ks and caressed his forehead. The stars shone palely
down. Some of the land was under cultivation, and he could see green
things growing in the starlight, and the breeze carried their green
breath to his nostrils. He reached the highway and began walking along
it. He saw no further sign of vehicles till he came opposite a large
brick building with bright light spilling through its windows. In front
of it were parked a dozen automobiles of a make that he was unfamiliar
with.

He heard the whir of machinery and the pounding of hammers, and he went
over and peered through one of the windows. The building proved to be a
furniture factory. Most of the work was being done by machines, but
there were enough tasks left over to keep the owners of the parked cars
busily occupied. The main manual task was upholstering. The machines cut
and sewed and trimmed and planed and doweled and assembled, but
apparently none of them was up to the fine art of spitting tacks.

* * * * *

Philip returned to the highway and went on. He came to other buildings
and peered into each. One was a small automobile-assembly plant, another
was a dairy, a third was a long greenhouse. In the first two the
preponderance of the work was being performed by machines. In the third,
however, machines were conspicuously absent. Clearly it was one thing
to build a machine with a superhuman work potential, but quite another
to build one with a green thumb.

[Illustration]

He passed a pasture, and saw animals that looked like cows sleeping in
the starlight. He passed a field of newly-sprouted corn. He passed a
power plant, and heard the whine of a generator. Finally he came to the
outskirts of Pfleugersville.

There was a big illuminated sign by the side of the road. It stopped him
in his tracks, and he stood there staring at its embossed letters:

PFLEUGERSVILLE, SIRIUS XXI
_Discovered April 1, 1962
Incorporated September 11, 1962_

Philip wiped his forehead.

Zarathustra had trotted on ahead. Now he stopped and looked back. _Come
on_, he seemed to say. _Now that you've seen this much, you might as
well see the rest._

So Philip entered Pfleugersville ... and fell in love--

Fell in love with the lovely houses, and the darling trees in summer
bloom. With the parterres of twinkling star-flowers and the expanses of
verdant lawns. With the trellised green roses that tapestried every
porch. With the hydrangeali