* *

It did. Her hair was a dark, lustrous brown, as were her eyebrows. Her
eyes were brown. Her skin, too--her dark red playsuit left little to the
imagination--was a rich and even brown. Originally fairly dark, it had
been tanned to a more-than-fashionable depth of color by naked
sun-bathing and by practically-naked outdoor sports. A couple of inches
shorter than the green-haired girl, she too had a figure to make any
sculptor drool.

"I'm to be Dr. Jim's assistant. I have a thousand tapes, more or less,
to study, too. It'll be quite a while, I'm afraid, before I can be of
much use, but I'll do the best I can."

"If we had hit Alpha Centauri that arrangement would have been good, but
as we are, it isn't." Garlock frowned in thought, his heavy black
eyebrows almost meeting above his finely-chiseled aquiline nose. "Since
neither Jim nor I need an assistant any more than we need tails, it was
designed to give you girls something to do. But out here, lost, there's
work for a dozen trained specialists and there are only four of us. So
we shouldn't duplicate effort. Right? You first, Belle."

"Are you asking me or telling me?" she asked. "And that's a fair
question. Don't read anything into it that isn't there. With your
attitude, I want information."

"I am asking you," he replied, carefully. "For your information, when I
know what should be done, I give orders. When I don't know, as now, I
ask advice. If I like it, I follow it. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough. We're apt to need any number of specialists."

"Lola?"

"Of course we shouldn't duplicate. What shall I study?"

"That's what we must figure out. We can't do it exactly, of course; all
we can do now is to set up a rough scheme. Jim's job is the only one
that's definite. He'll have to work full time on nebular configurations.
If we hit inhabited planets he'll have to add their star-charts to his
own. That leaves three of us to do all the other work of a survey.
Ideally, we would cover all the factors that would be of use in getting
us back to Tellus, but since we don't know what those factors are....
Found out anything yet, Jim?"

"A little. Tellus-type planet, apparently strictly so. Oceans and
continents. Lots of inhabitants--farms, villages, all sizes of cities.
Not close enough to say definitely, but inhabitants seem to be humanoid,
if not human."

"Hold her here. Besides astronomy, which is all yours, what do we need
most?"

"We should have