There were ten people waiting on an elevated metal platform. I hadn’t expected Sandra, since she was assigned to a building detail down at lakeside, but she was among the ten. She ran over and gave me a hug, and then pulled me along to meet Raleigh Dennison, the camp’s Coordinator pro tern.

We’d met several times in ’Home, of course, but he was literally a different man here. About my physical age—born a few years after Sandra—he had seemed pale and aristocratic, delicate, up there. A couple of months’ pioneering had turned him tan and muscular, and he sported a piratical moustache, curled at the ends. I had to laugh at the transformation.

He laughed along with me. “It’s the alien gravity,” he said. “Two months here and you’ll look like a farm girl yourself.” I doubted that anything would make me look like a “girl,” short of a time machine, but did look forward to working outdoors for the first time this century.

This flight had brought fifteen people and two tonnes of supplies. We loaded as much as we could on the utility floater and stacked the rest on the loading platform. The load for the return trip was light, a few boxes and cages of samples and animals, and two people who needed medical treatment. Hilltop’s first-aid station wasn’t up to cancer or schizophrenia.

We followed the floater in a slow walk up toward town, Raleigh giving us a running account of their agricultural successes and failures as we passed the various fields. Almost everything was grown in three sections: out in the open, in the open but protected by barbed wire, and green-housed, with soil imported from ’Home. There were goats, pigs, sheep, and chickens, all in protected covered pens, and pools of tilapi, salmon, and rainbow trout.

Most of the crops did well in the unprotected areas, though tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes all succumbed to an airborne microorganism, even in the greenhouses. The wire didn’t seem to make any difference; local fauna would take one sniff and move on. By the same token, those local fauna seemed in little danger of winding up on our tables, at least for a generation or two. Some things are just too weird to eat.

Evolution had produced different stratagems on Epsilon. Most forms of life didn’t have close analogs on Earth. Fish were recognizably fish, but the ones caught inland had lungs instead of gills. Someone who deserves a culinary medal cooked one and ate part of it. It tasted like cotton soaked in swamp water, he said, but it didn’t make him sick.