"We might even invite some of them up for the festival," Elias said slowly. "Providing they're--courteous." He frowned at the young spaceman who had done the swearing, and then he looked back at Captain Bernard. "And providing, of course, that we're not too far away by then." "I don't think you will be," Bernard said. "I think you'll stay." "I think so too," Max Cramer said, moving closer to Trina. "I hope so." Elias stood up slowly and signalled that the council was dismissed. The other people stood up also and moved toward the doors. "We'd better see about changing the world's course," Aaron Gomez said. No one objected. It was going to be done. Trina looked up at Max Cramer and knew that she loved him. And wondered why she was afraid. * * * * * It was ten days later that the world, New America, came into the gravitational influence of the planet's solar system. The automatic deflectors swung into functioning position, ready to change course, slowly and imperceptibly, but enough to take the world around the system and out into the freedom of space where it could wander on its random course. But this time men shunted aside the automatic controls. Men guided their homeland in, slowly now, toward the second planet from the sun, the one that the spacemen had said was so like Earth. "We'll see it tomorrow," Trina said. "They'll shut off part of the light tower system then." "Why don't they now?" Max Cramer asked her. It was just past sunset, and the stars of a dozen generations ago were just beginning to wink into view. He saw Venus, low on the horizon, and his lips tightened, and then he looked up to where he knew the new sun must be. There was only the crescent of Earth's moon. "Now?" Trina said. "Why should they turn the screens off now? We're still so far away. We wouldn't see anything." "You'd see the sun," Max said. "It's quite bright, even from here. And from close up, from where the planet is, it looks just about like Earth's." Trina nodded. "That's good," she said, looking over at the rose tints of the afterglow. "It wouldn't seem right if it didn't." A cow lowed in the distance, and nearer, the laughing voices of children rode the evening breeze. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere else a woman called her family home to supper. Old sounds. Older, literally, than this world. "What are the people like, out there?" He looked at her face, eager and worried at the same time, and he smiled. "You'll like them, Trina," he said. "They're like--well, they're more like _this_ than anything else." He gestured, vaguely, at the farmhouse lights ahead of them, at the slow walking figures of the young couples out enjoying the warm spring evening, at the old farmer leading his plow horse home along the path. "They live in villages, not too different, from yours. And in cities. And on farms." "And yet, you like it there, don't you?" she said. He nodded. "Yes, I like it there."