 What did Templin and Eckert find odd about the children they encountered?
] Nothing could have seemed pleasanter than that peaceful planet. Templin tightened his safety belt and lay back on the acceleration bunk. 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. There had been no mental instability in his family for as far back as the genetic records went. 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. How long would it be before memories faded and all there was left of Pendleton was a page of statistics? In the statistics Pendleton was the All-Around Boy, the cold marble statue with the finely chiseled muscles and the smooth, blank sockets where the eyes should be. 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. Warm breezes rustled through Eckert's graying hair and tugged gently at his tunic. A few hundred yards away, a forest towered straight and slim and coolly inviting, and brilliantly colored birds whirled and fluttered in the foliage. The rocketport, where they were standing surrounded by their luggage, was a grassy valley where the all too infrequent ships could land and discharge cargo or make repairs. He looked at the slim, dwindling shape that was the rocket, and was suddenly, acutely aware that he and Templin would be stranded for six months on a foreign and very possibly dangerous planet.
 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