"I suppose we'll see them soon," she said. "You're going to bring some of them back up in your ship tomorrow, aren't you?"
He stood quietly, looking down at her. His face was shadowed in the gathering night and his whole body was in shadow, tall and somehow alien seeming there before her.
"Why wait for them to come here, Trina?" he said. "Come down with us, in the ship, tomorrow. Come down and see for yourself what it's like."
She trembled. "No," she said.
And she thought of the ship, out away from the sky, not down on the planet yet but hanging above it, with no atmosphere to break the blackness, to soften the glare of the planet's sun, to shut out the emptiness.
"You'd hardly know you weren't here, Trina. The air smells the same. And the weight's almost the same too. Maybe a little lighter."
She nodded. "I know. If we land the world, I'll go out there. But not in the ship."
"All right." He sighed and let go his grip on her shoulders and turned to start walking back the way they had come, toward the town.
She thought suddenly of what he had just said, that she would hardly be able to tell the difference.
"It can't be so much like this," she said. "Or you couldn't like it. No matter what you say."