"But you don't like it here. Why?"
"If you don't understand by now, Trina, I can't explain."
They walked on. Night came swiftly, crowding the rose and purple tints
out of the western sky, closing in dark and cool and sweet smelling
about them. Ahead, a footbridge loomed up out of the shadows. There was
the sound of running water, and, on the bank not far from the bridge,
the low murmuring of a couple of late lingering fishermen.
"The people live out in the open, like this?" Trina said.
"Yes."
"Not underground? Not under a dome?"
"I've told you before that it's like Earth, Trina. About the same size,
even."
"_This_ is about the same size, too."
"Not really. It only looks that way."
The fishermen glanced up as they passed, and then bent down over their
lines again. Lucas Crossman, from Trina's town, and Jake Krakorian from
the southern hemisphere, up to visit his sister Lucienne, who had just
had twins....
Trina said hello to them as she passed, and found out that the twins
looked just like their mother, except for Grandfather Mueller's eyes,
and then she turned back to Max.
"Do people live all over the planet?"
"On most of it. The land sections, that is. Of course, up by the poles
it's too cold."
"But how do they know each other?"
He stopped walking and stared at her, not understanding for a minute.
Girl's laughter came from the bushes, and the soft urging voice of one
of the village boys. Max looked back at the fishermen and then down at
Trina and shook his head.
"They don't all know each other," he said. "They couldn't."
She thought of New Chile, where her cousin Isobelle was married last
year, and New India, which would follow them 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 the world slowed again and changed course, going
into an orbit around the planet, becoming a third moon, nearer to the
surface than the others.
The people, all of those who had followed their normal day-to-day life
even after New America came into the system, abandoned it at last. They
crowded near the television towers, waiting for the signal which would
open up some of the sky and show them the planet they circled, a great
green disk, twice the apparent diameter of the legendary Moon of Earth.
Max stood beside Trina in the crowd that pressed close about his ship.
He wore his spaceman's suit, and the helmet was in his hand. Soon he too
would be aboard with the others, going down to the planet.
"You're sure you won't come, Trina? We'll be down in a couple of hours."
"I'll wait until we land there. If we do."
Curt Elias came toward them through the crowd. When he saw Trina he
smiled and walked faster, almost briskly. It was strange to see him move
like a young and active man.
"If I were younger," he said, "I'd go down there." He smiled again and
pointed up at the zenith, where the blue was beginning to waver and fade
as the sky screens slipped away. "This brings back memories."
"You didn't like that other world," Trina said. "Not any more than
Father did."
"The air was bad there," Elias said.
The signal buzzer sounded again. The center screens came down. Above
them, outlined by the fuzzy halo of the still remaining sky, the black
of space stood forth, and the stars, and the great disk of the planet,
with its seas and continents and cloud masses and the shadow of night
creeping across it from the east.
"You see, Trina?" Max said softly.
The voices of the people rose, some alive with interest and others
anxious, fighting back the planet and the unfamiliar, too bright stars.
Trina clutched Max Cramer's hand, feeling again the eagerness of that
first day, when he had come to tell her of this world.
"You're right," she whispered. "It _is_ like Earth."
It was so much like the pictures, though of course the continents were
different, and the seas, and instead of one moon there were two. Earth.
A new Earth, there above them in the sky.
Elias let out his breath slowly. "Yes," he said. "It is. It's not a bit
like that world we visited. Not a bit."
"When you're down there it's even more like Earth," Max said. "And all
the way down you could watch it grow larger. It wouldn't be at all like
open space."
At the poles of the planet snow gleamed, and cloud masses drifted across
the equator. And the people looked, and pointed, their voices growing
loud with eagerness.
"Why don't we land the world now?" Trina cried. "Why wait for the ship
to bring people up here?"
"Landing the world would take a lot of power," Elias said. "It would be
foolish to do it unless we planned on staying for quite a while." He
sighed. "Though I would like to go down there. I'd like to see a really
Earth type planet."
He looked at Max, and Max smiled. "Well, why not?" he said.
Elias smiled too. "After all, I've been in space once. I'll go again."
He turned and pushed his way through the people.
Trina watched him go. Somehow he seemed a symbol to her. Old and stable,
he had been head of the council since she was a child. And he had gone
into space with her father....
"Please come, Trina," Max said. "There's nothing to be afraid of."
With both Max and Elias along, certainly it couldn't be too bad. Max was
right. There was nothing, really, to be afraid of. She smiled up at him.
"All right," she said. "I'll go."
And then she was walking with Max Cramer toward the ship and trying not
to remember her father crying in his sleep.
* * * * *
The ship rose, and Trina cried out as she felt the heaviness wrench her
back against the cushions. Max reached over to her. She felt the needle
go into her arm again, and then sank back into the half sleep that he
had promised would last until they were ready to land.
When she awoke the planet was a disk no longer, but a great curving mass
beneath the ship, with the mountains and valleys and towns of its people
plainly visible. But the planet's sky still lay below, and around them,
in every direction except down, space stretched out, blacker than any
night on the world. The world. Trina moaned and closed her eyes, glad
she hadn't seen it, somewhere tiny and insignificant behind them.
Max heard her moan and reached toward her. She slept again, and woke
only when they were down and he was tugging the straps loose from around
her. She sat up, still numbed by the drug, still half asleep and unreal
feeling, and looked out about her at the planet's surface.
They were in a field of some sort of grain. Beyond the scorched land
where they had come down the tall cereal grasses rippled in the soft
wind, a great undulating sea of green, reaching out toward the far off
hills and the horizon. Cloud shadows drifted across the fields, and the
shadow of the ship reached out to meet them.
Trina rubbed her eyes in wonder.
"It _is_ like the world," she said. "Just like it."
For a moment she was sure that they were back on the world again, in
some momentarily unrecognized pasture, or perhaps on one of the sister
worlds. Then, looking along the row of hills to where they dropped away
into an extension of the plain, she saw that the horizon was a little
too far, and that the light shimmered differently, somehow, than on her
home. But it was such a little difference.
"Come on outside," Max Cramer said. "You'll be all right now."
She stood up and followed him. Elias was already at the airlock, moving
unsteadily and a little blankly, also still partly under the influence
of the narcotic.
The lock opened. Captain Bernard stepped out and went down the ladder to
the ground. The others followed him. Within a few minutes the ship stood
empty.
* * * * *
Trina breathed the open air of the planet and felt the warmth on her
face and smelled the scent of grass and the elusive fragrance of alien
flowers. She heard the song of some strange, infinitely sweet throated
bird.
"It's--it's Earth," she whispered.
Voices, eager, calling voices, sang out in the distance. Then, little
cars rolled toward them through the field, mowing down the grass,
cutting themselves a path to the ship. People, men and women and
children, were calling greetings.
"This is where we landed before," Max said. "We told them we'd be back."
They were sunbronzed, country people, and except for their strange
clothing they might have been from any of the worlds. Even their
language was the same, though accented differently, with some of the
old, unused words, like those in the legends.
"You've brought your people?" the tall man who stood in the forefront
said to Captain Bernard.
"They're up there." Bernard pointed up at the sky, and the people looked
up. Trina looked up too. One of the planet's moons was almost full
overhead. But the world was invisible, shut off by the sky and the
clouds and the light of the earthlike sun.
"They'd like some of you to come visit their world," Bernard said. "If
any of you are willing."
The tall man nodded. "Everyone will want to go," he said. "Very few
ships ever land here. Until you came, it had been years."
"You'd go out in space?" Trina said incredulously.
Again the man nodded. "I was a spaceman once," he said. "All of us
MacGregors were." Then he sighed. "Sometimes even now I want to go out
again. But there've been no ships here, not for years."
Trina looked past him, at the women and the children, at the lush fields
and the little houses far in the distance. "You'd leave this?"
MacGregor shook his head. "No, of course not. Not to live in space
permanently. I'd always come back."
"It's a fine world to come back to," Max said, and he and the tall man
smiled at each other, as if they shared something that Trina couldn't
possibly understand.
"We might as well go into town," MacGregor said.
They walked over to the cars. MacGregor stopped beside one of them, his
hand on the door button.
"Here, let me drive." The girl stepped forward out of the crowd as she
spoke. She was tall, almost as tall as MacGregor, and she had the same
high cheekbones and the same laughter lines about her eyes.
"Not this time, Saari," MacGregor said. "This time you can entertain our
guests." He turned to Max and Trina and smiled. "My daughter." His face
was proud.
They climbed in, Trina wedging herself into the middle of the back seat
between Max and the planet girl. The car throbbed into motion, then
picked up speed, jolting a bit on the rough country road. The ground
rushed past and the fields rushed past and Trina leaned against Max and
shut her eyes against the dizzying speed. Here, close to the ground, so
close that they could feel every unevenness of its surface, it was far
worse than in the windmill like craft the spacemen used on the worlds.
"Don't you have cars?" Saari asked.
"No," Trina said. "We don't need them."
A car like this would rush all the way around the world in half an hour.
In a car like this one even the horizons wouldn't look right, rushing to
meet them. Here, though the horizons stayed the same, unmoving while the
fence posts and the farmhouses and the people flashed past.
"What do you use for transportation then?"
"We walk," Trina said, opening her eyes to look at the girl and then
closing them again. "Or we ride horses."
"Oh."
A few minutes later the car slowed, and Trina opened her eyes again.
"We're coming into town," Saari said.
They had climbed up over the brow of a small hill and were now dropping
down. At the bottom of the hill the houses clumped together, sparsely at
first, then more and more of them, so that the whole valley was filled
with buildings, and more buildings hugged the far slopes.
"There are so many of them," Trina whispered.
"Oh, no, Trina. This is just a small town."
"But the people--all those people...."
They crowded the streets, watching the cars come in, looking with open
curiosity at their alien visitors. Faces, a thousand faces, all
different and yet somehow all alike, blended together into a great
anonymous mass.
"There aren't half that many people on the whole world," Trina said.