Eight months, thought the one who called himself Major Harris, would be
ample time for Major Harris to lose himself in the billions of Earth
and carry out the purposes for which he had been sent here.
* * * * *
The _Lucky Lady_ was on the last lap of her journey. Harris had boarded
her on Alpheratz IV, after having been shipped there from Darruu by
private warpship. For the past three weeks, while the giant vessel
had slipped through the sleek gray tunnel in the continuum that was
its overdrive channel, Harris had been learning to walk at Earthnorm
gravity.
Darruu was a large world--radius 11,000 miles--and though its density
was not as great as Earth's, still the gravitational attraction was
half again as intense. Darruu's gravity was 1.5 Earthnorm. Or, as
Harris had thought of it in the days when his mind centered not on
Earth but on Darruu, Earth's gravity was .67 Darruunorm. Either way, it
meant that his muscles would be functioning in a field two-thirds as
strong as the one they had developed in. He could use the excuse that
he had spent most of his time on heavy planets, and that would explain
away some of his awkwardness.
But not all. A native Earther, no matter how long he stays on a heavy
world, still knows how to cope with Earthnorm gravity. Harris had to
learn that. He _did_ learn it, painstakingly, during the three weeks of
overdrive travel toward the system of Sol.
Now the journey was almost complete. All that remained was the transfer
from the starship to an Earth shuttle, and then he could begin life as
an Earthman.
Earth hung outside the main viewport twenty feet from Harris's
cabin. He stared at it. A great green ball of a world, with two huge
continents here, another land-mass there, a giant moon moving in slow
procession around it, keeping one pockmarked face eternally staring
inward, the other glaring at outer space like a single beady bright
eye.
The sight made Harris homesick.
Darruu was nothing like this. Darruu, from space, seemed to be a giant
red fruit, covered over by the crimson mist that was the upper layer of
its atmosphere. Beneath that could be discerned the great blue seas and
the two hemisphere-large continents of Darraa and Darroo.
And the moons, Harris thought nostalgically. Seven glistening blank
faces like coins in the sky, each at its own angle to the ecliptic,
each taking its place in the sky nightly like a gem moved by clockwork.
And the Mating of the Moons, when the seven came together once a year
in a fiercely radiant diadem that filled half the sky--
Angrily he cut the train of thought.
_You're an Earthman. Forget Darruu._
A voice on a speaker overhead said, "Please return to your cabins,
ladies and gentlemen. In eleven minutes we will come to a rest at the
main spaceborne depot. Passengers intending to transfer here please
notify their area steward."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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