"Yes, it's beautiful," he agreed, "but--" The feeling of despair and frustration welled up in him again. The warmth he sensed in Jerwyn made him suddenly long to blurt out the whole story. He controlled himself with difficulty, as he turned toward him. "It's pretty enough. It might make a good vacation resort if it weren't on the edge of nowhere." His pent-up emotion exploded as he spoke. "But five years in this hole! I'd feel a hell of a lot better if I were looking at some rocky, barren landscape with some mines on it--with _something_ of value on it--with a name somebody'd heard of, where you could hope to get somewhere. I don't want to waste five years here!" He paused for breath, staring angrily at the lush landscape. "And for that matter, life on one of those planets where you live under domes, with a sealed-in atmosphere, is probably a lot more civilized and convenient than in this primitive jungle." Jerwyn nodded slowly, an unspoken compassion in his face. "I know how you're feeling." He paused. "And it does seem pretty primitive here at first--no automatic precipitrons for cleaning your clothes, natural foods instead of synthetics, no aircars, no automatic dispensers for food or drinks or clothes; none of a hundred things you take for granted till you don't have them. But you get used to it. There are things to make up--" He broke off as the car began to descend into a valley. "Look!" His voice held an odd tone of affection. "There's your new home." Kirk gazed downward at the settlement nested in the valley below them. He fished in his pocket for a magnascope to bring the view nearer and stared curiously, as the lens adjusted to the distance. He picked out groups of buildings, low units of some coarse, natural material, widely spaced. This was the largest city on the planet, he knew, but it seemed to be little more than a village. It was undoubtedly primitive--very primitive. Remembering the magnificent high buildings of Terra, he was filled with sudden homesickness for the speeding sidewalks crowded with people, the skylanes humming with aircars. Turning the magnascope here and there, he kept his gaze trained on the town beneath him, studying it now in more detail. Slowly, some of his depression began to leave him, and he felt a strange sense of warmth begin to take its place. He stepped up the power of the glass till he could see the inhabitants walking in the streets. Like the natives who had met him at the landing ship, they walked with a beautiful, easy grace, a sumptuous ease that seemed somehow almost a rebuke of his own stiffly correct military posture. They gave an impression of combined leisure and vitality.