e notes of
their song drifting in from the nearby fields. And there was another
sound, that of the wind, not loud now but rising, swirling fingers of
dust in the street.

Trina sat in front of the town cafe with the planet girl, Saari. Max
Cramer was only a few feet away, but he paid no attention to her, and
little to Elias. He was too busy telling the planet people about space.

"Your man?" Saari asked.

"Yes," Trina said. "I guess so."

"You're lucky." Saari looked over at Max and sighed, and then she turned
back to Trina. "My father was a spaceman. He used to take my mother up,
when they were first married, when the ships were still running." She
sighed. "I remember the ships, a little. But it was such a long time
ago."

"I can't understand you people." Trina shook her head. "Leaving all of
this, just to go out in space."

The room was crowded, oppressively crowded. Outside, too many people
walked the shadowed streets. Too many voices babbled together. The
people of this planet must be a little mad, Trina thought, to live
cooped together as the spacemen lived, with all their world around them.

Saari sat watching her, and nodded. "You're different, aren't you? From
us, and from them too." She looked over at Max and Bernard and the
others, and then she looked at Curt Elias, who sat clenching and
unclenching his hands, saying nothing.

"Yes, we're different," Trina said.

Max Cramer's voice broke incisively into the silence that lay between
them then. "I don't see why," he said, "we didn't all know about this
world. Especially if more than one ship came here."

Saari's father laughed softly. "It's not so strange. The ships all
belonged to one clan. The MacGregors. And eventually all of them either
were lost in space somewhere or else grew tired of roaming around and
settled down. Here." He smiled again, and his high cheekboned face
leaned forward into the light. "Like me...."

Night. Cloudless, black, but hazed over with atmosphere and thus
familiar, not like the night of space. The two small moons, the stars in
unfamiliar places, and somewhere, a star that was her world. And Trina
sat and listened to the planet men talk, and to the spacemen among them
who could no longer be distinguished from the native born. Outside, in
the narrow street, wind murmured, skudding papers and brush before it,
vague shadows against the light houses. Wind, rising and moaning, the
sound coming in over the voices and the music