suitable for habitation

They said that the planet could support human life, but you still had to suit up before you could go outside.  There were things in the air that would get in your lungs and start eating them if you weren't careful.  The too big sun beat down relentlessly on the little town, and the humidity of the swampy lowlands was off the chart.  You couldn't see anybody stirring in the meager downtown....everyone was hunkered down in the carefully maintained artificial atmosphere of their offices and homes.  Space pioneers, proud first settlers of a new world.....they might as well still be up on the space station in orbit, or on one of the system ships, prospecting for anything worthwhile.....they hadn't found much worthwhile yet.....the robot systems found minerals and organics and the chemicals they needed to keep life support working, but the economics of the whole thing looked lousy.  What did they have that anybody else would want?  There was plenty of land.....swamp land mostly....crawling with very large toad-like creatures, that spent most of their time eating very large bug things, and trying to avoid being eaten by really large feathered serpent monstrosities.  If you did go outside, past the force-field fences, you had better have your blaster powered up, and you better know how to use it.....So you sat inside and prayed that the commlinks stayed up to speed, so you could at least maintain the illusion that the lonely town was part of the rest of humanity.   In the afternoon, dark masses of raincloud would appear, and sheet lightning would flash, and the power would glitch and jitter.....and the thunder could be heard booming, even through the bubble metal walls.  On the news, there was talk of budget over-runs, and of bills in the Assembly that might effect the whole Expansionist agenda.  Maybe they had come out here for nothing...maybe they would all be shipped back to the teeming and tension-filled planets they had escaped just a few years before.  Here at least you got a house on a street in a town, instead of a tiny box in a habitat deep underground or off in orbit somewhere....but somebody had better figure out how to make it all start paying for itself, or maybe the ships would just stop coming....Outside the thunder rolled, and the big frogs pulled themselves up on the front porch, adapting the human intrusion to their own purposes.....