"How can you say that?" Trina cried. "We've kept our world like Earth. Oh, maybe we've shortened winter a little, but still...."
Saari's voice was sad and gentle, as if she were explaining something to a bewildered child. "My mother's ancestors came here only a few years out from Earth," she said. "And do you know what they called this planet? A paradise. A garden world."
"That's why they named it Eden," Max Cramer said.
Then they were at the ship, out of the car, running to the airlock, with the grass lashing at their legs and the wind lashing at their faces and the cold night air aflame suddenly in their lungs. And Trina couldn't protest any longer, not with the world mad about her, not with Saari's words ringing in her ears like the wind.
She saw them carry Curt Elias in, and then Max was helping her aboard, and a moment later, finally, the airlock doors slipped shut and it was quiet.
She held out her arm for the needle.
When she awoke again it was morning. Morning on the world. They had carried her to one of the divans in the council hall, one near a window so that she could see the familiar fields of her homeland as soon as she awoke. She rubbed her eyes and straightened and looked up at the others. At Elias, still resting on another divan. At Captain Bernard. At Saari and her father, and another man from the planet. At Max.
He looked at her, and then sighed and turned away, shaking his head.
"Are we—are we going back there?" Trina asked.