about what?"

"That's it," he said. "Ferdias' orders were not to tell anyone."

He thought that Lyllin looked somehow relieved. "I don't mind. I'm worried, I wish I knew, but it's all right if you can't tell me."

It came to him that she was relieved to learn he didn't really care about his Earth ancestors, that that had only been an excuse.

Kirk felt a sharp relief himself, to be on his way to Orville, to the old house there where Ferdias' agent would be waiting to tell him what to do. In this gathering crisis he couldn't act blindly! It was vital to get directive information as soon as possible.

They turned off the big boulevard onto quiet, tree-lined back roads. These roads were old and rambling, accomodatingly twisting around hills and ponds and even houses. Some of the houses were modern chromaloy villas, but there were antique stone houses also, and once he and Lyllin both exclaimed when they saw a very old house that was built all of wood.

Out here away from the city, everything looked ancient. Stone fences that had the moss of centuries on them, a steepled church mantled thick with ivy, worn fields that had been tilled for ages. In the fields, driverless automatic tractors were lumbering about their work, but there seemed little bustle or activity. Kirk thought that this was an old, worn world....

A brilliant bird flashed across the road and he and Lyllin argued what it was. "A robin, I think," Kirk said doubtfully. "In school, when I was little, we had an old Earth poem about Robin Redbreast. I didn't know then what it was."

"Not nearly so splendid as a flame-bird," Lyllin said. "But the red of it, and the green trees, and the blue sky.... It's a pretty world, in its way."

They rolled finally down a little hill and over a bridged stream into the town of Orville. It was only a village, with shops around a big open square. There was a corroded statue of a soldier at the center of the park, and benches on which old men sat in the sun.

Kirk asked directions of a merchant standing in front of his shop, a chubby man who stared open-mouthed at the two visitors. And Kirk suddenly realized how strange indeed they must look in this sleepy little Earth village—he in his blue-and-silver starman's uniform, his face dark from foreign suns, and Lyllin whose beauty was a breath of the alien.

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