He was tired, in body and mind and nerve, and he stood for a while, just staring. The agent who cared for the old place had let him in and gone away, and there was not a sound in the house. He walked into the living-room where his grandfather's desk still stood beneath a window, and looked out. The window faced northward, along the California coastal cliffs that run north along Morro Bay to Big Sur. The Pacific foamed and surged against the huge broken stones beneath the cliffs, and the hills, somber now with a tinge of autumn, shouldered massively up toward the east from the cliff road. It all looked as lonely as ever, no other houses in sight but this gray, weatherbeaten house that had faced the sea-wind and the sea-fog for over a hundred years.
Kellard walked back along the hall. On its walls still hung the ornately framed family photographs which his grandfather had stubbornly kept in place. His great-grandfather, and his great-aunt something, and all the rest of them, on back into the shadows. They were all there, they had not been touched, nothing in the house had been touched, just as his grandfather's will had enjoined. Keep the old house, he had said. Some of the family will be back some day.
The old man had been right, he thought. One of the family had come back at last, one who had roamed farther than almost anybody on Earth.
"But that's all done with," he told himself. "Here I am, and here I stay. I'm through with space."
He started through the rooms, opening windows, letting in light and air. The furniture was faded and old-fashioned, but the place was not dusty, the agent had seen that it was kept in shape. Kellard picked one of the big upstairs bedrooms for himself, and brought in the blankets and cartons and luggage from the car. He went into the utility room and turned on the power-unit, remembering as he did so how his grandfather had disliked and distrusted the unit, how he had refused to have one until the electric wires were all gone and there was no other way to get power. He checked the stove and freezer, shoved his cartons of food into the latter, and then looked around and wondered what to do next.
Standing in the silent house, he wondered suddenly if he had been foolish to quit everything and come back to Earth and this old place?
No, he thought heavily. Mercury ended it for me. I made my decision and that is that. Forget it.
He strode abruptly out of the house and started walking. And after a little while the dark weight in his mind, the somber knowledge, faded and receded in the new-found, old-remembered interest of the things about him.
His way took him across the road, past the shabby barns and up sloping pastures where once his grandfather had kept the fine horses he bred. Then he was in among the pines, climbing more steeply, with the resinous smell of the trees strong in his nostrils. That smell he had never forgotten, and once he had met a smell vaguely like it, far away from Earth—