He watched her as she walked to the nearest exit off the bridge, a lean, almost bony woman, with gray and naturally wavy hair which she wore shoulder length. What Paul liked most about her was her wiry strength, both moral and physical, which was combined with a ruthlessness that sometimes startled him. She had tremendous personal vitality—just being in her presence gave one’s spirits a lift. Together they would make something of their new world.

He looked back to the main screen and the enthralling vista of Pern.

The large lounge had been set up as an office for the heads of the various teams of exobiology, agronomy, botany, and ecology, along with six representatives of the professional farmers, who were still a bit groggy from their term in deep sleep. The room was ringed by multiple screens displaying a constantly altering range of microbiology reports, statistics, comparisons, and analyses. There was much debate going on. Those hunched over desk monitors, busily collating reports, tried to ignore the tension emanating from the departmental heads who occupied the very center of the room in a tight knot, each one with an eye out for the screens displaying reports on his or her specialty.

Mar Dook, head agronomist, was a small man whose Earth Asiatic ancestry was evident in features, skin tone, and physiology: he was wiry, lean, and slightly bowed in the shoulders, but his black eyes gleamed with eager intelligence and the excitement of the challenge.

“The schedule has long been decided, my dear colleagues. We’re in the first wave down. The probes do not contradict any of the information we already have. The dirt and vegetation samples match. There’s the same sort of red and green algae reported along the shoreline. Marine life has been sighted by the sea probe. One of the low probes has caught a comforting variety of insects, which the EEC also found. The aerial fax that came up with that flyer reported—what did the team call them?—wherries.”

“Why ‘wherries’?” Phas Radamanth asked. He scrolled through the report searching for that particular annotation. “Ah,” he said when he found it. “Because they resemble airborne barges—squat, fat and full.” He allowed himself a little smile for the whimsy of that long-dead term.

“Yeah, but I don’t see mention of any other predators,” Kwan Marceau said, his rather high forehead creased, as usual, with a frown.

“There’s sure to be something that eats them,” Phas replied confidently.

“Or they eat each other,” Mar Dook suggested. He received a stern frown from Kwan. Suddenly Mar Dook pointed excitedly to a new fax coming up on one screen. “Ah, look! The scuttlebug got a reptiloid. Rather a large specimen, ten centimeters thick and seven meters long. There’s your wherry eater, Kwan.”