"Simple enough, but I was
lost! When the ground-shocks came, everybody else ran to the ship. We
waited for you. You didn't come." It had been, of course, because
Cochrane would not risk taking Babs through a forest in which trees were
falling. "We finally had to choose between taking off and crashing. So
we took off."
"That was quite right. We'd all be messed up if you hadn't," Cochrane
told him.
Jones waved his hands.
"I didn't think we could ever find you again. We were sixty light-years
away when that booster effect died out. Then Doctor Holden got on the
communicator. He got Earth. The astronomers back there located us and
gave us the line to get back by. We found the planet. Even then I didn't
see how we'd pick out the valley. But Doc had had 'em checking the shots
we transmitted as we were making our landing. We had the whole first
approach on film-tape. They put a crowd of map-comparators to work. We
went in a Space Platform orbit around the planet, transmitting what we
saw from out there--they figured the orbit for us, too--and they checked
what we transmitted against what we'd photographed going down.
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