They turned off the big boulevard onto quiet, tree-lined back roads. These roads were old and rambling, accomodatingly twisting around hills and ponds and even houses. Some of the houses were modern chromaloy villas, but there were antique stone houses also, and once he and Lyllin both exclaimed when they saw a very old house that was built all of wood. Out here away from the city, everything looked ancient. Stone fences that had the moss of centuries on them, a steepled church mantled thick with ivy, worn fields that had been tilled for ages. In the fields, driverless automatic tractors were lumbering about their work, but there seemed little bustle or activity. Kirk thought that this was an old, worn world.... A brilliant bird flashed across the road and he and Lyllin argued what it was. "A robin, I think," Kirk said doubtfully. "In school, when I was little, we had an old Earth poem about Robin Redbreast. I didn't know then what it was." "Not nearly so splendid as a flame-bird," Lyllin said. "But the red of it, and the green trees, and the blue sky.... It's a pretty world, in its way." * * * * * They rolled finally down a little hill and over a bridged stream into the town of Orville. It was only a village, with shops around a big open square. There was a corroded statue of a soldier at the center of the park, and benches on which old men sat in the sun. Kirk asked directions of a merchant standing in front of his shop, a chubby man who stared open-mouthed at the two visitors. And Kirk suddenly realized how strange indeed they must look in this sleepy little Earth village--he in his blue-and-silver starman's uniform, his face dark from foreign suns, and Lyllin whose beauty was a breath of the alien. He was glad to drive on out of the village, on the designated road. It was an even more rambling road, looping casually along the side of a shallow valley whose neat farms and fields and woods lay silent in the blaze of the soft golden sun. They met no other ground-cars, though an occasional air-car hummed across the blue sky. Kirk kept counting houses, and when he had counted five he turned in at a lane, and stopped. The house was of field-stone, an ancient, brown dumpy structure that had a faintly forlorn, deserted look. Under the big, stiff, dark-green trees in its front yard--were they the trees called "pines?"--the grass was high and ragged. The lane went on past the house, past an orchard of gnarled trees heavy with green fruit, to a big old barn. There was no one in sight, and no sign that anyone was here. "Are you sure it's the place?" asked Lyllin. He nodded, moving toward the porch. "It's the place. Ferdias had his agent here buy it, weeks ago, so we'd have this quiet place for contacts. There should be someone here." There was a bell-push at the door, but no one answered it. Kirk tried the door. It swung open, and they went in.