Interstellar travel -- Fiction; Science fiction; Television programs -- Fiction
"I'm better," said Cochrane cynically, "at putting on shows with scrap
film-tape and dream-stuff. So I'm going to look at the films Bell took
as we landed on this planet, and work out some ideas for broadcasts."
He went up another flight, and Holden went with him in a sort of stilly,
unnatural calm. Cochrane ran the film-tape through the reversed camera
for examination.
Outside, there waved long green tresses of extraordinarily elongated
leaves. The patches of reed-like stuff stirred in the breeze. Jamison
appeared in the control-room. He began to question Holden hopefully
about the ground-cover outside. It was not grass. It was broad-leaved.
There would be, Jamison decided happily, an infinitude of under-leaf
forms of life. They would most likely be insects, and there would be
carnivorous other insects to prey upon them. Some species would find it
advantageous to be burrowing insects. There must be other kinds of birds
than the giant specimens that looked like men at a distance, too. On the
glacier planet there had been few birds but many furry creatures.
Possibly the situation was reversed here, though of course it need not
be ...
"Hm," said Cochrane when the films were all run through. "Ice-caps and
land and seas. Plenty of green vegetation, so presumably the air is
normal for humans. Since you're alive, Holden, we can assume it isn't
instantly fatal, can't we? The gravity's tolerable--a little on the
light side, maybe, compared to the glacier planet."
He was silent, staring at the blank wall of the control-room. He
frowned. Suddenly he said:
"Does anybody back on Earth know that Babs and I were castaways?"
"No," said Holden, still very quiet indeed. "Alicia ran the
control-board. She told everybody you were too busy to be called to the
communicator. It was queer with you away! Jamison and Bell tied
themselves in chairs and spliced tape. Johnny, of course"--his voice was
very carefully toneless--"wouldn't do anything useful. I was space-sick
a lot of the time. But I did help Alicia figure out what to say on the
communicator. There must be hundreds of calls backed up for you to
take."
"Good!" said Cochrane. "I'll go take some of them. Jones, could we make
a flit to somewhere else on this planet?"
Jones said negligently,
"I told you we've got fuel to reach the Milky Way. Where do you want to
go?"
"Anywhere," said Cochrane. "The scenery isn't dramatic enough here for a
new broadcast. We've got to have some lurid stuff for our next show.
Things are shaping up except for the need of just the right scenery to
send back to Earth."
"What kind of scenery do you want?"
"Animals preferred," said Cochrane. "Dinosaurs would do. Or buffalo or a
reasonable facsimile. What I'd actually like more than anything else
would really be a herd of buffalo."
Jamison gasped.
"Buffalo?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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