ngerous beasts have to be relatively
rare, or they will not have enough to eat, when they will thin out until
they are relatively rare and do have enough to eat.

So the three explorers moved safely, though their boldness was that of
ignorance, below gigantic trees nearly as tall as the space-ship
standing on end. They saw a small furry biped, some twelve inches tall,
which waddled insanely in the exact line of their progress and with no
apparent hope of outdistancing them. They saw a gauzy creature with
incredibly spindly legs. It flew from one tree-trunk to another,
clinging to rough bark on each in turn. Once they came upon a small
animal which looked at them with enormous, panic-stricken blue eyes and
then fled with a sinuous gait on legs so short that they seemed mere
flippers. It dived into a hole and vanished.

But they came out to clear space. They could look for miles and miles.
There was a savannah of rolling soil which gradually sloped down to a
swift-running river. The grass--if it was grass--was quite green, but it
had multitudes of tiny rose-colored flowers down the central rib of each
leaf. Nearby it seemed the color of Earth-grass, but it faded
imperceptibly into an incredible old-rose tint in the distance. The
mountain-scarps on either side of the valley were sheer and tall. There
was a great stony spur reaching out above the lowland, and there was
forest at its top and bare brown stone dropping two thousand feet sheer.
And up the valley, where it narrowed, a waterfall leaped out from the
cliff and dropped hundreds of feet in an arc of purest white, until it
was lost to view behind tree-tops.

They looked. They stared. Cochrane was a television producer, and Holden
was a psychiatrist, and Babs was a highly efficient secretary. They did
not make scientific observations. The ecological system of the valley
escaped their notice. They weren't qualified to observe that the flying
things around seemed mostly to be furry instead of feathered, and that
insects seemed few and huge and fragile,--and they did not notice that
most of the plants appeared to be deciduous, so indicating that this
planet had pronounced seasons. But Holden said:

"Up in Greenland there's a hospital on a cliff like that. People with
delusions of grandeur sometimes get cured just by looking at something
that's so much greater and more splendid than they are. I'd like to see
a hospital up yonder!"

Babs said, shining-eyed:

"A city