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As a gesture of courtesy, in this Centennial year she was President not only of the United States, but also of Earth. And, of course, she had not asked for either job; if she had done so-or even if she had been suspected of such a faux pas-she would have been automatically eliminated. For the last century, almost all top political appointments on Terra had been made by random computer selection from the pool of individuals who had the necessary qualifications. It had taken the human race several thousand years to realize that there were some jobs that should never be given to the people who volunteered for them, especially if they showed too much enthusiasm. As on shrewd political commentator had remarked: “We want a

President who has to be carried screaming and kicking into the White

House-but will then do the best job he possibly can, so that he’ll get time off for good behavior.”

Duncan put the program away; there would be plenty of opportunity to study it later. Now he had eyes only for his first real look at Planet Earth, on a bright sunny day.

And that was the first problem. Never before in his life had he been exposed to such a glare. Though he had been warned, he was still taken aback by the sheer blazing ferocity of a sun almost one hundred times brighter than the star that shone gently on his own world. As the car whispered automatically through the outskirts of Washington, he kept readjusting the transmission of his dark glasses to find a comfortable level. It was appalling to think that there were places on Earth where the sun was even more brilliant than this, and he remembered another warning that had now suddenly become very real. Where the light fell directly on his exposed skin, he could actually feel the heat. On Titan, the very concept of 64 sunburn” was ludicrous; now, it was all too easy to imagine, especially for skin as dark as his.

He was like a newborn child, seeing the world for the first time. Almost every single object in his field of vision was unfamiliar, or recognizable only

III

from the recordings he had studied. Impressions flowed in upon him at such a rate that he felt utterly confused, until he decided that the only thing to do was to concentrate on a single category of objects and to ignore all the rest-even though they were clamoring for his attention.

Trees, for example. There were millions of them but he had expected that.

What he had not anticipated was the enormous variety of their shape, size, and color. And he had no words for any of them. Indeed, as he realized with shame, he could not have identified the few trees in his own Meridian Park.

Here was a whole complex universe, part of everyday life for most of mankind since the beginning of history; and he could not utter one meaningful sentence about it, for lack of a vocabulary. When he searched his mind, he could think of only four words that had anything to do with trees-“leaf,” “branch,” “root,” and stem.” And all these he had learned in a totally different context.

Then there were flowers. At first, Duncan had been puzzled by the random patches of color that he glimpsed from time to time. Flowers were not uncommon on Titan-usually as highly prized, isolated specimens, though there were some small groups of a few dozen in the Park. Here they were as countless as the trees, and even more varied. And once again, he had no names for any of them. This world was full of beauties of which he could not speak. Living on Earth was going to have some unanticipated frustrations…. “What was that!” he suddenly cried. Washington swung around in his seat to get a fix on the tiny object that had just shot across the roadway.

“A squirrel, I think. Lots of them in these woods -and of course they’re always getting run over. That’s one problem no one has ever been able to solve.” He paused, then added gently: “I suppose you’ve never seen one before?”

Duncan laughed, without much humor.

“I’ve never seen any animal before-except Man.”

“You don’t even have a zoo on Titan?”

“No. We’ve been arguinf, about it for years, but the problems are too great. And, to be perfectly frank, I think most people are scared of something going wrong-remember the plague of rats in that Lunar colony. What we’re really frightened of, though, are insects. If anyone ever discovered that a fly had slipped through quarantine, there’d be world-wide hysteria. We’ve got a nice, sterile environment, and we want to keep it that way.”

“Hm,” said Washington. “You’re not going to find it easy to adjust to our dirty, infested world. Yet a lot of people here have been complaining for the last century or so that it’s too clean and tidy. They’re talking nonsense, of course; there’s more wilderness now than there has been for a thousand years.”