He stood there smiling, a middle-sized man in a light brown suit, with a friendly bulge in the abdomen, and small, neat feet. His cheeks were round and sunburned; his hair was brilliantly white, though thinning at the temples and the back of his skull. He held a lemon-colored cane in front of him and leaned on it slightly. "Well," he said, a concealed microphone carrying his voice through the auditorium, "what do you think?" The immigrants seated before him answered with delighted laughter which merged into a wave of handclapping. When the noise died down, Colonel Baker said, in a low voice, "That's all I want to hear." He nodded, looking thoughtful. "This is the moment I always wait for--the moment when the settlers get off the ship and verify for themselves all the things I told them. You see, my friends, when I go on my lecture tours around the Earth, the scepticism I run into makes me feel like a very lonely man. I tell my story--about a place where things grow five to seven times as big as anything Earth ever saw in her best days, a place where one gets three or four harvests in what would be a single growing season on Earth--I tell the story and find that quite a lot of people don't believe it. But fortunately, here and there I meet people who can respond to a vision--people brave enough to rip up their stakes and take a journey across the oceans of space. And what I wait for is to see their faces and hear their voices when they reach these shores and learn that everything is true--everything--just as I told it." There was another burst of handclapping. Red Brace put two fingers to his lips and produced a deafening whistle, prolonging it until his wife yanked his hand away from his mouth.