosamplers at the Devil’s Playground hot springs. Sure, the material of the flyer is supposed to be inert, but that’s a hellish environment. My guess is that microscopic life is invading the land, and some kind of germ somehow catalyzed a reaction, maybe with the fullerene component. Let the scientists find out. The biochemistry here is so crazily different from ours.”
    “¿Qué es?”
Nansen exclaimed. Alarm stabbed him. “Do you mean … our ship—”
    Shaughnessy laughed, rather shakily, and clapped him on the back. “Not to worry, I do believe. Otherwise the whole gang of us would be dead. Those bugs must be confined to that area. Anyhow, exposure to space would doubtless kill them. We’ve lost an aircraft, but we may be about to make a great discovery.”
    Discovery is what we came here for.
    “If you’re fit to travel, let’s get back to the ship,” Nansen proposed.
    “I am, if you go easy on the boost,” Shaughnessy said. “Especially with that beer waiting!”

2.
    “
Oh, you’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road,
    And I’ll be in Scotland before you;
    But me and my true love will never meet again
    On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.”
    Jean Kilbirnie sang only the chorus, almost under her breath. It faded away into the silence that had fallen since she and Tim Cleland reached the height. For a while, again, all they heard was the soughing in leaves overhead.
    They sat on a bluff above a river. The westering sun, Tau Ceti, cast rays down the length of the vale, and the water shone like molten gold. Trees shaded turf, which nonetheless gave off fragrances to the mild air. After three terrestrial years, the first humans ever to see this world were calling it, in their different languages, Puerto, Limani, Kiang, Harbor.
    Yet little here truly recalled Earth as Earth once was. Thesward grew low, dense, a mat of minutely convoluted soft nuggets. Some of the trees curved their twin trunks upward, lyre-shaped, until they broke into shoots lined with feathery foliage. Others lifted columnar in a pelt of leaves. Others suggested huge, fringed spiderwebs. Nothing stood green; everything was in tones of yellow or orange, save where a patch flared red. Nothing could properly nourish the visitors, and much would have sickened them.
    It didn’t matter. That two evolutions, sundered by half a score of light-years, had been this alike—that you could walk freely, breathe the air, drink the water, rejoice in the beauty—was enough.
    “You surprise me,” Cleland blurted.
    Kilbirnie turned her head toward him. “How so?” she asked.
    “Oh, I, well, if you’re feeling sentimental I … I wouldn’t expect you to show it. You’d be extra cocky. Maybe you’d sing one of your bawdy old ballads.”
    Kilbirnie smiled. Her husky voice took on more than its usual slight burr. “We Scots can wax unco