kidded stubbornly down the ramp till he felt cold earth
against his rear. Accepting fate, Yonnie scrambled up and plodded after
the wagon. As the Stoltzfooses and the last of their off-worldly goods
topped a hillock, they both turned to wave at the ship's officers. Then,
veiled by the dusty fall of snow, they disappeared.

* * * * *

"I don't envy them," the Engineer said, staring out into the wintery
world.

"Hymie, were you born in a barn?" the Exec bellowed.

"Sorry, sir." The Engineer raised the landing ramp. Heaters hummed to
thaw the hold's air. "I was thinking about how alone those two folks are
now."

"Hardly alone," the Captain said. "There are four million Murnans,
friendly people who consider a white skin no more than a personal
idiosyncrasy. Aaron's what his folks call a _Chentelmaan_, too. He'll
get along."

"Chentelmaan-schmentelmaan," the Engineer said. "Why'd he come half
across Creation to scratch out a living with a horse-drawn plow?"

"He came out here for dirt," the Captain said. "Soil is more than
seed-bed to the Amish. It feeds the Old Order they're born to. Aaron
and Martha Stoltzfoos would rather have built their barns beside the
Susquehanna, but all the land there's taken. Aaron could have taken a
job in Lancaster, too; he could have shaved off his beard, bought a
Chevie and moved to the suburbs, and settled down to read an
English-language Bible in a steepled church. Instead, he signed a
homestead-contract for a hundred acres eighty light-years from home; and
set out to plow the land like his grandpop did. He'll sweat hard for his
piece of Murna, but the Amish always pay well for their land."

"And what do we, the government, I mean, get from the deal?" the Exec
wanted to know. "This wagon of ours doesn't run on hay, like Aaron's
does."

"Cultures skid backwards when they're transplanted," the Captain said.
"Murnan culture was lifted from Kano, a modern city by the standards of
the time; but, without tools and with a population too small to support
technology, the West African apostates from Islam who landed here four
hundred years ago slid back to the ways of their grandparents. We want
them to get up to date again. We want Murna to become a market. That's
Aaron's job. Our Amishman has got to start this planet back toward the
machine age."

"Seems an odd job to give a fellow who won't drive a car or read by
electric light," the Engineer observed.