“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.
He nodded. “Yes, I like it there.”
“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.