But the moment was gone, and with it the eager excitement and the
half-formed anticipations of the things he would learn and accomplish on
Terra. The things he would learn--microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one.
One of the steel trunks was full of things he had learned and
accomplished, too. Maybe they, at least, had some value....
The woods were autumn-tinted now and the fields were bare and brown.
They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been
harvested. Those workers below must be going out for the wine-pressing.
That extra hands were needed for that meant a big crop, and yet it
seemed that less land was under cultivation than when he had gone away.
He could see squares of low brush among the new forests that had grown
up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked
like hills above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when
the planet had been colonized.
That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the Seventh
Century, Atomic Era. The name of the planet--Poictesme--told that: the
Surromanticist Movement, when the critics and professors were
rediscovering James Branch Cabell.
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