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.”