"I'll try not to be any trouble to you," he told Marn. "I'm just supposed to take it easy, do anything I want to."

She nodded. "I know. Some of our neighbors had Earth-treatment visitors as lodgers. They all got to like Earth a lot before they left."

Carlin did not voice his pessimism on that point. He went to the door and stood looking out into the sun-bright, flowery yard.

He felt at a loss. It was baffling to find himself without anything to do, no work crowding up that must be hurried through, no crews of ato-men to supervise in blasting spaceports out of untamed planets.

Marn looked at him understandingly. "You've always been busy, haven't you? Earth must seem slow and dull to you."

Carlin shrugged. "I might as well get used to it. I think I'll take a look around."

"You'll find Gramp fishing up at the north brook if you go that far," Marn called after him as he walked across the yard.

Carlin sauntered past a big, locked ferroconcrete workshop of some kind, and some tall storage sheds, then on past the flat, wide hydroponic tanks that were now loaded with their masses of green growth.

He found a road beyond them that he did not recognize as a road, at first. It was a mere wide track gouged northward along the wooded ridge, the first dirt road that he had ever seen on a civilized world.

"A poor planet, all right," Carlin thought. "Can't even build decent roads."

There were hardly even any ato-fliers in the sky, only an occasional one flitting across the blue vault.

"No wonder these poverty-stricken devils resent the rest of the galaxy," he thought. "I suppose I would too, if it had been my bad luck to be born here."

The road was crazily illogical, winding westward along the woods-clad ridge in serpentine fashion. It twisted accomodatingly to avoid big boulders, a spring, a small gully.

The woods on either side was deplorably unkempt to Carlin's eyes. Big and small trees jumbled together, saplings choking each other out, dead brush and thorns and vines everywhere. There was even wild life in the woods, furry rodents scuttling away, hosts of birds.

This sort of thing was what 

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