He laughed. "Oh, I suppose I'd be out in space a good deal of the time," he said. "The ships will come here now, you know. But I'll always come home, Trina. To this world. To you."

And suddenly it didn't matter that the girl beside her chuckled, nor that there were too many people crowding around them, all talking at once in their strangely accented voices. All that mattered was Max, and this world, which was real after all, and a life that seemed like an endless festival time before her.

Evening came quickly, too quickly, with the sun dropping in an unnatural plunge toward the horizon. Shadows crept out from the houses of the town, reached across the narrow street and blended with the walls of the houses opposite. The birds sang louder in the twilight, the notes of their song drifting in from the nearby fields. And there was another sound, that of the wind, not loud now but rising, swirling fingers of dust in the street.

Trina sat in front of the town cafe with the planet girl, Saari. Max Cramer was only a few feet away, but he paid no attention to her, and little to Elias. He was too busy telling the planet people about space.

"Your man?" Saari asked.

"Yes," Trina said. "I guess so."

"You're lucky." Saari looked over at Max and sighed, and then she turned back to Trina. "My father was a spaceman. He used to take my mother up, when they were first married, when the ships were still running." She sighed. "I remember the ships, a little. But it was such a long time ago."

"I can't understand you people." Trina shook her head. "Leaving all of this, just to go out in space."

The room was crowded, oppressively crowded. Outside, too many people walked the shadowed streets. Too many voices babbled together. The people of this planet must be a little mad, Trina thought, to live cooped together as the spacemen lived, with all their world around them.

Saari sat watching her, and nodded. "You're different, aren't you? From us, and from them too." She looked over at Max and Bernard and the others, and then she looked at Curt Elias, who sat clenching and unclenching his hands, saying nothing.

"Yes, we're different," Trina said.

Max Cramer's voice broke incisively into the silence that lay between them then. "I don't see why," he said, "we didn't all 

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