As Carol's eyes lifted to his, she saw him staring at the picture with such longing that she at once knew herself for a fool. They're his wife and children, she thought. He's trying to find them. And I had to fall in love with him at first sight.
His eyes were on her now, and she said, "I'm sorry, I've never seen them."
"Have you lived around here long?"
"Five years."
"Then this can't be the place." He stood there irresolutely and started to turn slowly away without even a word of thanks to her.
"My father may have heard about them," said Carol, knowing herself for a fool again.
Past experience, she told herself ruefully, had taught her nothing. The thing to do was to let him go and forget him as quickly as possible, before she learned anything about him, before her feeling for him could become anything more than an irrational, momentary impulse. The stronger the bonds of knowledge and interest between them, the more painful they would be to break. And the breaking was inevitable.
The house where she and her father lived was a simple dome-shaped building, its walls and furniture both made of a silicon plastic whose raw materials had come from the ground on which it stood. There were rugs and draperies of a slightly different composition, woven on the all-purpose Household Helper that her father had bought before leaving Earth. They lived comfortably enough, she thought, as she led the man in.
But he hardly noticed the house or anything in it. When they reached the library and her father looked up from the book he was reading, only then did the man display interest. The book was a favorite of her father's and it made him unhappy to cut his reading short.
Nevertheless, he turned off the projector, stood up, and said, "Yes, Carol?"