launched in honor of his appearance.

The village lay in the gentle hollow of a wide valley, surrounded by the equally gentle slopes of hills. To his right, it followed the bank of a fair-sized river; in the other three directions the checkered pattern ended in a careless, irregular outline and was replaced by the larger pattern of cultivated fields.

It was a good site—the river for power, sanitation and transportation, the hills for a sheltered climate. He saw suddenly, in complete, sharp detail, how it would be.

"The trip is over," he wrote with sudden decision. "We will stay here, and build a city."

III

The most difficult part was the number of things that he had to learn. There was no trouble about anything he wanted done by others; he simply commanded, and that was the end of it. But the mass of knowledge about the Terranovans and their world before he came appalled him not only by its sheer bulk but by its intricacy, the unexplained gaps, the contradictions. For a long time after the founding of New Washington—later New Jerusalem—he was still bothered a little by doubt. He wanted to learn all that there was to learn about the Terranovans, so that finally he would understand them completely and the doubt would be gone.

Eventually he confessed to himself that the task was impossible. He was forty-seven years old; he had perhaps thirty years ahead of him, and it was not as if he were able to devote them solely to study. There was the written history of the Terranovans, which covered minutely a period of nine thousand years—though not completely; there were periods and places which seemed to have left no adequate records of themselves. The natives had no reasonable explanation of this phenomenon; they simply said that the keeping of histories sometimes went out of fashion.

Then there was the biology of the Terranovans and the countless other organisms of the planet—simply to catalogue them and give them English names, as he had set out to do, would have occupied him the rest of his lifetime.

There was the complex and puzzling field of social relations—here again everything seemed to be in unaccountable flux, even though the over-all pattern remained the same and seemed as rigid as any primitive people's. There was physics, which presented exasperating difficulties of translation; there was engineering, there was medicine, there was economics....

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