Jonny, to get some instruments he left in the ship," Marn said to him after dinner one evening. "Do you want to go along?"

Carlin grinned. "I've legged it so much lately that riding anywhere would be a change."

The old ato-truck swung down the twisting road in the blaring sunset. The heavens behind them were a glory of fusing colors as the red ball of Sol dipped majestically toward the horizon.

Despite his appreciation of that wild splendor, Carlin felt a vague uneasiness. Why should the loveliness of the evening bring disturbing recollection of Jonny Land's puzzling machine into his mind?

"You're getting to like it better here, aren't you?" asked Marn.

She was usually so silent with him that Carlin glanced quickly at her profile as she drove. It struck him with surprise that she had a certain beauty. Her thick mop of ashen hair, and firm-chinned face, and small, competent hands grasping the wheel, were oddly attractive. It wasn't the fine-edged, shimmering beauty that Nila had, but it had appeal.

"Yes, I must be getting more accustomed to it," he answered her question. "And it's not as provincial as I thought. Nearly every man you meet here has been to space some time or other."

"Every Earth boy runs away to space sooner or later," she said, and smiled. "Following space is in our blood. And our planet's so poor now that it's the only way most of our men can make a living." She added, "Some of our men never come back. My father didn't. And my mother died, when he was lost."

It was dusk when they reached the spaceport. As he walked with the girl along its edge toward her brothers' ship, she drew him aside toward a tall shaft that loomed up spectrally in the twilight.

"This is where the first Earthman went away to space," she told him.

He looked at the deeply engraved legend on the pedestal of the soaring column. It was the Monument to the Space-Pioneers.

"Gorham Johnson took off in his first flight from this very spot," Marn said.

Carlin strained his eyes in the dusk to read the roll of names and dates engraved on the pedestal.

Gorham Johnson, 1991 Mark Carew, 1998 Jan Wenzi, 2006 John North, 2012

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