Horseface clunked his heels on Elmer's sides, urging him up the stony hillside. They gained the summit and craned down at Finchburg, only half a mile below. Like most of the mining-settlements scattered sparsely over the vast Venus deserts, it consisted of scarcely a dozen buildings, none of them new, but all in reasonably good repair. If it is true that a town speaks for its inhabitants, Finchburg plainly declared that while its people might be down on their luck, but they hadn't lost hope.
"Looks like Trixie is blowing her jets," Horseface speculated, and Elmer dipped his broad bill in agreement. "Wonder what's eating her? She ain't acted human for months!"
Elmer cocked an inquiring eye on his master as if asking whether Trixie's behavior could possibly be considered gwippish. He decided not, and clucked sympathetically. He knew all about Trixie's idiosyncrasies. But then, who—or what—didn't?
Trixie O'Neill was the only woman within a thousand miles of the Venus Flats, and furthermore, the only terrestrial woman. She wasn't young nor beautiful. She was in her middle fifties, gaunt, coarse, and had a wooden leg.
She'd come to Finchburg thirty years ago at the height of the psithium rush. She'd been young and pretty then, and desperately in love with her prospector-spouse Mike O'Neill. Mike had been a roistering giant, but he hadn't lasted long on Venus. The acid dust had eaten his lungs away, and in less than a year he'd been laid to rest down in an abandoned mine.
Almost immediately the veins of psithium had petered out. The mine-owners closed the shafts and took away their expensive equipment imported nut-by-bolt by rocket from Earth. Finchburg became a ghost-town. All the miners except for die-hards like Horseface had moved far away to the more promising strikes of Satterlee, Guzil Banks and Storington.
But Trixie remained at Finchburg. "My Mike's buried here, ain't he? Awright—where he stays, I stay!"
And she went on doggedly doing Mike's work until a cave-in crushed one of her legs, after which she set up a hostelry which was a one-woman service-bureau—she washed the miners' clothes, served their meals, kept their books, sold supplies to them and most of all kept up their morale. She provided the woman's touch, and the men adored her.
But the touch which they worshiped abjectly was of Terra itself—half of a blistered blast-tube filled with Terrestrial soil and growing genuine Terrestrial dandelions, rather scrubby and colorless ones, but from good old Terra just the same.
When you thought you'd choke on one more whiff of the bitter Venus-dust, when you remembered the green lushness of Terra and wished you were back there, knowing you could never find enough psithium to pay your passage—then you went to Trixie's place, looked at her dandelions and maybe touched your finger to the dirt in which they grew—and you went away feeling better somehow. You'd been home again for a little while.