Shy, big-eyed little kids, showing brown where they weren't clothed, ran in the grassy streets. Unusually--unnecessarily--clean for the offspring of a semi-savage people, he thought. Tsu was drawing water from the creek as he came up. She paused, holding the water jar against youthful breasts, restrained under the taut fabric of her yellow sarong. Like others of her race, she was surpassingly slender, breathtakingly beautiful in the liquid melody of her movements. Her face was long, tanned, glowing with the ripeness of youth. Her eyes, long, tip-tilted, were lidded with mystery, and her black hair was substanceless shadow caressing her shoulders. It almost came to him as he looked at her, greeted her. Did Tsu look the part of a shy, savage maiden of the wild? He had to admit that she did ... she looked like an over-enthusiastic video casting director's idea of category two X sub one maidenhood. The implications slipped from his mind as she clasped his hand. The warm flesh of her palm felt firm against his. An electric tingle wriggled up his arm. Not even the rigor of his emotional conditioning could have prevented that much. It was not good for field men to be bothered by emotions. It made their work difficult; they found wives on sub-standard worlds and wanted to bring them out to civilization; or, they reverted to the wilds themselves with their mates. The Corps conditioned its men against anything like that, so that emotional vagaries could not disturb the single-mindedness trained into them--to discover and interpret in the field. "Good evening, _sintaha_ Rowley," Tsu said. He followed her into the house she shared with Smarin and Torl, her parents. They greeted Rowley warmly, slim, smiling, happy as usual. It was a stage play, performed for his benefit. He moved around among the actors, but he was not an actor himself. He was the audience. Rowley had been in this house often, always with a haunting sense of wrongness. He knew it as well as he knew his own tent. Living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and quarters for bathing. Clean people, the natives of Hume. Rowley sat on the stone stoop and contemplated the gathering shadows. Tsu came out and sat close beside him. He asked her again about the trees, why the people tended them. "It is proper to tend the trees, _sintaha_ Rowley. We have done so always." Was she evading? Or did he fully understand her language, simple as it was? He had learned it quickly, and had wondered at the time that it was so similar in grammar and syntax to his own. An odd coincidence--or deliberate casting, to impress the play more easily on the audience? "Tomorrow," he said, "I should like to learn more about the trees." "If it will please you," she said. * * * * *