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.

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