"They'd like some of you to come visit their world," Bernard said. "If any of you are willing."
The tall man nodded. "Everyone will want to go," he said. "Very few ships ever land here. Until you came, it had been years."
"You'd go out in space?" Trina said incredulously.
Again the man nodded. "I was a spaceman once," he said. "All of us MacGregors were." Then he sighed. "Sometimes even now I want to go out again. But there've been no ships here, not for years."
Trina looked past him, at the women and the children, at the lush fields and the little houses far in the distance. "You'd leave this?"
MacGregor shook his head. "No, of course not. Not to live in space permanently. I'd always come back."
"It's a fine world to come back to," Max said, and he and the tall man smiled at each other, as if they shared something that Trina couldn't possibly understand.
"We might as well go into town," MacGregor said.
They walked over to the cars. MacGregor stopped beside one of them, his hand on the door button.
"Here, let me drive." The girl stepped forward out of the crowd as she spoke. She was tall, almost as tall as MacGregor, and she had the same high cheekbones and the same laughter lines about her eyes.