The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Colonists, by Raymond F. Jones

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Title: The Colonists

Author: Raymond F. Jones

Illustrator: Paul Orban

Release Date: June 4, 2010 [EBook #32687]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE COLONISTS

By Raymond F. Jones

Illustrated by Paul Orban

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _If historical precedent be wrong--what qualities, then, must
man possess to successfully colonize new worlds? Doctor Ashby said:
"There is no piece of data you cannot find, provided you can devise the
proper experimental procedure for turning it up." Now--about the man and
the procedure...._]

This was the rainy year. Last year had been the dry one, and it would
come again. But they wouldn't be here to see it, Captain Louis Carnahan
thought. They had seen four dry ones, and now had come the fourth wet
one, and soon they would be going home. For them, this was the end of
the cycle.

At first they had kept track of the days, checking each one off on their
calendars, but the calendars had long since been mingled
indistinguishably with the stuff of the planet itself--along with most
of the rest of their equipment. By that time, however, they had learned
that the cycle of wet and dry seasons was almost precisely equivalent to
a pair of their own Terran years, so they had no more need for the
calendars.

But at the beginning of this wet season Carnahan had begun marking off
the days once again with scratches on the post of the hut in which he
lived. The chronometers were gone, too, but one and three-quarters Earth
days equalled one Serrengian day, and by that he could compute when the
ships from Earth were due.

He had dug moats about the hut to keep rain water from coming in over
his dirt floor.