nd a ship trying to land on those cliffs might very well pitch
over into the sea. That is, if she were trying to land on emergency
rockets."

Rockets--that brings home the ancientness of this ship
_Gilgamesh_--but after all the ships that settled Incognita probably
carried emergency rockets, too.

This settled, the meeting turns into a briefing session and merges
imperceptibly with the beginning of the job.

* * * * *

The job of course is Faking the background of the crash; working out
the past history and present aims of the Lost Kafoozalum. We have to
invent a planet and what's more difficult convey all the essential
information about it by the sort of sideways hints you gather among
peoples' personal possessions; diaries, letters et cetera; and what is
even _more_ difficult we have to leave out anything that could lead to
definite identification of our unknown world with any known one.

We never gave that world a name; it might be dangerous. Who speaks of
their world by name, except to strangers? They call it "home"--or
"Earth," as often as not.

Some things have been decided for us. Language, for instance--one of
two thousand or so Earth tongues that went out of use late enough to
be plausible as the main language of a colonized planet. The settlers
on Incognita were not of the sort to take along dictionaries of the
lesser-known tongues, so the computers at Russett had a fairly wide
choice.

We had to take a hypnocourse in that language. Ditto the script, one
of several forgotten phonetic shorthands. (Designed to enable the
tongues of Aliens to be written down; but the Aliens have never been
met. It is plausible enough that some colony might have kept the
script alive; after all Thasia uses something of the sort to this
day.)

The final result of our work looks pretty small. Twenty-three
"Personal Background Sets"--a few letters, a diary in some, an
assortment of artifacts. Whoever stocked this ship we are on supplied
wood, of the half-dozen kinds that have been taken wherever men have
gone; stocks of a few plastics--known at the time of the Exodus, or
easily developed from those known, and not associated with any
particular planet. Also books on Design, a Form-writer for translating
drawings into materials, and so on. Someone put in a lot of work
before this voyage began.

Most of the time it is like being back on Russet doing a group
Project. What we are working on has