The First Day of Spring Part 3

The voices of the people rose, some alive with interest and others anxious, fighting back the planet and the unfamiliar, too bright stars.

Trina clutched Max Cramer's hand, feeling again the eagerness of that first day, when he had come to tell her of this world.

"You're right," she whispered. "It _is_ like Earth."

It was so much like the pictures, though of course the continents were different, and the seas, and instead of one moon there were two. Earth.

A new Earth, there above them in the sky.

Elias let out his breath slowly. "Yes," he said. "It is. It's not a bit like that world we visited. Not a bit."

"When you're down there it's even more like Earth," Max said. "And all the way down you could watch it grow larger. It wouldn't be at all like open s.p.a.ce."

At the poles of the planet snow gleamed, and cloud ma.s.ses drifted across the equator. And the people looked, and pointed, their voices growing loud with eagerness.

"Why don't we land the world now?" Trina cried. "Why wait for the s.h.i.+p to bring people up here?"

"Landing the world would take a lot of power," Elias said. "It would be foolish to do it unless we planned on staying for quite a while." He sighed. "Though I would like to go down there. I'd like to see a really Earth type planet."

He looked at Max, and Max smiled. "Well, why not?" he said.

Elias smiled too. "After all, I've been in s.p.a.ce once. I'll go again."

He turned and pushed his way through the people.

Trina watched him go. Somehow he seemed a symbol to her. Old and stable, he had been head of the council since she was a child. And he had gone into s.p.a.ce with her father....

"Please come, Trina," Max said. "There's nothing to be afraid of."

With both Max and Elias along, certainly it couldn't be too bad. Max was right. There was nothing, really, to be afraid of. She smiled up at him.

"All right," she said. "I'll go."

And then she was walking with Max Cramer toward the s.h.i.+p and trying not to remember her father crying in his sleep.

The s.h.i.+p rose, and Trina cried out as she felt the heaviness wrench her back against the cus.h.i.+ons. Max reached over to her. She felt the needle go into her arm again, and then sank back into the half sleep that he had promised would last until they were ready to land.

When she awoke the planet was a disk no longer, but a great curving ma.s.s beneath the s.h.i.+p, with the mountains and valleys and towns of its people plainly visible. But the planet's sky still lay below, and around them, in every direction except down, s.p.a.ce stretched out, blacker than any night on the world. The world. Trina moaned and closed her eyes, glad she hadn't seen it, somewhere tiny and insignificant behind them.

Max heard her moan and reached toward her. She slept again, and woke only when they were down and he was tugging the straps loose from around her. She sat up, still numbed by the drug, still half asleep and unreal feeling, and looked out about her at the planet's surface.

They were in a field of some sort of grain. Beyond the scorched land where they had come down the tall cereal gra.s.ses rippled in the soft wind, a great undulating sea of green, reaching out toward the far off hills and the horizon. Cloud shadows drifted across the fields, and the shadow of the s.h.i.+p reached out to meet them.

Trina rubbed her eyes in wonder.

"It _is_ like the world," she said. "Just like it."

For a moment she was sure that they were back on the world again, in some momentarily unrecognized pasture, or perhaps on one of the sister worlds. Then, looking along the row of hills to where they dropped away into an extension of the plain, she saw that the horizon was a little too far, and that the light s.h.i.+mmered differently, somehow, than on her home. But it was such a little difference.

"Come on outside," Max Cramer said. "You'll be all right now."

She stood up and followed him. Elias was already at the airlock, moving unsteadily and a little blankly, also still partly under the influence of the narcotic.

The lock opened. Captain Bernard stepped out and went down the ladder to the ground. The others followed him. Within a few minutes the s.h.i.+p stood empty.

Trina breathed the open air of the planet and felt the warmth on her face and smelled the scent of gra.s.s and the elusive fragrance of alien flowers. She heard the song of some strange, infinitely sweet throated bird.

"It's--it's Earth," she whispered.

Voices, eager, calling voices, sang out in the distance. Then, little cars rolled toward them through the field, mowing down the gra.s.s, cutting themselves a path to the s.h.i.+p. People, men and women and children, were calling greetings.

"This is where we landed before," Max said. "We told them we'd be back."

They were sunbronzed, country people, and except for their strange clothing they might have been from any of the worlds. Even their language was the same, though accented differently, with some of the old, unused words, like those in the legends.

"You've brought your people?" the tall man who stood in the forefront said to Captain Bernard.

"They're up there." Bernard pointed up at the sky, and the people looked up. Trina looked up too. One of the planet's moons was almost full overhead. But the world was invisible, shut off by the sky and the clouds and the light of the earthlike sun.

"They'd like some of you to come visit their world," Bernard said. "If any of you are willing."

The tall man nodded. "Everyone will want to go," he said. "Very few s.h.i.+ps ever land here. Until you came, it had been years."

"You'd go out in s.p.a.ce?" Trina said incredulously.

Again the man nodded. "I was a s.p.a.ceman 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.u.t.ton.

"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 s.p.a.cemen 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.