Paradise Planet

It was a queer looking planet. As his ship approached it, Steve Donay could see slowly rising and twisting coils of strange smoke, brown and silver and gold, like great snakes or the tenuous flesh of some creature of the air. He hated to think of setting down on that world of surface fires. But what else was there to do? He was at the end of his supplies, there wasn't fuel enough to look further. Maybe not enough to land safely. But he had to take a chance.

As he burst down through the coiling layers of strange smoke, the world beneath was amazingly beautiful. Wild, maybe, no—those were planted trees, those fields of grass were too regularly curved, too well laid out. He smiled. That brown stuff, he should have recognized it. It was weather control particles. He'd read about it somewhere. Magnetized particles. When you turned on the field, they gathered, shut out unwanted light. When you reversed, to negative field projection, they caused rain to condense. When you wanted the sun, they were swept aside by another repellent field ... he should have recognized them. This was luck, a really civilized world.

He swept lower, his jets thrumming softly, reassuringly. Still perking, he could pick a good landing spot. There, beyond that huge tree group. And what trees they were. That meant an old culture, a good one. The temples crowning the hills, the peaceful meadows curving between, the lazy river—he caught his breath! This was a world, some place, indeed!

He set the little ship down near the great trees, and tested the air. It was normal, as he expected.

Not far away, on the edge of the meadow, was a house. It was a very nice looking farm house, with a tiny barn, two other small buildings, and a haystack. There were three cows, and a pen of hogs; a horse was in the barnyard. He left his ship and walked up the path to the door, marveling at the rows of flowers beside the path, and the neatness of the yard. No blade of grass seemed to grow out of place, no flower bloomed too boisterously. Even the birds in the trees seemed to partake of the discipline, singing in a soft and careful way, not to disturb the serene surroundings.

Steve knocked, and almost at once the upper part of the door swung inward. He stared, for he had not seen a woman in nearly two years. Not a beautiful woman ... like this! Cinematic, glamorous ... he wondered if he wasn't in truth a little unbalanced from his long absence from humankind. No one could be quite that attractive! But when she spoke, something in his breast shrilled an alarm, and a chill ran up his spine. There was a brittle, edgy quality in her voice, like a crystal bell, yes—but a bell with a crack that was about to shatter.

"Vey fanis vu?" she asked.

He shook his head. "I'm from Earth, another planet. We can't understand each other, I suppose—not until I learn your tongue."

She opened the bottom half of the door, and he walked into a room of quiet beauty. A large brown tile stove was nearby with a copper pot simmering, utterly spotless.

Pictures were set in the walls, strangely exotic, realistic art work. Leather chairs, a wide wooden table, unmarred by scratches and nicks, cabinets of clear crystal behind which glimmered rows of gleaming dishes and goblets.... It was like something from a Homemakers catalog—the home of the future. Yet there was a quality of timeless permanence in it all. It was as if it had been the same, unmoving, unchanged, and as if this woman had been poised at that door, waiting to open it for a visitor for endless centuries.

She poured a bowl of steaming broth, and smiling, set brown bread and yellow butter before him. He sat and ate, wolfishly: he had been on a capsule concentrate diet for months. She sat by the big tile stove and took up yarn and needles, went on with the knitting of a garment as he ate. He turned his eyes away. They were, of course, little booties for a tiny child.

That alarm in his breast had subsided, and he wondered what kind of idiot he had become to take alarm where such a home could exist. But nevertheless there was something, some brittle quality to the whole that he could not put his finger on. Some cold threat that he sensed but could not fathom. Yet ... there was nothing but that it was all too idyllic! Too prosaic—no strange planet could be so much like home.

The weariness of the months of strain claimed him and he nodded in his chair, waiting. She got up and beckoned to him, and beyond the first door she opened was a chamber, a bed made on the floor of soft hand-made quilts, silken and lovely. He fell across the bed in a heap and she went out, closing the door softly.

Hours later he awoke, and darkness had come. He lay there, trying to remember what She had been wearing, feeling a little pang of jealously that She must have a man, must be knitting that mate's child's clothing.... She had worn some kind of clinging trousers, slacks—something ... and across her perfect bosom had been crossed two wide bands of white that ended in a girdle around her small waist. Her throat and the cleft of her breasts had had a sheen like mother of pearl, and her bare arms soft and lovely as two dreams. Dreams! He cursed a little. Too many dreams had tormented him, these last starving months, eking out his dwindling food supply, waiting for something to come ... some planet to appear in the endless black void where he could set his fuel-dry ship down and rest.

The door opened, and she came in, carrying a lamp—a primitive thing with a tiny flame. She set it down and stood smiling at him, and there was a magic on her, in her eyes and on her bare graceful arms, in the lovely curves of her body under the clinging garment.

Donay sighed. A man went to the stars seeking perfection, adventure, magic ... and when he found it, he found it was very like home, only better. It was like a perfect wife and a perfect farm and peace and contentment—bucolic magic—why had he left Earth?

As he got to his feet, one foot slipped on the smooth tile floor and he lurched suddenly against her. His first thought was—"My God, her condition ..." but his second was a vague horror that began to grow in his mind. For her body was solid as a rock, unyielding. And the hand with which she seized his arm and steadied him was like the grasp of a pair of tongs of heavy steel!

The more he looked at her perfection, the more his mind worried at the problem— How can she be so beautiful and yet be made of metal ... yet be not human, yet be—yet be .... His mind would not accept it— yet be a robot? She could not be of flesh and blood like himself, not ... like that.... He shuddered, inwardly.

The evening meal was a feast of berries and thick cream, fresh bread and the beautiful yellow butter, slabs of something fried ... fried ... he remembered, like panhaus, like scrapple—like the Dutch cooked.

He ate and leaned back satisfied. Then she brought a heavy blue wine from a door he guessed was a cellar way, and he drank. And the wine opened his lips, and he asked, "How can we understand each other, strange woman of steel?"

She smiled at the weird sounds of his mouth, and answered, "Ven nu da, uman. En nu see me."

Somehow he knew what she meant. When he got to Heaven he would understand life, but not until. That seemed to be what she meant. She nodded, as if that was close enough. He wondered, that alarm in his breast tugging at his nerves, setting his eyes to roving for the jaws of the trap he felt about him.

Days passed, and his wonder increased. It was like living in a mirror, or in an instant of frozen time. It was idyllic, yet ... nothing happened! The beautiful creature was alone here, with her few cows and animals; the garden and the cows produced her living. The cellar was full of stored food, and she seemed to possess everything one could want ... except change . One day was exactly like another.

No one came. No one left. The smoky sky overhead coiled and uncoiled those odd clouds; the sun shone ... a large red sun, warm ... but not too warm. No one came. No one left. There was himself, puzzling, thinking. There was the calm woman, beautiful as a picture, busy as a housewife, making everything sweet and clean and comfortable for ... Steve Donay?

And Donay couldn't stand it. Out there sat his ship, unharmed, unsmashed. All it needed was fuel. And he couldn't pull himself out onto that meandering road that went over the hill and look for the civilization behind this little farm house and this perfect ... robot.

It was then he gave up trying to learn her language. Gave up waiting for the neighbors, for contact with intelligent members of her race. She could not be a living creature, and she could not be even flesh. She must be some kind of maintenance robot ... and Donay shivered. What lay over the hill? If even the tiny farms of this world were peopled with maintenance robots, what wonders lay over the hill?

Then he wondered where were the produce trucks to take away the milk, the butter, the fruit and vegetables? And even as he wondered, his feet took him at last out of the clutching beauty and peace and neat contentment of that little home. His feet led him along that road, winding over the hill.

Looking back, he saw Her standing in the doorway, the upper part swung open, her eyes even at this distance seeming blurred with tears. She waved one hand, a little gesture of farewell, and that snowy apron she wore over her strange spotless garments came up to her face. She was weeping!

With a tug at his heart as strange as any emotion he ever knew, he realized the creature was weeping to see him go! But he made an effort, and his mind assured him it was but a trick of his own fleshly emotions, that that woman of the steel-hard lovely form was not able to weep, or to do anything but tend her cows and weed her garden and can her fruits and open the door to any knock that came. She must be a robot, his mind said. But his heart shouted— She is woman, perfection in womanhood, and you are leaving your home!

His feet led on, and he reached the top of the hill and sat down to look over the view that spread out beneath his eyes. There were other farmsteads, very like the one he had just left. Dotted here and there were herds of cattle. The whole land lay dreaming under his eyes, and he knew the mist of the far horizon only shut off a repetition of the same thing. But hope led him on, and he rose and went along a little used trail.

Days, it took, to reach the city. The farmsteads lay dreaming as he passed, and he knocked on the lovely old wood of the doors sometimes, and asked for water or food. The upper door would open, and there would stand a woman. Not the same woman, but very like, too much alike—too much like his own first woman. She would smile and say: "Vey fanis vu?"

He would shake his head, make a motion of drinking or eating and the lower door would open. He would enter and sit at the wooden table. The food was always perfect, sublime taste, simple fruit or milk or garden greens, or the fried panhaus, or sometimes a thing that looked like meat but he was sure was not meat for She had never killed anything or possessed any meat.

Then there were no more of the farmsteads, and he came across a great empty plain, where the trail was wide and the earth beaten hard as stone. But nowhere did he see the vehicles that had made that track. In the distance he could see the tall spires of a city. But there was no noise of a city. The tall spires seemed silent, and there was none of that smoke he knew a city should make. Above the spires coiled the weird spirals of the upper air, like great brown snake forms gestating and birthing and changing, entwined and unentwining, wreathing over each other and seeming to peer down at the strange midge crossing their plain.

Steve Donay was puzzled trying to understand this planet. His feet plodded on across the grassy plain and he came to the first street of the city. There were people moving, and he went on eagerly for now he would learn the truth from real people!

He went up to the first man he saw and asked: "I am a stranger, can you tell me...."

The man said firmly, "Vey fanis vu?"

Donay shook his head, and the man walked on, not swiftly, not hurriedly, but with a measured, machine-like step.

The city did not seem crowded, and there were some huge freight vehicles trundling along, not like autos, but like huge wagons with little motors where a man would ordinarily sit driving a horse. And there was no man driving them.

"I am beginning to understand," Steve muttered, "this is a world of madmen, or simpletons, or robots. Why does no one act curious, or sympathetic, or human?..." He walked on, gloomily.

Near the center of the city, many plodding hours later, he walked into the base of one of the great towers. There was a door he suspected was an elevator and he went in and pressed a button. It took him to the top. He got out and entered the first door he came to.

A woman sat behind a desk. She said. "Vey fanis vu?"

Donay said "Nuts," and slapped her face. She promptly rose from her seat and knocked him down. When he arose he found a man on either side of him. They gripped his arms with fingers of steel and led him from the room, back down the tower and out on the street. He gathered this was very unusual, for three different people along the way stopped to glance curiously at him. His face was very sore where the woman had struck him. She had a hand like a lead pipe.

The men took him into a place just across the square from the tower he had entered. In and up the elevator and into a great chamber.

Steve saw a very big bed. The person in the bed was very small. Very old, too. He said, "Vey fanis vu?"

Donay shrugged dispiritedly and answered, "From Earth, and I don't like this planet of yours a little bit."

The little man in the bed smiled a very human smile and reached out to a thing beside the bed and turned a knob. A glow came from the box, and Steve could suddenly hear a thought—"From Earth, eh? I wonder now where that would be if you could tell me."

Startled, Steve thought where Earth was and the little old creature in the bed nodded. Then Donay asked, "Why does every one act so odd ... like robots, or like they were wound up and couldn't stop or change...."

The old man sighed and leaned back. "That is a long story, stranger. Sit down and I will try to explain...."

Donay sat down and listened. The thought in his head told him of a great world of people who had become very tired of everything and wanted to have something new. They did not want to die. They wanted life to be more satisfying, wanted to be more contented. The old man smiled sadly. "There arose among them a great scientist who promised them immortality and contentment. He had devised a treatment...."

The old man leaned back and looked at Donay. His eyes were tragic. "That's what ails the people, Steve Donay. They're treated ... and the treatment did everything he said it would. It's really a new factor introduced into the human metabolism. You know something of chemistry?"

Steve Donay nodded. The old man went on, wearily. "Well, you know how complicated the protoplasm molecule is, then. This change he introduced is only a new atom in the basic living molecule. As if, say, you're making pancakes and put in more shortening ..." the old man laughed. "When I make pancakes they swell up, like balloons. This is the opposite effect. The yeasty growth of life is changed, subdued, altered into a new pattern, by a single new ingredient in the chemical transversion in the body. The end product, the basic plasm-cule, is more stable, less affected by adverse conditions, a lot more durable. But it isn't what I call life! You've noticed?"

Steve nodded. "They act like robots," he observed, sadly. "I'd like to get some fuel, get back to my own world."

The old man scribbled some notes on a pad, nodded. "They will synthesize your fuel. I'll put through a requisition for it. Now, they may ask you if you want the treatment. It's tempting, because it gives you a life cycle, from birth through fecundity to death, of around ten times the ordinary cycle. Almost immortality you would think. But I refrained, and now I'm the only one left of the old race. The new race is not flesh."

"I'll refuse, too." Steve observed. "They pay for their long lives."

The old man nodded sagely. "Things happen ten times as slowly, although to the eye they move as rapidly as before. The drive toward growth and progress is lessened by ten, to my eyes. They're satisfied to go on at the new slow pace."

"Stasified, you mean," Steve grinned. The old man smiled. "How come they made you their ruler?" asked Steve.

"I'm not the ruler. They believe I am the only one capable of understanding you, a flesh man."

Steve stood up. "What'll I do with myself while I'm waiting for that fuel order to go through?"

"Look around, take in the sights. You can sleep here, there's an extra room in this suite. I'm lonesome, you can talk to me when you have time."

Steve looked into the other rooms of the suite, came back to stand beside the old man's bed. The old fellow rang a bell, and one of the beautiful creatures came and looked in the door.

"Our Earth visitor wants to take in the sights," started the old man, in the "Vey fanis vu?" language, but Steve understood because the thought augmenter was still switched on. "You get this memorandum onto a requisition slip and see that they make some fuel for his ship, so he can go back to his natural world. He doesn't like your new order any better than I do."

The girl, who looked a brisk, efficient and ripe eighteen, beckoned to Steve. He followed her from the room. She closed the door softly, carefully, stood leaning against it, eyeing Steve. She murmured, "U seen yung to bay," but Steve shook his head, and she went ahead of him into another room. There was no one there, but one of the thought machines stood on a pedestal beside several other machines. She switched on the augmenter and Steve heard her thought, like slow, perfect music on a thrilling harp.... "You are here too short a time to judge what you like and dislike. Let me show you what the change has given us before you refuse a chance to be like us."

Steve shook his head, murmured, "Not interested. Peddle it somewhere else."

She appeared not to hear him. Her thought went on, inexorable, beautiful, without a ripple of irritation or haste: "The change was not brought about in a day, Earthman. Nor are we finished, ever, with attempts to make life more worth having. Our people hated the change, at first. Centuries passed before it was fully demonstrated to be a far more pleasant and satisfying way of life. You cannot judge this thing with ordinary standards. We accomplish just as much as before, without the frenetic hub-bub that we once thought necessary."

Steve smiled, as if he owned a secret she could never see. "I'd rather be dead, than turned into a damned robot."

The girl moved toward him, her face pale and perfect as a prize rose. "Look into my eyes, foolish one ..." she whispered, and her thought in his mind was a bold invitation. He looked into the deep green-blue depths and he saw there real emotion, waiting to be borne into a consuming fire of passion. Her arms went around him, and though they were strong and hard arms, he did not feel that, for her lips touched his, and a shock of ecstasy ran through him so that he shook like a leaf in a breeze.

Her thoughts plunged on—he had to listen—"You think we are dead robots because you do not see our life. You cannot see it, until you are one of us. Then it becomes quite clear, our life is more than before."

Steve's thoughts, unlocked from sad introspection and loneliness, plunged suddenly into a swirl of desire. He could not help wishing to see her body without the sleek rippling film of silk. He could not help wondering if the bodies of these machine-like people were as perfect as their faces were perfect. She laughed as the machine augmented his inadvertent wish ... and she zipped down her side, tossed off the one piece jumper of silken stuff. She stood there, perfect and desirable.

Steve flushed. "That wasn't necessary, baby," he heard himself say, embarrassed. "I couldn't help wishing."

"More you can never have, while you are made of flesh. My arms would crush you, my lips burst your soft flesh lips. But if you underwent the treatment ..." she smiled. Her meaning was unmistakable, too much so and Steve flushed, guiltily.

He heard his own thought on the augmenter, going on and on inexorably, against his own will: "There was a woman, the first I knew in this world. I stayed there too long. She wanted me, but we could not even speak. Somehow, I feel drawn back to her. And the thing that puzzled me, that terrified me ... she was knitting baby clothes, yet there was no man! No man ever came, there was only me. And I never even touched her, except by chance."

The girl slipped her jumper on, zipped it up. Her face was suddenly grave, empty, and somehow sorry. Steve stopped thinking, listened to the augmenter and her thoughts. "Oh, no! I am sorry I intruded."

Steve shook his head. He was trying hard not to understand the meaning of what he heard. It was like being led by the hand, like a child trying to break away from his mother's restraining hand.

"What do you mean, you're sorry you intruded?"

She smiled, a very peculiar smile, one of those female smiles that madden men so much, because they show him that sometimes women know things that men can never know.

"You will understand one of these days, why I am sorry. I should have known. If I had looked I would have seen it in you already. It changes a man ... but you could not understand. It was inevitable. You were doomed when you set foot on this world." She laughed, and repeated, "Doomed, doomed," and she went out the door, a silvery laugh like a glass bell struck with a felt hammer.

Steve stood looking at the augmenter. He leaned over it, and his own thought beat back at him powerfully. "Go back, go back, or you will never escape! You will be another robot, with flesh like rock, and never again will the hot blood rush through your veins, never again...." But all at once he saw behind his own thought, and heard something deeper in his own mind, saying, "Go back, she is waiting for you. The garden is waiting, the little house, the fields, the tiny barn, the tidy rooms, and her sweet perfection to serve you forever."

Steve stood up and pounded his head with his fist, trying to knock out the sound of his own thinking. There was something here, something threatening and frightful, and he couldn't understand. He let the thought augmenter idle on, emptily bouncing his own thought about the room in magnetic waves of meaningless content, and peered at the other strange machines. There was one, a cabinet where a person could stand, with buttons like a shower stall. He stepped in, pushed a button and waves of force washed over him, set his body to tingling and shaking with the force of it. But what it was supposed to be doing, he didn't know. Beside it was upended a bottle with a spigot and a paper cup. It looked like water, and without thinking he took the cup, filled it, tasted the "water". It was not water; it tasted like peppermint, like licorice, like mint leaves and whiskey ... like quite a drink, he decided and drank it down. He took another cup, and another. His head suddenly whirled, and he staggered slightly.

"Potent stuff to put in a water cooler," he grunted, putting out a hand to steady himself. For the stuff had set up a thrumming in his veins, a pumping in his heart, a rosy pulsation in his vision. If he wasn't drunk, what would you call it? he wondered. He tried a step, another, and after minutes his legs obeyed and he walked out the door. He stopped there, looking back. In this condition he would forget his own name.... He wondered what he had forgotten. Something he had left there.... He eased back, sliding his feet, bent over the augmenter to listen to his thinking. It beat up at him from the orifice like a strong wind in his face. It said, "You're going back, Steve, you are going back, to say goodbye properly to your host, the woman who waits and knits and waits and who wept when you left."

Steve decided he was going back. They would bring the fuel when they brought it, or they wouldn't. But somehow right now he had to see that "Vey fanis vu?" female again, to make sure about something that puzzled him.

Then his thought reminded him. "You forgot to switch off this thing, that's why you came back in." And he reached down and turned the knob; the pulse of his own strange deeper thought stopped, and he felt suddenly lost and his own mind blank. He moved back, turned, went out the door and heard a silvery laugh down the corridor as he staggered a little, trying to walk down the center of the corridor.

"Inhuman things," Steve muttered. "They treat me like I was a kid with no sense, or something," and he went to the elevator, down to the street level, and so along the street, some sense of direction guiding his whirling mind. He knew where he was going.

One of the driverless wheeled wagons stopped beside him, the machine-voice of it said, "You may ride, I am going your way."

Steve climbed on the back of the wagon, grumbling. "How'n hell do you know where I'm going? I don't."

The wagon rolled off, not fast, not slow, its wheels bouncing slightly with the weight of its bales and boxes of cargo. Along the wide serene avenues it rolled, quiet, sure, straight as a train on rails. Steve nodded, closed his eyes, fell asleep.

When he awoke, the wagon had stopped, someone brushed by Steve, took off one of the boxes. It was dark, the starlight was so vague he could not see where he was. The wagon started up again, rolled on. Steve slept, and dreamed that he had been changed into a glass statue, and placed on a pedestal in the square of his home town, back on Earth. People stopped and stared at the glass statue, giggling and smirking, and he hated it, but he could only stand there, his hand on his chest, smiling idiotically. He could hear the girls giggling, saying to each other, "Isn't he perfect? He doesn't know, he doesn't know."

Steve stood there in the square and the traffic turned and honked and braked; the people stood and waited for the traffic lights, and looked at the glass statue, and smiled, as if he were a joke, a permanent joke. "He doesn't know," they would laugh, and the light would change, and the traffic move again.

Hours later a hand touched his arm, but it wasn't a hard hand of steel. It was a soft human hand, and Steve's heart leaped with the guess: "Some of these people didn't undergo the change and formed their own community. So the crystallized people sent me to the natural people, and now I am among my own kind again!"

The soft pink-tipped fingers grasped his arm, shook him gently, so gently, and Steve opened his eyes. The face in the darkness was vaguely familiar, but somehow all these people were nice looking. He eased himself off the back of the wagon, leaned against the body that belonged to the hand. A soft body, a woman's real body of flesh ... he thrilled to the touch, a deep satisfying revelation of humanity, of love, of natural human life, a home-like feeling.

"So they didn't all change. There is a place here where they live like people ..." murmured Steve.

"U fanis hane, O tu!" said the voice, a sweet voice, from a fragrant-scented person, a soft bodied woman-person.... Steve smiled sleepily. She seemed glad to see him. He followed her up a path, and into the warm pink light.

A shock went through him. This was the same room! The same pictures built in the smooth wall, the same brown tile stove, sleek and clean as a new-washed baby. The same big comfortable leather chairs, and he grinned. "I'm hungry, Elvie," he said.

"A hane to u, is eat," she laughed, and he knew she had spoken two words of his own tongue.

He sat down, not weary, but somehow very glad to be back. "The thought machine," he asked, wishing he could ask her where they could find one; he wanted her to tell him something.

She switched on a button in the wall, a button he had not seen before. Her thought came to him then.

"I was so sorry I did not have one when you came. I ordered one, but they have to be made as there are not many in use. Now it has come, I can tell you. There is something you could not understand."

"There's a lot of things you could tell me, that's a fact. It's so puzzling. They take me for granted. No excitement...."

"That is because of prevision."

Steve started. A shiver went through him, or was it a pulse of delight at the sudden knowledge of what was to come?

"Prevision?" asked Steve, though he suddenly realized he knew the answer.

"After the change, people came to know by experience that they could foresee the future, when they willed to see ahead. When you came, I knew what would come to pass."

"Because they know what's coming, they didn't get excited?" Steve asked, his eyes on her sweet perfection, on her hands, setting the flowers straight in the bowl again, then going back to her eternal knitting.

"That's why we seem like robots to you. Robots don't have to think about what's coming next. They know. They know because they are machines. We know ahead, too, not because it's built in us, but because we can deduce precisely how things are going to turn out. The penalty of increased mental activity ... see?" Her voice was gentle, but there was awareness of something in it, something he ought to understand, something she couldn't say.

Suddenly Steve saw it and sat up straight, his heart doing flip-flops. He could hear his voice and his augmented thought shouting together—"There's no man! You're alone here!"

Her smile was heavenly, something like music that touched him inside.

"Now you know," she said, and held up the tiny garment she had just completed. "It's for our first one."

Steve leaned back, his worriment smoothing out into a strange beautiful prevision of their life, going on and on here.... He couldn't seem to get excited about Earth any longer. All the dreams of going back seemed to be dissolving in a warm flood of knowing— he wasn't going back !

"This prevision can be fun," mused Steve, looking into her eyes. "You knew...."

"I knew when your ship sounded overhead! It added up, because ... I don't know. When I saw you, then I saw the prevision had not been wishful thinking. It was you, the same man I saw ahead. So I began making the things...."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Steve asked.

"It wasn't that way. You had to go and see the city, undergo the change, want to come back. If you hadn't wanted to come back, why then I had made a mistake. But you came back, so ... but I knew all the time."

"I knew too, but ... there was your knitting. I thought you must have a mate, that he must be away."

"In the flesh state, people have prevision, but it isn't as accurate. Ours is usually accurate. Just a new faculty. One of several new faculties."

"I suppose they will treat me?" Steve asked, but he knew.

Gently she explained—. "In the city, the change is provided for. It is in the drinking water. Here, we have to take capsules. If we didn't we'd revert to the flesh state. No one wants to revert."

Steve stood up. She moved into his arms naturally, and he knew he was home. He kissed her sweet face ... again. Her laugh tinkled softly, and the edgy, glass-like quality was gone from it. He was happy and he knew she was happy. He switched off the thought augmenter.

"Let's pretend it's the first day ..." he said.

She went and stood by the door, and he went out the door. He closed it and knocked. She opened the door.

"Vey fanis vu?" she asked.

Steve stood, adoring her, his eyes warm. "How can a guy be so dumb, not to know when he finds his own home?" he asked in English.

"I wondered, Steve," she murmured, in English.

She opened the lower door....