ew unbearable ... only there would be no one--no human, anyway--to
bear it.

Year after year the leaves would wither and fall and decay. Rock would
cover them. And some day ... billions of years thence ... there would be
coal and oil--and nobody to want them.

"Very likely Earth will replenish herself," the commander agreed, "but
not in your time or your children's time.... That is, not in _my_
children's time," he added hastily.

The handful of men lined up in a row before the airlock shuffled their
feet and allowed their muttering to become a few decibels louder.
Clifford looked at his wrist chronometer. Obviously he was no less
anxious than the crew to be off, but, for the sake of his conscience, he
must make a last try.

"Damn your conscience," Johnson thought. "I hope that for this you feel
guilty as hell, that you wake up nights in a cold sweat remembering that
you left one man alone on the planet you and your kind discarded. Not
that I don't want to stay, mind you, but that I want you to suffer the
way you're making me suffer now--having to listen to your platitudes."

The commander suddenly stopped paraphrasing the _Manual_. "Camping out's
fun for a week or two, you know, but it's different when it's for a
lifetime."

Johnson's fingers curled in his palms ... he was even angrier now that
the commander had struck so close to home. Camping out ... was that all
he was doing--fulfilling childhood desires, nothing more?

Fortunately Clifford didn't realize that he had scored, and scuttled
back to the shelter of the _Manual_. "Perhaps you don't know enough
about the new system in Alpha Centauri," he said, a trifle wildly. "It
has two suns surrounded by three planets, Thalia, Aglaia, and
Euphrosyne. Each of these planets is slightly smaller than Earth, so
that the decrease in gravity is just great enough to be pleasant,
without being so marked as to be inconvenient. The atmosphere is almost
exactly like that of Earth's, except that it contains several beneficial
elements which are absent here--and the climate is more temperate. Owing
to the fact that the planets are partially shielded from the suns by
cloud layers, the temperature--except immediately at the poles and the
equators, where it is slightly more extreme--is always equable,
resembling that of Southern California...."

"Sounds charming," said Johnson. "I too have read the Colonial Office
handouts.... I wonder what the people who wrote them'll do now t