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Show Isaac and Ida had been oceanographers, as had their parents before them, the happiest years of their lives having been spent at the University of Nova Scotia on Earth getting their terminal degrees and doing research. In fact, they had been volunteered for the mission to BauerWorlde by their parents when they were but infants, because the planet was known to be seven-eighths ocean. The Needlesmith pair had been the titular leaders on board the Bussard ramjet during the two years of waking travel and were meant to be full-fledged leaders once they landed on BauerWorlde. But the Doctors Needlesmith would prove impatient to get back to the waters of their first love upon planeting and would turn out to be slapdash BauerWorlde leaders at best. By the time the technicians and their support staff disembarked from the FifthSleeper twenty years later, the technological society that was supposed to have been running by then at full tilt and in need of their services was nowhere to be seen. The style of dress had settled permanently into OldeWorlde Earth. Dress swords and jousting carnivals abounded. The horse population had mushroomed in two decades of careful and dogged breeding and the animals filled the streets. If they weren't carrying someone or something, they were pulling covered carriages and drays. Native jackponies were colorfully evident, usually led by the yeofolk farmers and pulling behind them two-wheeled carts filled with things like JackApples and BauerMelons-the latter a species of grape that had been brought from Earth and grown to unbelievable proportions in BauerWorlde's hospitable soil. The Jackponies' humming sounded like a mammoth bumble bee 68 |