Bill trotted off the mound. For a moment, the thrill of the game held him. This was the way things should be: The feel of smoothly flowing muscles, the thudding sound of horsehide hitting a leather glove, the weight of a bat in your hands in your first ball game after clambering over and scrabbling in an unexplored planet for fourteen months.
Then he caught sight of Candace Mathews, walking among the pneuma-huts that served as the outpost camp for the expedition. Gloom enveloped him again, surrounding him like a dank fog.
For fourteen long months, Bill had feasted on the memory of Candy Mathews, on his recollection of her turquoise eyes and cascading brown hair, on the remembrance of her soft lips on his last night under the four moons of Vensor III.
Today she had arrived with the seventy-odd men and women who comprised the appraisal unit, the final group of the planet's explorers. He had looked forward like a schoolboy to her coming. And, like a schoolboy, he had suffered black despair when his dreams were shattered.
For the Candy Mathews who got off the shuttlebug at Camp Outpost was not the Candy Mathews who had said soft words on Vensor III. She was, instead, a self-assured young woman, somehow harder, who felt only an indifferent tolerance toward a tall young man named Bill Bradley, and an all-consuming, hero-worshipping infatuation for a newcomer, a dapper walking brain, Vance Montgomery, one of the council's smart boys, with the title of planet evaluator.
"He's simply wonderful," she had said. And the joy of life had gone out of Bill Bradley.
The appraisal group brought in athletic equipment and Bill's men spontaneously declared a holiday, their first on the planet. Baseball was the order of the afternoon and they shanghaied a not unwilling Bill to pitch. He should, he knew, be laying out reports for Montgomery to study. He did not particularly want to be with Montgomery.
Bill sat on the xetal log that served as a bench.
One Quxa was bent over, examining first base. He made a colorful sight. The first baseman slapped him jovially on the loin cloth to move him.