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should possess its own native life, and should share so very little. In my head, I knew that the two worlds were not so different. Both were in the process of returning to the original state that each had enjoyed before the human colonists ever arrived. One was moving a little faster than the other, had got a little further, but essentially the situations were the same. My eyes, however, lied just a little, and told me that there were, indeed, two worlds.
    My ears, too, confirmed the difference. The settlement land was almost silent, but the forest was a continuing chaos of whistles, clicks, creaks and rustles, as if the trees themselves were continually shuffling their feet. The youthful forest seemed to be busy —not merely active but at work. The human domain was derelict, still in the process of dying even while it was in the early stages of rebirth.
    I realized that I felt slightly sick. The revelation of what was here had gone to my stomach. In my head I felt little—not even sadness. The sense of tragedy was more physical than that.
    Floria had been far from perfect, the colonists had needed our help badly, but the people there had been successful. They had done what they had set out to do. They had had every chance to do it. Almost everything had been in their favor, and the one thing that had not had now been set aside, thanks to the Daedalus .
    But here....
    â€œNo judgments,” I murmured.
    â€œWhat?”
    I glanced at Linda, making a slight grimace. “We’re supposed to ask why,” I said. “But there are certain answers we’re not allowed to arrive at. We’re not allowed to answer that they never had a chance in the first place, that they should never have been sent.”
    â€œThat’s not an answer at all,” she said. “That’s what comes after the answer. It’s the excuse. An excuse.”
    What she left unsaid was: ‘And it isn’t any part of our job to provide excuses.’
    I hopped down off the wall, just for a moment. Linda didn’t follow. I took only three or four paces away from her. I didn’t reach out to touch anything. I paused, and looked back.
    â€œIt smells good,” she said, looking down at me.
    I realized that she was right. The one thing the survey’s olfactory analyses hadn’t said, and I’d almost missed it, too. Like their mechanical apparatus, my mind had been tied up with abstract matters.
    It did smell good. I breathed in deeply. The extra two or three per cent oxygen didn’t give me any lift. It wasn’t enough of an increase to have an intoxicating effect.
    I came back to the wall and jumped up. I scrambled over and dropped back inside. There would be other times to go into the forest, to see the alien world on its own terms. Not now.
    Linda came down too, and we both looked at the wall from within, still not quite understanding why it was there.
    â€œYou’re right,” she said. “It is absurd. An awful lot of work has to be put into building something like that. Mile upon mile....”
    â€œI don’t believe it’s a physical barrier at all,” I said. I think it’s a psychological one.”
    â€œThat’s ridiculous,” she objected. “ Nobody would build a seven-mile wall for psychological reasons.”
    I shrugged.
    â€œIt seems to me,” I replied, in a low voice, “that nobody would build one for any other kind of reasons.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    As night fell, making nonsense once again of the dutiful hands of the ship’s clock and the schedule of shifts by which Pete and Karen, at least, tried hard to operate, we all gathered back at the ship.
    On Floria, first night down, we’d been treated by the locals to an evening of celebration. By the time we’d all got together again aboard the Daedalus our thoughts had been turned toward the next morning. We’d had little enough to say to one another.
    This first night down