ther on my mother's side. She raised me
as an Earther. She wanted me to be an Earther. But I kept getting bigger
and uglier all the time. She took me to a plastic surgeon once, figuring
he could make me look like an Earther. He was a little man; I don't know
what he looked like to start with but some other surgeon had made him
clean-cut and straight-nosed and thin-lipped like all the other
Earthers. I was bigger than he was--twice as big, and I was only
fifteen. He looked at me and felt my bones and measured me. 'Healthy
little ape'--those were the words he used. He told my grandmother I'd
get bigger and bigger, that no amount of surgery could make me small and
handsome, that I was fit only for space and didn't belong in Yawk. So I
left for space the next morning."

"I see," Laney said quietly.

"I didn't say good-bye. I just left. There was no place for me in Yawk;
I couldn't pass myself off as an Earther any more. But I'd like to go
back and see what the old life was like, now that I know what it's like
to be on the other side for a while."

"It'll hurt when you find out, Rolf."

"I'll take that chance. But I want to go. Maybe my grandmother'll be
there. The surgeons made her young and pretty again every few years; she
looked like my sister when I left."

Laney nodded her head. "There's no point arguing with him, Kanaday. He
has to go back there and find out, so let him alone."

Rolf smiled. "Thanks for understanding." He took out Quinton's card and
turned it over and over in his hand.

* * * * *

Rolf went to Yawk on foot, dressed in his best clothes, with his face as
clean as it had been in some years. Spacertown was just across the river
from Yawk, and the bridges spanning the river were bright and gleaming
in the mid-afternoon sun.

The bombs had landed on Yawk during the long-forgotten war, but somehow
they had spared the sprawling borough across the river. And so Yawk had
been completely rebuilt, once the radioactivity had been purged from the
land, while what was now Spacertown consisted mostly of buildings that
dated back to the Twentieth Century.

Yawk had been the world's greatest seaport; now it was the world's
greatest spaceport. The sky was thick with incoming and outgoing liners.
The passengers on the ship usually stayed at Yawk, which had become an
even greater metropolis than it had been before the Bomb. The crew
crossed the river to Spacertown, where they cou