Then there had
been Imhotep; in twenty or thirty thousand years, it would be
a fine planet, but at present it was undergoing an extensive
glaciation. And Irminsul, covered with forests of gigantic trees;
it would have been fine except for the fauna, which was nasty,
especially a race of subsapient near-humanoids who had just
gotten as far as clubs and _coup-de-poing_ axes. Contact with
them had entailed heavy ammunition expenditure, with two men and
a woman killed and a dozen injured. He'd had a limp, himself,
for a while as a result.
As for the other five, one had been an all-out hell-planet, and
the rest had been the sort that get colonized by irreconcilable
minority-groups who want to get away from everybody else. The
Colonial Office wouldn't even consider any of them.
Then they had found this one, third of a G0-star, eighty million
miles from primary, less axial inclination than Terra, which would
mean a more uniform year-round temperature, and about half land
surface. On the evidence of a couple of sneak landings for
specimens, the biochemistry was identical with Terra's and the
organic matter was edible.
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