Rod liked her, though he had been painfully shy with her at first. There was no side to her, no posh, no swank. Once she got down to business, her incredible body faded partway into the background, though with the sides of his eyes he could never quite forget it. It was her mind, her intelligence, her humor and good humor, which carried them across the hours and days they spent together. He found himself trying to impress her that he was a grown man, only to discover that in the spontaneous, sincere affections of her quick cat heart she did not care in the least what his status was. He was simply her partner and they had work to do together. It was his job to stay alive and it was her job to keep him alive.

Doctor Vomact had told him not to speak to the other passengers, not to say anything to each other, and to call for silence if any of them spoke.

There were ten other passengers who stared at one another in uncomfortable amazement.

Ten in number, they were.

All ten of them were Rod McBan.

Ten identified Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBans to the one hundred and fifty-first, all exactly alike. Apart from C’mell herself and the little monkey-doctor, A’gentur, the only person on the ship who was not Rod McBan was Rod McBan himself. He had become the cat-man. The others seemed, each by himself, to be persuaded that he alone was Rod McBan and that the other nine were parodies. They watched each other with a mixture of gloom and suspicion mixed with amusement, just as the real Rod McBan would have done, had he been in their place.

“One of them,” said Doctor Vomact in parting, “is your companion Eleanor from Norstrilia. The other nine are mouse-powered robots. They’re all copied from you. Good, eh?” He could not conceal his professional satisfaction.

And now they were all about to see Earth together.

C’mell took Rod to the edge of the little world and said gently, “I want to sing ‘The Tower Song’ to you just before we shut down on the top of Earthport.” And in her wonderful voice she sang the strange little old song,

Rod felt a little funny, standing there, looking at nothing, but he also felt pleasant with the girl’s head against his shoulder and his arm enfolding her. She seemed not only to need him, but to trust him very deeply. She did not feel adult — not self-important and full of unexplained business. She was merely a girl, and for the time his girl. It was pleasant and it gave him a strange foretaste of the future.

The day might come when he would have a permanent girl of his own, facing not a day, but life, not a danger, but destiny. He hoped that he could be as relaxed and fond with that future girl as he was with C’mell.

C’mell squeezed his hand, as though in warning.

He turned to look at her but she stared ahead and nodded with her chin,

“Keep watching,” she said, “straight ahead. Earth.”

He looked back at the blank artificial sky of the ship’s force-field. It was a monotous but pleasant blue, covering depths which were not really there.

The change was so fast that he wondered whether he had really seen it.

In one moment the clear flat blue.

Then the false sky splashed apart as though it had literally been slashed into enormous ribbons, ribbons in their turn becoming blue spots and disappearing.

Another blue sky was there — Earth’s.

Manhome.

Rod breathed deeply. It was hard to believe. The sky itself was not so different from the false sky which had surrounded the ship on its trip from Mars, but there was an aliveness and wetness to it, unlike any other sky he had ever heard about.

It was not the sight of the Earth which surprised him — it was the smell. He suddenly realized that Old North Australia must smell dull, flat, dusty to Earth-men. This Earth air smelled alive. There were the odors of plants, of water, of things which he could not even guess. The air was coded with a million years of memory. In this air his people had swum to manhood, before they conquered the stars. The wetness was not the cherished damp of one of his covered canals. It was wild free moisture which came laden with the indications of things living, dying, sprawling, squirming, loving with an abundance of Earth had always seemed fierce and exaggerated! What was stroon that men would pay water for it — water, the giver and carrier of life. This was his home, no matter how many generations his people had lived in the twisted hells of Paradise VII or the dry treasures of Old North Australia. He took a deep breath, feeling the plasma of Earth pour into him, the quick effluvium which had made man. He smelled Earth again — it would take a long lifetime, even with stroon, before a man could understand all these odors which came all the way up to the ship, which hovered, as planoforming ships usually did not, twenty-odd kilometers above the surface of the planet.

There was something strange in this air, something sweet-clear to the nostrils, refreshing to the spirit. One great beautiful odor overrode all the others. What could it be? He sniffed and then said, very clearly, to himself,

“Salt!”

C’mell reminded him that he was beside her,

“Do you like it, C’rod?”

“Yes, yes, it’s better than—” Words failed him. He looked at her. Her eager, pretty, comradely smile made him feel that she was sharing every milligram of his delight. “But why,” he asked, “do you waste salt on the air? What good does it do?”

“Salt?”

“Yes — in the air. So rich, so wet, so salty. Is it to clean the ship some way that I do not understand?”

“Ship? We’re not on the ship, C’rod. This is the landing roof of Earthport.”

He gasped.

No ship? There was not a mountain on Old North Australia more than six kilometers above MGL — mean ground level — and those mountains were all smooth, worn, old, folded by immense eons of wind into a gentle blanketing that covered his whole home world.

He looked around.

The platform was about two hundred meters long by one hundred wide.

The ten “Rod McBans” were talking to some men in uniform. Far at the other side a steeple rose into eye-catching height — perhaps a whole half-kilometer. He looked down.

There it was — Old Old Earth.

The treasure of water reached before his very eyes — water by the millions of tons, enough to feed a galaxy of sheep, to wash an infinity of men. The water was broken by a few islands on the far horizon to the right.

“Hesperides,” said’C’mell, following the direction of his gaze. “They came up from the sea when the Daimoni built this for us. For people, I mean. I shouldn’t say ‘us’.”

He did not notice the correction. He stared at the sea. Little specks were moving in it, very slowly. He pointed at one of them with his finger and asked C’mell,

“Are those wethouses?”

“What did you call them?”

“House which are wet. Houses which sit on water. Are those some of them?”

“Ships,” she said, not spoiling his fun with a direct contradiction. “Yes, those are ships.”

“Ships?” he cried. “You’d never get one of those into space. Why call them ships then?”

Very gently C’mell explained, “People had ships for water before they had ships for space. I think the Old Common Tongue takes the word for space vessel from the things you are looking at.”

“I want to see a city,” said Rod, “Show me a city.”

“It won’t look like much from here. We’re too high up. Nothing looks like much from the top of Earthport. But I can show you, anyhow. Come over here, dear.”