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is it?”
    “Planet Johnson, ten light-minutes out from an F8 star about two thousand light-years from us.”
    “I mean, what is it that bothers me about it? I know it’s alien, but I don’t know how I know.”
    “Your eye is reacting to the proportions of the vegetation. This is a slightly larger world than ours, and the atmosphere is thicker, so the trunk and stems are braced against greater weight and heftier wind-pressure, and react differently than would an Earth-plant in a similar situation.”
    “So
that’s
how I knew!” he laughed.
    Brad manipulated the controls again and the scene switched. This was a higher view of a grassy plain, though it was odd grass, with stalagmites rising randomly from it Low mountains showed in the hazy distance.
    “Earth or alien?” Brad inquired, teasing him.
    “Alien — but I can’t tell a thing about the air or gravity, even unconsciously. What is it this time?”
    “Those projections have two shadows.”
    Ivo made a gesture of knocking sawdust from his ear.
    “This is Planet Holt. There are some fine specimens of pseudo-mammalian herbivores here, but I’d have to search for them and it isn’t worth the effort right now. I’d probably lose the image entirely if I took it off automatic. This one circles a G3 star five thousand light-years away.”
    “So this picture is five thousand years old?”
    “This scene is, yes, since it takes that long for the macronic impulse to reach us. I told you we traveled in time, here.”
    Brad returned to the controls, but Ivo stopped him. “Hold it, glibtongue! If this planet circles one, count it,
one
star — where does that second shadow come from?”
    “Thought you’d never ask. There is a reflective cliff behind our pickup spot — another typical outcropping of Holt’s crust.”
    “So my subconscious reasoning was spurious after all. How many of these things have you found?”
    “Earthlike planets? Almost a thousand so far.”
    “You told me you couldn’t locate planets—”
    “Particular planets we can’t. But with luck and sound analysis, we get a few. These are only a minuscule fraction of those available, and we’ve probably missed most of the closest ones, but chance plays a dictatorial part in such discoveries. Our thousand planets are merely a random selection of the billions we know are there.”
    “And they all have trees and animals?”
    “Hardly. We only name the important ones. Less than two hundred have any life at all we can recognize, and only forty-one of
those
have land-based animals. Chief specialization seems to be size. I can show you monsters—”
    “Maybe next time. I like monsters; I feel a personal affinity for them because they always get the negative characterizations in the science fiction reruns. I could romp with them for hours. But to the point: have you found
intelligence
?”
    “Yes. Watch.” Brad shifted scenes.
    A tremendous hive appeared. Walls and tunnels were built upon themselves in a mountain, and fluid filled many wholly or in part. Strange squidlike creatures splashed and swam and climbed through the maze, disappearing and reappearing so thickly that Ivo could not tell whether he ever saw the same individual twice.
    “This is Planet Sung, about ten thousand light-years distant. We have studied it with ferocious intensity the past few months, and we don’t much like the implications. They are quite alarming, in fact.”
    The image was traveling over the planet, showing open water and desert land, with frequent warren-mountains inhabited tightly by the semi-aquatic creatures. Ivo was reminded of pictures he had seen of the beaches where walruses congregated; no vegetation showed at all. He wondered what the Sung denizens ate.
    “This is intelligence? I haven’t seen anything very alarming or even impressive, yet. Just a termite-society with very little pasture. Surely they aren’t planning to loft a bomb at Earth?” But his scoffing covered what was beginning to be a