"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."
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