Here There Be Tygers

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"No," said Captain Forester. "I have too much respect for other worlds to treat them the way you want to, Chatterton. It's not my business to rape or ruin anyway, thank God. I'm glad I'm just a rocket man. You're the anthropologist-mineralogist. Go ahead, do your mining and ripping and scraping. I'll just watch. I'll just go around looking at this new world, whatever it is, however it seems. I like to look. All rocket men are lookers or they wouldn't be rocket men Von like to smell new airs, if you're a rocket man, and see new oceans and islands."

"Take your gun along," said Chatterton. "in my bolster," said Forester.

They turned to the port together and saw the green world rising to meet their ship. "I wonder what it thinks of us?" said Forester.

"It won't like me" said Chatterton "I'll see to it It won't like me. And I don't care. you know, I'm out for the money. Land its over there, will you. Captain; that looks like rich country if I ever saw IV,

It was the freshest green color they had seen since childhood.

Lakes lay like clear blue water droplets through the soft hills; there were no loud highways, signboards or cities. It's a sea (if green golf links, thought Forester, which goes on forever. Putting greens, driving greens, you could walk ton thousand miles in any direction and never finish your game. A Sunday planet a croquet-lawn world, where, you could lie on your back, clover in your lips, eyes half shut, smiling at the sky, smelling the grass, drowse through an eternal Sabbath, rousing only on oc casion to turn the Sunday paper or crack the red-striped wooden bail through the wicket.

"It ever a planet was a woman, this one is "

"Woman on the outside, man on the inside," said Chatterton. "All hard underneath, all male iron, copper, uranium, black sod, Don't let the cosmetics fool you."

He walked to the bin where the Earth Drill waited. Its great screw-snout glittered bluely, ready to stab seventy feet deep and stick out corks of earth, deeper still with extensions into the heart of the planet Chatterton winked at it "We'll fix your planet,

Forester, but good "

"Yes, I know you will," said Forester, quietly,

The rocket landed.

"It's too green, too peaceful," said Chatterton. "I don't like it " He turned to the captain "We'll go out with our rifles "

"I give orders. if you don't mind "

"Yes, and my company pays our way with millions of dollars of machinery we must protect; quite an investment."

The air on the new planet 7 in star system 84 was good. The port swung wide The met; filed out Into the greenhouse world.

The last man to emerge was Chatterton, gun in hand

As Chatterton set foot to the green lawn, the earth trembled. The grass shook. The distant forest rumbled, The sky seemed to blink and darken imperceptibly, The men were watching Chatterton when it happened.

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