Captain Nicholas Joel stood waiting in his fore-waist bridge; he looked again through its heavy, slotted quartz windows and now he could see them coming. He could make out the toy-like silhouette of their jeep, emerging in reckless, bounding leaps from the edge of the cultivated forest. Now they were racing at full tilt across the hard-packed yellow sand of the desert in a bee-line for the ship that had landed them here a scant three weeks ago. Captain Nicholas Joel watched them, their excitemen