But even the Directorate has to make compromises. The desirable places on Earth filled up long ago, and then the less desirable, and then the undesirable, until the only clear horizons left are on the mountain roofs, the icecaps, the stone-and-sand deserts, whatever is still worse to make a living from than the bottom of a megalopolis. The bureaucrats I work for did not do so badly; the Low Countries complex has much to recommend it. They control a lot of wealth and are correspondingly influential.

Anyway, I don’t have to live in Rotterdam, except a few days at a time, reporting in or getting briefed. Otherwise I mostly spend my furloughs at one or another resort, as expensive and exclusive as possible. Thus I needn’t observe what man has inflicted on this planet his mother while I was gone. Spaceman’s pay accumulates wonderfully on the long hauls, years or decades in a stretch. I can afford whatever I want on Earth: even clean air, trees, a brook to drink from, a deer to glimpse, unlighted nights when I take a girl out and show her the stars I have visited.

Let me see, I thought, once this is over with here, where should I go? Hitherto I’ve avoided places where Cumae is visible. But why, really? Hm…catalogued HR 6806, 33.25 light-years distant, K2 dwarf of luminosity 0.62 Sol…yes, I’ll want a small telescope as well as some large brags for the girl…

One star detached itself and whirred toward me. Startled, I realized that this must be Tom Brenner coming. Suddenly I was in no more mood to brag about what I had done at Cumae than I was on first returning. I didn’t want to confront him, especially alone. If I hurried, I could be inside before he set down. I could await him together with d’Indre, impregnable in the apparatus of government.

But no. I had seen too much—we had both seen too much, he and I, and all those men and women and children for whom he must speak tonight—on the high plains of his planet. In our very separate ways, we had both known the terror of the alien enemy. I could never be totally an official to him. So I stayed by the parapet, waiting. The breath came out of me like smoke and the cold crept inside.

* * *

On Sibylla it was always hot. Cumae glowers half again as great in the sky of that world as Sol does on Earth, and pours down nearly twice the energy. Those wavelengths are poor in ultraviolet but rich in infrared. The sunlight is orange-tinted, not actually furnace color though it feels that way.

I asked Brenner why the colonists didn’t move upward. Peaks shouldered above the horizon. Their snows were doubly bright against the purplish heaven, doubly beautiful against the gray-green bushland that stretched around us, murmurous and resinous under a dry wind. I saw that timberline, or whatever passed for it, reached almost to the tops. The dark, slightly iridescent hues suggested denser growth than here. Yonder must be a well-watered country, fertile in soil, and cool, cool.