"What's the matter, darling?" James asked anxiously. "Don't you like the planet?"
"Oh, I love the planet," Phyllis said. "It's beautiful."
It was. The blue--really blue--grass, blue-violet shrubbery and, loveliest of all, the great golden tree with sapphire leaves and pale pink blossoms, instead of looking alien, resembled nothing so much as a fairy-tale version of Earth.
Even the fragrance that filled the atmosphere was completely delightful to Terrestrial nostrils -- which was unusual, for most other planets, no matter how well adapted for colonization otherwise, tended, from the human viewpoint, anyway, to stink. Not that they were not colonized nevertheless, for the population of Earth was expanding at too great a rate to permit merely olfactory considerations to rule out an otherwise suitable planet. This particular group of settlers had been lucky, indeed.
