Peace Assessor Epsilon Tau stood with his back against a big rock, trembling. He needed to calm down. Taking a slow deep breath, he asked for the blessing of the Atom Heart Mother and reached out with his senses, connecting. He could feel the solidness of the house-size boulder behind him. The shape of it where it extended below the ground. The soil around it, a tumult of microscopic life and death and new birth .......... Beneath that he could feel the planet's brittle crust---mere kilometers thick---and then the horribly liquid mantle and core beneath...

This exercise would have quickly soothed his soul back at home, but here it just made him aware of how horribly alien this planet was. Green trees. A yellow sun in a blue sky…