wave braked
itself, and the third wave dropped into the orbital shell.

From the first wave, a single ship went down to land, and its
telecameras broadcast a view of a forest garden, slightly charred for a
hundred yards around the ship, with fires blazing along its edges.

"No signs of the natives yet," came the report. "No signs of technology.
No evidence of hostility."

A second ship descended to land a mile from the first. Its telecamera
caught a fleeting glimpse of a man waving from a hilltop, but nothing
more.

One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with
steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave
forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square
miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen
miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it
would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground.

In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden,
who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the
enveloping conditions outside the flagship. He stood in an open lock,
sniffing the autumn air of Earth in late afternoon. It was full of
jet-fire smoke, and smelled of burning brush. The automatic
extinguishers had quenched the flames, but the blackened trees and brush
still roasted and sparked and leaked smoke across the land. Somewhere a
bird was singing through the sunlit haze. Baron ven Klaeden recognized
the sound as made by a living thing, and wondered if the recognition was
born into his bones.

Three hundred and fifty yards to the north, a wingship towered in the
sun, its guns trained outward from the inner circle, and to the south,
another wingship. The baron glanced down at the earth beneath the
flagship. The jets had reduced to ashes something that might have been a
low wooden structure. He shrugged, and glanced across the blackened area
toward the orderly forest. Trees and shrubs, and a carpet of green turf
below, broken here and there by rain-worn rocks and clusters of smaller
fragile leafy stuff that might be food-plants. Vivid splashes of color
blossomed in the shady forest, scarlets and blues and flashes of
brilliant lemon that lived in profusion in the foliage of the shrubbery.
Some of the trees were living masses of tiny flowers, and when the wind
stirred them, petals showered to the ground in fragrant gusts. The wind
changed, and the air tha