"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." 

 Prev. P 10/20 next