Potter had sighed. "I see," he had said, and he did.

Out-of-the-way places were for putting things out of the way, and the things that were most often put out of the way in the CoDominium were people. Earth was still crowded, and the better colony worlds were taken, or their lobbyists were still able to resist forced refugee assignment in the Grand Senate.

And you had to put them somewhere, he knew.

Enter the CoDominium's Bureau of Relocation, BuReloc for short, and arguably the hardest-working bureaucracy in history. Bureloc moved product like there was no tomorrow, and its product was colonists. Sometimes the colonists were willing, more often they were not. But willing or not, they moved.

"Poor bastards," Potter had said, as he and Farrow signed the contract for the Survey order.

"Don't worry about your crew," Hogan had said. "Better they have something to do for two years than sit around idle."

But Potter hadn't meant the crew of the Fast Eddie. He had read the discovery team's preliminaries on the moon of the Byers' Star gas giant, and he had been thinking about the people who would someday have to live there.

Now the Fast Eddie had arrived; the crew began the long preparations that would culminate, however reluctantly, with the first extended visit of men to her surface, and Potter's mood shifted into the low gear of indigestion.

"Pack your long underwear, boys," Owens pronounced, and transferred the last of the orbital survey data to the Fast Eddie's shuttle computers. He turned at a chuckle from Connolly. "What?"

"Oh, just thinking about all the things people have said wouldn't happen 'til hell froze over." The Officer pointed to a screen rippling with ground images and overlaid with environmental data. "They're all down there waiting for us right now."