"I am in love with you," he said. He immediately took her into his arms, kissing her long and hard. Then he released her, looking strangely into her eyes. "Anna," he said, "I shall be back in ten months. I know you'll be here." He went down the stairs. She went into her room. She sat on the edge of the bed. Then she threw herself on the bed and cried, hard, angry sobs. Why had she allowed him to ruin what could have been such a splendid evening? She kicked her shoes off. They hit the wall with two walloping thumps. She lay on her back and laughed at the ceiling with tears coming out of her eyes. What an evening. An evening as strange, as abortive, as cruel as the man who had cut it off so suddenly.

Her eyes snapped open then. She felt something happen inside her, a longing as wide and deep as black space. "Oh no," she said in a tone that was low and explosive. She slowly turned on her side, sniffling.

She couldn't help it. He was nothing, but he was incredible. Ten months....

For years the Asteroid Association had offered a flat rate of one thousand credits to anybody who gave them the location of genuine asteroid-juncture faults. They were engaged in a strictly scientific and commercially useless attempt to show that the asteroids once comprised a large planet between Mars and Jupiter. They needed evidences of lines of fracture showing where two separated asteroids once had been joined; the complete picture would finally give them a complete planet. Harvey had found fifteen such points. The money gave him leeway to pursue other activities.

Forty million miles above the plane of the ecliptic moved his small ship.

He was not looking for juncture points now. He was looking for a particular kind of planet, one, moreover, which had never been discovered before. Therefore he was hunting for a "perp" planet.

He searched two months. That most celestial bodies within the Solar System already had been discovered did not deter him. He found his planet and came to a landing. He got into his pressure suit, lugging his gravitic equipment with him. He immediately started taking readings.

The gravity was shallow, less than one-tenth of a gee. Far too little. There was no atmosphere. The ground was frozen, but upon submitting it to flame it gave off the lines characteristic of phosphorus, nitrogen, hydrogen. That pleased him. He made other readings, then he went into his ship and wrote in his diary:

There are 

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