[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from IF Worlds of Science
Fiction June 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
[Sidenote: _Here is a love story of two young people who met under the
magic of festival time. One was Trina, whose world was a gentle
make-believe Earth. The other was Max, handsome spaceman, whose world
was the infinite universe of space...._]
The First Day of spring, the man at the weather tower had said, and
certainly it felt like spring, with the cool breeze blowing lightly
about her and a faint new clover smell borne in from the east.
Spring--that meant they would make the days longer now, and the nights
shorter, and they would warm the whole world until it was summer again.
[Illustration]
Trina laughed aloud at the thought of summer, with its picnics and
languid swims in the refilled lakes, with its music and the heavy scent
of flowers and the visitors in from space for the festival. She laughed,
and urged her horse faster, out of its ambling walk into a trot, a
canter, until the wind streamed about her, blowing back her hair,
bringing tears to her eyes as she rode homeward toward the eastern
horizon--the horizon that looked so far away but wasn't really.
"Trina!"
His voice was very close. And it was familiar, though for a moment she
couldn't imagine who it might be.
"Where are you?" She had reined the horse in abruptly and now looked
around her, in all directions, toward the north and south and east and
west, toward the farm houses of the neighboring village, toward the
light tower and the sun tower. She saw no one. No one else rode this
early in the day in the pasture part of the world.
"I'm up here, Trina."
She looked up then and saw him, hovering some thirty feet off the ground
in the ridiculous windmill-like craft he and his people used when they
visited the world.
"Oh, hello, Max." No wonder she had known the voice. Max Cramer, down
from space, down to the world, to see her. She knew, even before he
dropped his craft onto the grass beside her, that he had come to see
her. He couldn't have been on the world for more than the hour she'd
been riding.
"You're visiting us early this year, Max. It's not festival time for
three months yet."
"I know." He cut the power to the windmill blades, and they slowed,
becoming sharply visible. The horse snorted and backed away. Max smiled.
"This world is very--attractive."
His eyes caught hers, held them. She smiled back, wishing for the
hundredth time since last summer's festival that he were one of her
people, or at least a worldling, and not a man with the too white skin
of space.
"It may be attractive," she said. "But you always leave it soon enough."
He nodded. "It's too confining. It's all right, for a little while, but
then...."
"How can you say that?" She shook her head sadly. Already they were
arguing the same old unresolvable argument, and they had scarcely
greeted each other. After all his months in space they met with the same
words as they had parted. She looked past him, up and out, toward the
horizon that seemed so many miles away, toward the morning sun that
seemed to hang far, far off in the vaulted blue dome of the sky.
"How can you even think it? About this?"
His lips tightened. "About _this_," he repeated. "A horizon you could
ride to in five minutes. A world you could ride around in two hours. A
sun--you really call it a sun--that you could almost reach up and pluck
out of that sky of yours." He laughed. "Illusions. World of illusions."
"Well, what do you have? A ship--a tiny ship you can't get out of, with
walls you can see, all around you."
"Yes, Trina, with walls we can see."
He was still smiling, watching her, and she knew that he desired her.
And she desired him. But not the stars.
"You have nothing like this," she said, knowing it wouldn't do any good.
She looked past him at the light tower, one of the many that formed the
protective screen about her world, that made it seem great and convex, 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 somehow, seeing him so eager. "What do you want to tell
me?"
"About our last trip, Trina. We've found a world!"
She stared at him blankly, and his hand made a cutting gesture of
impatience. "Oh, not a world like this one! A planet, Trina. And it's
Earth type!"
She wheeled the horse about and stared at him. For a moment she felt
excitement rise inside of her too, and then she remembered the
generations of searching, and the false alarms, and the dozens of
barren, unfit planets that the spacemen colonized, planets like
ground-bound ships.
"Oh, Trina," Max cried, "This isn't like the others. It's a new Earth.
And there are already people there. From not long after the Exodus...."
"A new Earth?" she said. "I don't believe it."
The council wouldn't either, she thought. Not after all the other new
Earths, freezing cold or methane atmosphered or at best completely
waterless. This would be like the others. A spaceman's dream.
"You've got to believe me, Trina," Max said. "And you've got to help
make the others believe. Don't you see? You wouldn't live in space. I
wouldn't live here--on this. But there, on a real planet, on a real
Earth...."
Then suddenly she felt his excitement and it was a part of her, until
against all reason she wanted to believe in his mad dream of a world.
She laughed aloud as she caught up the reins and raced her horse
homeward, toward the long vista of the horizon and the capital village
beyond it, ten minutes gallop away.
* * * * *
Max and Trina came together into the council hall and saw the two
groups, the roomful of worldmen and the half dozen spacemen, apart from
each other, arguing. The spacemen's eyes were angry.
"A world," Captain Bernard said bitterly, "there for your taking, and
you don't even want to look at it."
"How do we know what kind of world it is?" Councilman Elias leaned
forward on the divan. His voice was gentle, almost pitying. "You brought
no samples. No vegetation, no minerals...."
"Not even air samples," Aaron Gomez said softly. "Why?"
Bernard sighed. "We didn't want to wait," he said. "We wanted to get
back here, to tell you."
"It may be a paradise world to _you_," Elias said. "But to us...."
Max Cramer tightened his grip on Trina's hand. "The fools," he said.
"Talking and talking, and all the time this world drifts farther and
farther away."
"It takes so much power to change course," Trina said. "And besides, you
feel it. It makes you heavy."
She remembered the stories her father used to tell, about his own youth,
when he and Curt Elias had turned the world to go to a planet the
spaceman found. A planet with people--people who lived under glass
domes, or deep below the formaldehyde poisoned surface.
"You could be there in two weeks, easily, even at your world's speed,"
Captain Bernard said.
"And then we'd have to go out," Elias said. "Into space."
The worldmen nodded. The women looked at each other and nodded too. One
of the spacemen swore, graphically, and there was an embarrassed silence
as Trina's people pretended not to have heard.
"Oh, let's get out of here." The spaceman who had sworn swore again,
just as descriptively, and then grinned at the councilmen and their
aloof, blank faces. "They don't want our planet. All right. Maybe New
Chile...."
"Wait!" Trina said it without thinking, without intending to. She stood
speechless when the others turned to face her. All the others. Her
people and Max's. Curt Elias, leaning forward again, smiling at her.
"Yes, Trina?" the councilman said.
"Why don't we at least look at it? Maybe it is--what they say."
Expression came back to their faces then. They nodded at each other and
looked from her to Max Cramer and back again at her, and they smiled.
Festival time, their eyes said. Summer evenings, summer foolishness.
And festival time long behind them, but soon to come again.
"Your father went to space," Elias said. "We saw one of those worlds the
spacemen talk of."
"I know."
"He didn't like it."
"I know that too," she said, remembering his bitter words and the
nightmare times when her mother had had so much trouble comforting him,
and the winter evenings when he didn't want even to go outside and see
the familiar, Earth encircling stars.
He was dead now. Her mother was dead now. They were not here, to
disapprove, to join with Elias and the others.
They would have hated for her to go out there.
She faltered, the excitement Max had aroused in her dying away, and then
she thought of their argument, as old as their desire. She knew that if
she wanted him it would have to be away from the worlds.
"At least we could look," she said. "And the spacemen could bring up
samples. And maybe even some of the people for us to talk to."
Elias nodded. "It would be interesting," he said slowly, "to talk to
some new people. It's been so long."
"And we wouldn't even have to land," Aaron Gomez said, "if it didn't
look right."
The people turned to each other again and smiled happily. She knew that
they were thinking of the men and women they would see, and all the new
things to talk about.
"We might even invite some of them up for the festival," Elias said
slowly. "Providing they're--courteous." He frowned at the young spaceman
who had done the swearing, and then he looked back at Captain Bernard.
"And providing, of course, that we're not too far away by then."
"I don't think you will be," Bernard said. "I think you'll stay."
"I think so too," Max Cramer said, moving closer to Trina. "I hope so."
Elias stood up slowly and signalled that the council was dismissed. The
other people stood up also and moved toward the doors.
"We'd better see about changing the world's course," Aaron Gomez said.
No one objected. It was going to be done. Trina looked up at Max Cramer
and knew that she loved him. And wondered why she was afraid.
* * * * *
It was ten days later that the world, New America, came into the
gravitational influence of the planet's solar system. The automatic
deflectors swung into functioning position, ready to change course,
slowly and imperceptibly, but enough to take the world around the system
and out into the freedom of space where it could wander on its random
course. But this time men shunted aside the automatic controls. Men
guided their homeland in, slowly now, toward the second planet from the
sun, the one that the spacemen had said was so like Earth.
"We'll see it tomorrow," Trina said. "They'll shut off part of the light
tower system then."
"Why don't they now?" Max Cramer asked her. It was just past sunset, and
the stars of a dozen generations ago were just beginning to wink into
view. He saw Venus, low on the horizon, and his lips tightened, and then
he looked up to where he knew the new sun must be.
There was only the crescent of Earth's moon.
"Now?" Trina said. "Why should they turn the screens off now? We're
still so far away. We wouldn't see anything."
"You'd see the sun," Max said. "It's quite bright, even from here. And
from close up, from where the planet is, it looks just about like
Earth's."
Trina nodded. "That's good," she said, looking over at the rose tints of
the afterglow. "It wouldn't seem right if it didn't."
A cow lowed in the distance, and nearer, the laughing voices of children
rode the evening breeze. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere else a woman
called her family home to supper. Old sounds. Older, literally, than
this world.
"What are the people like, out there?"
He looked at her face, eager and worried at the same time, and he
smiled. "You'll like them, Trina," he said. "They're like--well, they're
more like _this_ than anything else."
He gestured, vaguely, at the farmhouse lights ahead of them, at the slow
walking figures of the young couples out enjoying the warm spring
evening, at the old farmer leading his plow horse home along the path.
"They live in villages, not too different, from yours. And in cities.
And on farms."
"And yet, you like it there, don't you?" she said.