couldn't even guess. Wups, fella, he told himself.
That's too weird, too indigestible--don't start hiccuping again. How old
are you--twenty-five, or twenty-five thousand years? Wups--careful...

The full Moon was past zenith, looking much as it always had. The
blue-tinted air domes of colossal industrial development, were mostly
too small at this distance to be seen without a glass. Good...

With wondering absorption he sniffed the mingling of ripe field and road
smells, borne on the warm breeze of the late-August night. Some few cars
evidently still ran on gasoline. For a moment he watched neon signs
blink. In the desertion he walked past Lehman's Drug Store and Otto
Kramer's bar, and crossed over to pause for a nameless moment in front
of Paul Hendricks' Hobby Center, which was all dark, and seemed little
changed. He took to a side street, and won back the rustle of trees and
the click of his heels in the silence.

A few more buildings--that was about all that was visibly different in
Jarviston, Minnesota.

A young cop eyed him as he returned to the main drag and paused near a
street lamp. He had a flash of panic, thinking that the cop was
somebody, grown up, now, who would recognize him. But at least it was no
one that he remembered.

The cop grinned. "Get settled in a hotel, buddy," he said. "Or else move
on, out of town."

Nelsen grinned back, and ambled out to the highway, where intermittent
clumps of traffic whispered.

There he paused, and looked up at the sky, again. The electric beacon of
a weather observation satellite blinked on and off, moving slowly. Venus
had long since set, with hard-to-see Mercury preceding it. Jupiter
glowed in the south. Mars looked as remote and changeless as it must
have looked in the Stone Age. The asteroids were never even visible here
without a telescope.

The people that he knew, and the events that he had experienced Out
There, were like myths, now. _How could he ever put Here and There
together, and unite the mismatched halves of himself and his
experience?_ He had been born on Earth, the single home of his kind from
the beginning. How could he ever even have been Out There?

He didn't try to hitch a ride. He walked fourteen miles to the next
town, bought a small tent, provisions and a special, miniaturized
radio. Then he slipped into the woods, along Hickman's Lake, where he
used to go.

There he camped, through September, and deep into October. He fished, he
sw