It feathered soundlessly and gently toward the tiny world and settled on a rolling green lawn, seeming to sigh as it settled, as the big engines which defied gravity muted into silence, as the metal of the ship relaxed after the Journey. The sigh was echoed in the control room. “Journey’s end.” The captain wasn’t human and he spoke Universal with a liquid sibilance, but he was intelligent and had about him something of the mystic. The navigator respected his mysticism. “Journey’s end,” he echoed. He wasn’t human either but his form was as different from the captain’s as a man’s is from a frog. He spoke with a harsh bark, and his native polysyllabic name, as translated into Universal, was Aarne. He glanced through one of the ports. “They improved the place,” he commented. “Some new trees, a wider lawn, and wasn’t that a swimming pool we saw on the way down?” “Possibly.” “Money’s been spent here,” said Aarne. “A lot of money. All this refashioning of a hunk of dead rock into a miniature world.”
