a
huge flattened sphere with the sun high above, and not the swift curving
steel ball that it actually was.

This was her world. It was like Earth, like the old Earth of the legends
of the time before the radiation wars. And even though her mind might
know the truth about the screens that refracted light and the atomic
pile that was her sun, her heart knew a more human truth. This was a
world. As it had been in the beginning. As it must be till the end--or
until they found a new Earth, somewhere, sometime.... Max sighed. "Yes,
you have your world, Trina. And it's a good one--the best of its kind
I've ever visited."

"Why don't you stay here then?"

A spaceman, she thought. With all the dozens of men in my world, why did
it have to be a spaceman? With all the visitors from New France and New
Chile and New Australia last festival, why did it have to be him?

"I have the stars, Trina."

"We do too!" Last festival, and the warm June night, heavy, druggedly
heavy with honeysuckle and magnolia, and the hidden music from the
pavillions. And Max Cramer, tall and strong boned and alien, holding her
in his arms, dancing her away from her people, out onto the terrace
above the little stream, beneath the full festival moon and the summer
stars, the safe, sane, well ordered constellations that their ancestors
had looked upon from Earth.

"My stars are real, Trina."

She shook her head, unable to argue with him. World-woman and spaceman,
and always different, with nothing in common between them, really,
except a brief forgetfulness at festival time.

"Come with me, Trina."

"No." She gathered up the reins and chucked at the horse and turned,
slowly, for the village.

"You wouldn't come--for me?"

"You wouldn't stay, would you?"

She heard the windmill blades whir again, and a rustling of wind, and
then he was beside her, skimming slowly along, barely off the ground,
making her horse snort nervously away.

"Trina, I shouldn't tell you this, not until we've met with your
councilmen. But I--I've got to."

He wasn't smiling now. There was a wild look about his face. She didn't
like it.

"Captain Bernard's with the council now, giving them the news. But I
wanted to see you first, to be the one who told you." He broke off,
shook his head. "Yet when I found you I couldn't say anything. I guess I
was afraid of what you'd answer...."

"What are you talking about?" She didn't want to look at him. It
embarrassed her someh