The old-timer nodded. “As evenings should be after a fruitful day's toil. Sit down, comrade. You must be from the United Planets. Have you ever seen Earth?”
Ronny accepted the invitation and felt a soothing calm descend upon him almost immediately. An almost [pg 056] disturbingly pleasant calm. He said, “I was born on Earth.”
“Ai?” the old man said. “Tell me. The books say that Kropotkin is an Earth type planet within what they call a few degrees. But is it? Is Kropotkin truly like the mother planet?”
Ronny looked about him. He'd seen some of this world as the shuttle rocket had brought them down from the passing liner. The forests, the lakes, the rivers, and the great sections untouched by man's hands. Now he saw the areas between homes, the neat fields, the signs of human toil—the toil of hands, not machines.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I'm afraid not. This is how Earth must once have been. But no longer.”
The other nodded. “Our total population is but a few million,” he said. Then, “I would like to see the mother planet, but I suppose I never shall.”
Ronny said diplomatically, “I have seen little of Kropotkin thus far but I am not so sure but that I might not be happy to stay here, rather than ever return to Earth.”
The old man knocked the ashes from his pipe by striking it against the heel of a work-gnarled hand. He looked about him thoughtfully and said, “Yes, perhaps you're right. I am an old man and life has been good. I suppose I should be glad that I'll unlikely live to see Kropotkin change.”
“Change? You plan changes?”