On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his
father was a prospector and let them interpret that as meaning an
explorer for, say, uranium deposits. Rodney Maxwell found plenty of
uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.
The old replacement depot or classification center or training area or
whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all
forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cluster of deserted
buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose--bands of farm
tramps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the
eastern foothills were out of sight and he was looking down on the
granite spines of the Calder Range; the valley beyond was sloping away
and widening out in the distance, and it was time he began thinking of
what to say when he landed. He would have to tell them, of course.
He wondered who would be at the dock to meet him, besides his family.
Lynne Fawzi, he hoped. Or did he? Her parents would be with her, and
Kurt Fawzi would take the news hardest of any of them, and be the first
to blame him because it was bad. The hopes he had built for Lynne and
himself would have to be held in abeyance till he saw how her father
would regard him now.
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