The wagon rolled off, not fast, not slow, its wheels bouncing slightly with the weight of its bales and boxes of cargo. Along the wide serene avenues it rolled, quiet, sure, straight as a train on rails. Steve nodded, closed his eyes, fell asleep.
When he awoke, the wagon had stopped, someone brushed by Steve, took off one of the boxes. It was dark, the starlight was so vague he could not see where he was. The wagon started up again, rolled on. Steve slept, and dreamed that he had been changed into a glass statue, and placed on a pedestal in the square of his home town, back on Earth. People stopped and stared at the glass statue, giggling and smirking, and he hated it, but he could only stand there, his hand on his chest, smiling idiotically. He could hear the girls giggling, saying to each other, "Isn't he perfect? He doesn't know, he doesn't know."
Steve stood there in the square and the traffic turned and honked and braked; the people stood and waited for the traffic lights, and looked at the glass statue, and smiled, as if he were a joke, a permanent joke. "He doesn't know," they would laugh, and the light would change, and the traffic move again.
Hours later a hand touched his arm, but it wasn't a hard hand of steel. It was a soft human hand, and Steve's heart leaped with the guess: "Some of these people didn't undergo the change and formed their own community. So the crystallized people sent me to the natural people, and now I am among my own kind again!"
The soft pink-tipped fingers grasped his arm, shook him gently, so gently, and Steve opened his eyes. The face in the darkness was vaguely familiar, but somehow all these people were nice looking. He eased himself off the back of the wagon, leaned against the body that belonged to the hand. A soft body, a woman's real body of flesh ... he thrilled to the touch, a deep satisfying revelation of humanity, of love, of natural human life, a home-like feeling.
"So they didn't all change. There is a place here where they live like people ..." murmured Steve.
"U fanis hane, O tu!" said the voice, a sweet voice, from a fragrant-scented person, a soft bodied woman-person.... Steve smiled sleepily. She seemed glad to see him. He followed her up a path, and into the warm pink light.
A shock went through him. This was the same room! The same pictures built in the smooth wall, the same brown tile stove, sleek and clean as a new-washed baby. The same big comfortable leather chairs, and he grinned. "I'm hungry, Elvie," he said.
"A hane to u, is eat," she laughed, and he knew she had spoken two words of his own tongue.
He sat down, not weary, but somehow very glad to be back. "The thought machine," he asked, wishing he could ask her where they could find one; he wanted her to tell him something.