Sinopsis

Morning was flowing over the red-green planet. "What do we know?" The delicate brown face of Dorothy Leeds kindled with questions. "Summarize it." Edmund Spearman achieved casualness. "Diameter and mass a trifle more than Earth's, larger orbit around a larger sun. A year of 458 days, twenty- six hours each. Moderate seasonal changes, axial tilt less than Earth's, orbit less elliptical. See the smallness of the north polar ice cap? The equatorial region--much too hot; the rest is subtropical to temperate. We should go down (if we do) near the 50th parallel--north, I'd say. Too much desert in the southern hemisphere. Might be hot winds, sandstorms." "The red-green is vegetation?" Dr. Christopher Wright teetered on long legs before the screen, a classroom mannerism unchanged by eleven years in the wilderness of space. He pinched and pulled the skin on his Adam's apple, his hawk's-beak, small-chinned head jutting forward with an awkwardness not aggressive but intent. Paul Mason thought: You love him or hate him. In either case he's never quite grotesque. Wright's too-soft voice insisted: "It is, of course?" "It has to be, Doc," Spearman said, and rubbed his bluish cheeks, looking ol...