"Robots," I said contemptuously. It was lost on that metallic monstrosity. It was already rolling away toward another table.

The spaceman poured the pony glass into his Napoleon, sniffed appreciatively, sipped delicately and extended a meaty hand. "My name's Halsey," he said. "Captain Roger Halsey. I skipper the Two Two Four."

"The Bureau ship that landed this morning?"

He nodded. "Yeah. I'm one of the Bureau's brave boys." There was a faint sneer in his voice. "The good old Bureau of Extraterrestrial Exploration. The busy BEE." He failed to pronounce the individual letters. "You're a reporter, aren't you?" he asked suddenly.

"How'd you guess?"

"That little trick of not answering an introduction. Most of you sludge pumpers do it, but I never knew why."

"Libel and personal privacy laws," I said. "If you don't know who we are, you can't sue."

He grinned. "Okay. I don't care. Keep your privacy. All I want is someone to talk to."

I smiled inwardly.

"Think my job's exciting?" he asked. "Skipper of an exploration ship. Poking my nose into odd corners of the Galaxy. Seeing what's over the hill."

"Of course," I said.

"Well, you'd be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred. It's just a job. Most of it is checking—or did you know that only one sun in ten has planets, and only one in ten thousand has a spectrum that will support human life, and that only one in ten thousand planets has Earthlike qualities? So you can imagine how we felt when we ran across Lyrane." He grimaced wryly. "I had it on the log as Halsey's Planet for nearly two weeks before we discovered it was inhabited." He shrugged. "So the name was changed. Too bad. Always did want to have a planet named after me. But I'll make it yet."

I clucked sympathetically. Capt. Halsey sighed, and this is what he told me.

II

It's a beautiful world, Lyrane is. Like Earth must have been before it got cluttered up with people. No cities, no smoke, no industrial complexes—just green plains, snowy mountains, dark forests, blue seas, and white polar caps all wrapped in cotton 

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