God, I love this place, he thought. He didn't mean merely the waterfall, nor even the entire property. He meant Balboa, possibly the only country in which he had ever felt truly at home.

Odd thing, that. But what's not to love… outside of, maybe, the government here? The people are bright, hardworking and friendly. The men are brave; the women loyal and lovely. The land is… well, "beautiful" hardly does it justice. He watched Linda's multicolored pet "trixie," Jinfeng, sail across the waterfall. It came to rest on the branch of a large mango tree and began to eat the fruit it found there.

Just beautiful.

Balboa, being largely jungle and also somewhat sparsely settled, retained more than the usual amount of pre-settlement flora and fauna. Jinfeng was one example. But mixed in with the green of the jungle around the waterfall were some other species, bluegums and tranzitrees, the latter so named because their bright green-skinned fruit was intensely appetizing to look upon, and the mouthwatering red pulp inside intensely poisonous for man to eat.

Lower animals could eat tranzitree fruit without ill effect. It was conjectured in some circles that tranzitrees had been developed and placed on Terra Nova by the Noahs-the beings who had seeded the planet with life untold eons ago-expressly to prevent the rise of intelligence. Certainly the tranzitrees had been artificially created, as had bolshiberry bushes and progressivines. The latter two were, likewise, poisonous to intelligent life but harmless to lower forms. Their complex toxins did build up in some food animals, were they allowed to eat of them, rendering those animals equally toxic. This, too, would have tended to limit the development of civilization, even had early intelligent life managed to survive the tranzitrees, bolshiberries, and progressivines, by limiting the food supply.