soon to the planet, because
Captain Bernard had been able to contact them by radio. She thought of
her people, her friends, and then she remembered the spacemen's far
flung ships and the homes they burrowed deep in the rock of inhospitable
worlds. She knew that he would never understand why she pitied the
people of this system.

"I suppose we'll see them soon," she said. "You're going to bring some
of them back up in your ship tomorrow, aren't you?"

He stood quietly, looking down at her. His face was shadowed in the
gathering night and his whole body was in shadow, tall and somehow alien
seeming there before her.

"Why wait for them to come here, Trina?" he said. "Come down with us, in
the ship, tomorrow. Come down and see for yourself what it's like."

She trembled. "No," she said.

And she thought of the ship, out away from the sky, not down on the
planet yet but hanging above it, with no atmosphere to break the
blackness, to soften the glare of the planet's sun, to shut out the
emptiness.

"You'd hardly know you weren't here, Trina. The air smells the same. And
the weight's almost the same too. Maybe a little lighter."

She nodded. "I know. If we land the world, I'll go out there. But not in
the ship."

"All right." He sighed and let go his grip on her shoulders and turned
to start walking back the way they had come, toward the town.

She thought suddenly of what he had just said, that she would hardly be
able to tell the difference.

"It can't be so much like this," she said. "Or you couldn't like it. No
matter what you say."

"Trina." His voice was harsh. "You've never been out in space, so you
couldn't understand. You just don't know what your world is like, from
outside, when you're coming in."

But she could picture it. A tiny planetoid, shining perhaps behind its
own screens, a small, drifting, lonely sphere of rock. She trembled
again. "I don't want to know," she said.

Somewhere in the meadows beyond the road there was laughter, a boy and a
girl laughing together, happy in the night. Trina's fingers tightened on
Max's hand and she pulled him around to face her and then clung to him,
trembling, feeling the nearness of him as she held up her face to be
kissed.

He held her to him. And slowly, the outside world of space faded, and
her world seemed big and solid and sure, and in his arms it was almost
like festival time again.

* * * * *

At noon the next day