The First Day of Spring Part 4

In a car like this one even the horizons wouldn't look right, rus.h.i.+ng 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, spa.r.s.ely at first, then more and more of them, so that the 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 ma.s.s.

"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 s.p.a.ce a good deal of the time,"

he said. "The s.h.i.+ps 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, the 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 s.p.a.ce.

"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 s.p.a.ceman. He used to take my mother up, when they were first married, when the s.h.i.+ps were still running." She sighed. "I remember the s.h.i.+ps, 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 s.p.a.ce."

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 s.p.a.cemen 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 s.h.i.+p came here."

Saari's father laughed softly. "It's not so strange. The s.h.i.+ps all belonged to one clan. The MacGregors. And eventually all of them either were lost in s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.cemen 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 from the cafe singers.

It was a stronger wind than ever blew on the world, even during the winter, when the people had to stay inside and wish that Earth tradition might be broken and good weather be had the year around.

"We'd better get back to the s.h.i.+p," Elias said.

They stopped talking and looked at him, and he looked down at his hands, embarra.s.sed. "They'll be worried about us at home."

"No, they won't," Max said. Then he saw the thin, blue-veined hands trembling and the quiver not quite controlled in the wrinkled neck.

"Though perhaps we should start back...."

Trina let out her breath in relief. To be back in the s.h.i.+p, she thought, with the needle and its forgetfulness, away from the noise and the crowd and the nervousness brought on by the rising wind.

It would be better, of course, when they had their place in the country.

There it would be warm and homelike and quiet, with the farm animals near by, and the weather shut out, boarded out and forgotten, the way it was in winter on the world.

"You're coming with us?" Captain Bernard was saying.

"Yes, we're coming." Half a dozen of the men stood up and began pulling on their long, awkward coats.

"It'll be good to get back in s.p.a.ce again," MacGregor said. "For a while." He smiled. "But I'm too old for a s.p.a.ceman's life now."

"And I'm too old even for this," Elias said apologetically. "If we'd found this planet the other time...." He sighed and shook his head and looked out the window at the shadows that were people, bent forward, walking into the wind. He sighed again. "I don't know. I just don't know."

Saari got up and pulled on her wrap too. Then she walked over to one of the other women, spoke to her a minute, and came back carrying a quilted, rough fabricked coat. "Here, Trina, you'd better put this on.

It'll be cold out."

"Are you going with us?"