you'll get your luggage, I'll take you up," Jonny Land suggested. "I have a truck. I'll meet you over at the terminal."

Carlin came out of the shabby terminal a little later with his two kitbags and found the lame youngster waiting at the wheel of a disreputable-looking old ato-truck.

Loesser, the red-faced young man, was standing beside it voicing emphatic protest about something. Carlin overheard a few words.

"—ruin everything by taking this fellow in!" he was saying violently. "How do you know he isn't a Control spy?"

"I know what I'm doing, Loesser," Jonny Land repeated firmly.

They broke off as they saw Carlin coming. But Loesser gave him a hot, angry glare as he climbed into the machine.

The old truck ran westward across the bumpy tarmac and started climbing an ancient, cracked concrete road toward the green ridge.

Carlin wondered wearily what these Earthmen were up to that made them afraid of Control? Smuggling, maybe? He didn't much care. He was hot, tired, grimy with dust, and unutterably disgusted with Earth.

The concrete road that climbed the ridge looked as though it was centuries old. And its engineering had been timid, for it wound around hills instead of cutting through them, bridged small streams instead of trampling over them. But the battered truck had difficulty negotiating even these easy grades. Its ato-motor drumming noisily as it climbed.

Carlin looked out gloomily at the sunset-lit landscape. He could not get used to the vivid, dominating green of all vegetation here. And he was shocked by the unkempt, ragged look of everything. Untended fields of weeds and clumps of woods grew right up to the road. It was dismayingly different from the groomed, parklike planets of Canopus.

The houses Carlin glimpsed along the road added to his dislike. They were mostly old ferroconcrete dwellings half-hidden by trees and bright flowers, with behind them the big tanks used in hydroponic farming. Hydroponic farming was so old-fashioned he had thought it had disappeared from the galaxy. What was the matter with these people that they didn't directly synthesize their food as others did?

Young Jonny Land was speaking to him.

"You've never been here before? You must find Earth a little odd."

 Prev. P 9/54 next