It was nearly winter when the ship arrived. Pete Farnam never knew if the timing had been planned that way or not. It might have been coincidence that it came just when the colony was predicting its first real bumper crop of all time. When it was all over Pete and Mario and the rest tried to figure it out but none of them ever knew for sure just what had happened back on Earth or when it had actually happened. There was too little information to go on and practically none that they could true.