He started through the rooms, opening windows, letting in light and air. The furniture was faded and old-fashioned, but the place was not dusty, the agent had seen that it was kept in shape. Kellard picked one of the big upstairs bedrooms for himself, and brought in the blankets and cartons and luggage from the car. He went into the utility room and turned on the power-unit, remembering as he did so how his grandfather had disliked and distrusted the unit, how he had refused to have one until the electric wires were all gone and there was no other way to get power. He checked the stove and freezer, shoved his cartons of food into the latter, and then looked around and wondered what to do next. Standing in the silent house, he wondered suddenly if he had been foolish to quit everything and come back to Earth and this old place? No, he thought heavily. Mercury ended it for me. I made my decision and that is that. Forget it. He strode abruptly out of the house and started walking. And after a little while the dark weight in his mind, the somber knowledge, faded and receded in the new-found, old-remembered interest of the things about him. His way took him across the road, past the shabby barns and up sloping pastures where once his grandfather had kept the fine horses he bred. Then he was in among the pines, climbing more steeply, with the resinous smell of the trees strong in his nostrils. That smell he had never forgotten, and once he had met a smell vaguely like it, far away from Earth-- _Forget all that, Kellard._ The trees took him in and he walked through a dapple of sun and shadows. A deer slipped away through the pines ahead of him, and quail burst up from almost under his feet. He remembered a grove of bigger pines farther up the slope, and an old man and a boy walking up to them. How long ago was that? He had been fifteen--and he was thirty-two now. Seventeen years. Still, he thought he could find the place. He found it. The big pines were still there, for people did not use wood much any more. The rough dark giants stood at dignified intervals from each other, and he sat down with his back against the massive trunk of the biggest. Funny, he thought. When I was a boy sitting here dreaming about the future and what I was going to do, I never once imagined that some things would stay much the same. The whole world would somehow be miraculously transformed--but it wasn't. This tree was here when men first reached the Moon, and Mars, and Venus and the rest, but it didn't know about that, it didn't change because of it. * * * * *