aid incredulously.

Again the man nodded. "I was a spaceman once," he said. "All of us
MacGregors were." Then he sighed. "Sometimes even now I want to go out
again. But there've been no ships here, not for years."

Trina looked past him, at the women and the children, at the lush fields
and the little houses far in the distance. "You'd leave this?"

MacGregor shook his head. "No, of course not. Not to live in space
permanently. I'd always come back."

"It's a fine world to come back to," Max said, and he and the tall man
smiled at each other, as if they shared something that Trina couldn't
possibly understand.

"We might as well go into town," MacGregor said.

They walked over to the cars. MacGregor stopped beside one of them, his
hand on the door button.

"Here, let me drive." The girl stepped forward out of the crowd as she
spoke. She was tall, almost as tall as MacGregor, and she had the same
high cheekbones and the same laughter lines about her eyes.

"Not this time, Saari," MacGregor said. "This time you can entertain our
guests." He turned to Max and Trina and smiled. "My daughter." His face
was proud.

They climbed in, Trina wedging herself into the middle of the back seat
between Max and the planet girl. The car throbbed into motion, then
picked up speed, jolting a bit on the rough country road. The ground
rushed past and the fields rushed past and Trina leaned against Max and
shut her eyes against the dizzying speed. Here, close to the ground, so
close that they could feel every unevenness of its surface, it was far
worse than in the windmill like craft the spacemen used on the worlds.

"Don't you have cars?" Saari asked.

"No," Trina said. "We don't need them."

A car like this would rush all the way around the world in half an hour.
In a car like this one even the horizons wouldn't look right, rushing to
meet them. Here, though the horizons stayed the same, unmoving while the
fence posts and the farmhouses and the people flashed past.

"What do you use for transportation then?"

"We walk," Trina said, opening her eyes to look at the girl and then
closing them again. "Or we ride horses."

"Oh."

A few minutes later the car slowed, and Trina opened her eyes again.

"We're coming into town," Saari said.

They had climbed up over the brow of a small hill and were now dropping
down. At the bottom of the hill the houses clumped together, sparsely at
first, then more and more of them, so that t