 What did Templin and Eckert find odd about the children they encountered?
] Nothing could have seemed pleasanter than that peaceful planet. Or more complex ones, if you went into it deeper. Weltschmerz, perhaps. Eckert had lit a cigarette and was calmly blowing the smoke at the neon "No Smoking" sign, which winked on and off in mechanical disapproval. Your memory plays traitor and boils friendship down to the status of a breakfast food testimonial. Eckert was just a dull, formless blur opposite him. Eckert had come into his office without saying a word and had watched his scenery-window. Eckert had fiddled with the controls and changed it to sunshine, then to a weird mixture of hail amid the brassy, golden sunlight. He had been raised in a middle-class neighborhood and attended a local grammar school where he had achieved average grades and had given his instructors the normal amount of trouble. And then an unscheduled freighter had put in for repairs, one of the very few ships that ever came by Tunpesh. So friendly that he had made sure that a certain box was on board, filled with shiny atomic rifles, needle pistols, and the fat little gas guns. Eckert and he had been chosen to go to Tunpesh and investigate. The thin red line was practically microscopic now and Templin could feel his lashes lying gently on his cheeks. They knew that it had no trading concessions or armed forces and that nobody from neighboring systems seemed to know much about it or even visited it. But a staff anthropologist must have been routinely assigned to Tunpesh to furnish data and reports.
 They were all impressively healthy.
 They all looked much younger than the children on Earth.  They were all more well-behaved than any children they had seen on Earth  They were all impressively healthy.  They looked much older than the children on Earth