“Well, yes, I reckon you would at that,” Brenner said. “Getting back to why we’ve settled this Devil’s Meadows district, I can tell you we haven’t got any better place, and most are not as good. Sibylla is not Earth and never will be.”

“But you have colonized the polar regions, haven’t you? The original expedition team suggested it, and my briefing said—”

“We abandoned them a spell back. They do have higher air pressure and lower background count, at a reasonable average temperature. But that’s only an average. Don’t you forget, the rotation period is locked to two-thirds of the year, we being so close to the sun. Sixty-five Earthdays of light are tolerable, though it gets too hot toward evening for us to work. We can grow crops, sort of, with lamps to help through the sixty-five-day night. But at the poles, a thirty-seven-degree axial tilt, the seasons are too flinkin’ extreme. What with everything else they had going against them, our poor little terrestrial plants kept dying off there. We haven’t the industry or the resources to practice greenhouse agriculture on the needful scale.” Brenner shrugged. “Finally we gave up and everybody moved equatorward.”

I glanced down the crater slope. The road from Jimstown was dirt, a track nearly lost to sight, rutted, overgrown in places, little used since the destruction of New Washington. But traffic had never been heavy along it; no community on Sibylla was ever more than an overgrown village, and most were less. Tiny at this remove stood Brenner’s buggy. The lank horse sniffed discouragedly at the brush it could not eat.

We might have taken a flitter from one of the relief ships. But that would have meant waiting until it could be unloaded and fetched down from orbit. Besides, I had wanted some feel of what Sibylla and its people were really like.

I was getting it.

High hopes, two hundred years ago. People who were going to an uncrowded unplundered world, a whole new world, and this time build things right. They understood there would be hardships, danger, strangeness, on a planet for which our kind of life is not really fitted. But there would be nothing that men had not encountered and overcome elsewhere. The explorers had made certain of that beforehand.

Economics was a stronger motive than decency for being sure. The Directorate takes a bit of political pressure off itself with each colony it establishes, but does not really solve any physical problems at home; and the cost of sending the big ships is fantastic. The aim is to make Earth’s people look up through the dust and smoke and say, “Well, at, least somebody’s doing all right out there, and maybe we’ll be picked to go in the next emigration, if we stay in favor with the authorities meanwhile.” Failures would be very, very upsetting. Only the news of outright attack had justified organizing the Colonial Fleet to evacuate the Sibyllans.

The investment in them was so huge. Their ancestors came with tools, machinery, chemicals, seeds, suspended-frozen animal embryos, scientific gear…the basics. Of course, they brought a full stock of technical references too. As population expanded, they would build fusion power stations, they would replace the native life forms in ever larger areas with terrene species, they would at last create Paradise. To judge from their laser reports, they had been following out the plan. It was going slowly, because Sibylla was uncommonly hostile, but it was going.