We slanted gently down until the forest became trees, and the little blue-green splotches were lush, grassy meadows.
And there was the tower, and the low buildings—and the spaceship!
Something happened to me inside when I saw that. It was a kind of tremolo feeling, like a note in a new symphony, a note that springs free and alone, wavering uncertainly, and you don’t know which way it will turn.
In seconds that seemed like hours, we were on the ground, the ramp was jammed out and Larson was blundering down it crying like a baby.
* * * *
I stood in the port breathing the warm air redolent with exotic new scents and yawped like an idiot, trying to make sense of the huge banner strung a hundred yards across one whole side of the little village. The banner read:
WELCOME, HANS!
WELCOME ALBERT E.
WE KNEW YOU WERE COMING, SO—
And near the center of the banner was the largest chocolate cake, or facsimile thereof, in all creation. It must have been ten feet high and twenty feet in diameter.
But Hans Larson wasn’t amused by the cosmic gag. He galloped off that gang-plank like a lovesick, gorilla. And I’m a comet’s uncle if Tina wasn’t there, racing out to meet him, Larson had guessed the truth, and no wonder he hadn’t had the guts to test it beforehand!
By the time I got down, out and over to where they were all wrapped up mingling tears, I had it pretty well doped out myself.
I don’t know why we had figured that all progress and improvement in interstellar flight would cease just because we had left Earth. The eternal, colossal conceit of men, I guess.
When our last signal back to Earth had given the okay sign, sure, they started building bigger ships and recruiting another crew. But by the time that the Albert E. II, was ready to take off for a more extended expedition, the Larson Drive was now the Larson-McKendrick Drive, with a velocity of a full half the speed of light, some five times our velocity.
Somehow, Tina had managed to get herself in the party, as Hans had sensed she would. And the time-differential, as it worked out, wasn’t serious at all. Tina had been only 32 when we left her on Earth. Including the year and a half she had already been with the colony on New Columbia, she was still quite a bit younger than Hans, and just twice as pretty as the day of their separation.
The tremolo note was rising now, the soft, mystic pitch of excitement inherent in the new world.
I turned to Mac, who was grinning like to split his face. I said, “Looks like you were wrong, old boy—about the impossibility of colonizing.”
He nodded, but he wouldn’t tear his eyes away from that monstrous, preposterous chocolate cake. The attraction, I discovered, was a little bevy of onlookers who stood at its base. They were a dozen or more most attractive colonists in the younger age-bracket and unmistakably of the opposite sex.
Mac said, “Yeah, I was wrong about colonizing prospects. Dead wrong. Aren’t you glad?”
And now the tremolo feeling split into a crescendo of sub-harmonics and overtones, a magnificent chord of attunement with life and humanity everywhere in the universe. And all a once I knew I was glad, happy as hell to see these people from the old home town of Earth.
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