he whole valley was filled
with buildings, and more buildings hugged the far slopes.

"There are so many of them," Trina whispered.

"Oh, no, Trina. This is just a small town."

"But the people--all those people...."

They crowded the streets, watching the cars come in, looking with open
curiosity at their alien visitors. Faces, a thousand faces, all
different and yet somehow all alike, blended together into a great
anonymous mass.

"There aren't half that many people on the whole world," Trina said.

Saari smiled. "Just wait till you see the city."

Trina shook her head and looked up at Max. He was smiling out at the
town, nodding to some men he apparently knew, with nothing but eagerness
in his face. He seemed a stranger. She looked around for Curt Elias, but
he was in one of the other cars cut off from them by the crowd. She
couldn't see him at all.

"Don't you like it?" Saari said.

"I liked it better where we landed."

Max turned and glanced down at her briefly, but his hand found hers and
held it, tightly, until her own relaxed. "If you want to, Trina, we can
live out there, in those fields."

For a moment she forgot the crowd and the endless faces as she looked up
at him. "Do you mean that, Max? We could really live out there?"

Where it was quiet, and the sun was the same, and the birds sang sweetly
just before harvest time, where she would have room to ride and plenty
of pasture for her favorite horse. Where she would have Max, there with
her, not out somewhere beyond the stars.

"Certainly we could live there," he said. "That's what I've been saying
all along."

"You could settle down here?"

He laughed. "Oh, I suppose I'd be out in space a good deal of the time,"
he said. "The ships will come here now, you know. But I'll always come
home, Trina. To this world. To you."

And suddenly it didn't matter that the girl beside her chuckled, nor
that there were too many people crowding around them, all talking at
once in their strangely accented voices. All that mattered was Max, and
this world, which was real after all, and a life that seemed like an
endless festival time before her.

* * * * *

Evening came quickly, too quickly, with the sun dropping in an unnatural
plunge toward the horizon. Shadows crept out from the houses of the
town, reached across the narrow street and blended with the walls of the
houses opposite. The birds sang louder in the twilight, th