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could extract fluorine and, if required, employ the ancient process of gaseous diffusion to make fuel for a fission pile.
    Parvati made a check-mark on the margin of the copy of the schedule which lay before her, detailing the predictedstages of the conquest of Asgard. This island where the settlers had landed had been chosen by the original team of four explorers as ideal for a first colony. It was neither small nor large-extensive enough to offer plenty of data by which they could judge the true habitability of Asgard, yet not so big that its unexplored recesses might hide serious threats like carnivores or poisonous plants to kill over-confident and ignorant children when they started their families. It was steep enough to resist the tides. It was located in a temperate climatic zone where the fauna of the ocean were neither as fierce as in the equatorial waters nor as frenzied as at the poles, where the annual melting of the ice poured incredible volumes of nutriment into the sea and provoked a fantastic outburst of ravening greed.
    Nonetheless, in spite of all these advantages, the programme for the settlement had been laid out in gradual stages. By policy, to impress beyond doubt on the colonists that this was
not
tame, domesticated Earth, they had gone straight to grips with their new home. Instead of retreating nightly to the security of durasteel bulkheads, they cut native wood and fashioned huts like barracks, partitioned to afford privacy to those who had paired off, or who preferred to sleep alone. They made furniture. Currently they were baking pots of clay, since a suitable deposit had been found near the inland peak where the
Santa Maria
rested. It was no use relying on something manufactured lightyears away by the peak tools of terrestrial technology, when without warning they might be left naked and desperate.
    And yet …
    Parvati hesitated. At last she nodded and shrugged, and decided the gamble was justifiable. She was going to recommend to Hassan, at the progress meeting, that they omit some of the slow stages from their schedule. They could scarcely expect to leap ahead to programmed dwellings, polysensory entertainment channels and all the other trappings of the leisured culture they had left, not within the lifetimes of the first arrivals. Butat the back of her mind she had always nursed the vague hope that here, with a chance to start over, mankind might avoid some of the worst mistakes he had committed at home: raping fertile lands until they became dustbowls, hunting animals like whales until it was too late to prevent their extinction, squandering irreplaceable coal and oil in furnaces and cars when they would eventually be needed as a source of food.
    It looked as though that was going to be possible. For instance, according to the report which Hassan himself had prepared-as well as being their chairman and senior administrator, he was their quartermaster and responsible fo the use they made of the stores they had brought from Earth, including the surviving ships—their solar collectors were already providing nearly all their power requirements, and if the tidal generators could be installed before winter they could cocoon their fusion generators for emergency use only. That was crucial; refining heavy hydrogen was not on the schedule for another year and a half.
    From this starting-point, optimistic conclusions radiated. They could scrap the idea of heating their new home in winter by means of a clay-pipe hot-water system connected to a common boiler, and concentrate the labour freed thereby on producing proper window-glass, a task which had posed unexpected difficulties. Small individual heaters containing unrefined molten salts and plugged into the common power-cable would be far more convenient. And so on.
    A shadow crossed the window, and she glanced around. Her brow clouded suddenly as she remembered what she, of all people, ought not to have forgotten for an instant: that it was on their