they had been out, now,
for four years, which was close to maximum for an exploring
expedition. They had entered eleven systems, and made landings
on eight planets. Three had been reasonably close to Terra-type.
There had been Fafnir; conditions there would correspond to Terra
during the Cretaceous Period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur would
have been cute and cuddly to the things on Fafnir. Then there had
been Imhotep; in twenty or thirty thousand years, it would be
a fine planet, but at present it was undergoing an extensive
glaciation. And Irminsul, covered with forests of gigantic trees;
it would have been fine except for the fauna, which was nasty,
especially a race of subsapient near-humanoids who had just
gotten as far as clubs and _coup-de-poing_ axes. Contact with
them had entailed heavy ammunition expenditure, with two men and
a woman killed and a dozen injured. He'd had a limp, himself,
for a while as a result.

As for the other five, one had been an all-out hell-planet, and
the rest had been the sort that get colonized by irreconcilable
minority-groups who want to get away from everybody else. The
Colonial Office wouldn't even consider any of them.

Then they had found this one, third of a G0-star, eighty million
miles from primary, less axial inclination than Terra, which would
mean a more uniform year-round temperature, and about half land
surface. On the evidence of a couple of sneak landings for
specimens, the biochemistry was identical with Terra's and the
organic matter was edible. It was the sort of planet every explorer
dreams of finding, except for one thing.

It was inhabited by a sapient humanoid race, and some of them were
civilized enough to put it in Class V, and Colonial Office doctrine
on Class V planets was rigid. Friendly relations with the natives
had to be established, and permission to settle had to be guaranteed
in a treaty of some sort with somebody more or less authorized to
make one.

If Paul Meillard could accomplish that, he had it made. He would
stay on with forty or fifty of the ship's company to make
preparations. In a year a couple of ships would come out from Terra,
with a thousand colonists, and a battalion or so of Federation
troops, to protect them from the natives and vice versa. Meillard
would automatically be appointed governor-general.

But if he failed, he was through. Not out--just through. When he
got back to Terra, he would be promoted to some home office pos