Gradually he became aware of resilient rubber and plastic supporting him. He lay on his back, heels together and toes lopped outward, elbows crowding uncomfortably into his ribs. His body shifted. The month-long hibernation was over.

A delicious feeling of completeness—of achievement—swept over him. He, Dorav Brink, had escaped from the endless boredom and idleness of Earth's mechanized domes, after all. Here on Sulle II there would be adventure and work in plenty.

His eyes opened. In the soft yellowish light which flooded the small square room, he saw a dozen other couches, similar to that on which he lay. Most of them were occupied. His gaze probed the huddled figures searching for the girl Rea.

He had met her aboard the space lighter enroute to the interstellar liner that was to carry them to Sulle II. Then they had been given their preliminary capsules of iberno and he remembered no more.

Iberno hits some people that way—with others it takes five or six capsules to put them into the death-like cataleptic state required for star hopping....

He saw her! Third couch to the right of his own. He stood up carefully, balancing on rubbery legs, and his hand went up to the constriction binding his skull. What was this? Goggles! Brink's fingers curled about the flexible band securing them. He tugged.

"Stop that, Brink!"

Brink's hand fell away. He recognized the voice of Len Daniels, the recruiter for this illegal voyage here to Sulle II.

"Want to lose your eyesight, Brink?" demanded the dapper little man. "We warned you of the danger. For at least ten days your eyes must remain protected."

The little gray-haired man wore no glasses, he had acquired an immunity to the sunlight of Sulle II from former voyages, but his naturally pink-and-white complexion was a sickly yellow.

Their voices roused the other colonists, and now Daniels moved among them, his soft full voice admonishing and sympathetic.

A coarse-haired giant of a man, dark hair graying at the temples of his ruddy outsize features, clamped Brink's fist with a huge hand.

"Name's Bryt Carby," he said, his voice ridiculously shrill.

"I'm Dorav Brink." His eyes slid toward the tall slenderness of Rea Smyt.

"Air don't taste much different from back home, Brink."

Brink made a wry face. "After breathing spacer air and being doped with iberno for months could we tell the difference?"

Carby laughed in agreement. "But Senior Daniels," and Brink wanted to grin at the respectful term used by the big, slow speaking man, "Senior Daniels says that Sulle II is like Earth in almost every respect."

"He would! And possibly it is. According to him even the animals resemble our own planet's."

"Once," and Carby grinned widely, "I ate a bit of cooked native meat. Ten credits it cost me. After that the protein packets and yea-steaks sickened me."

"I tried it once too, Carby, but it cost me fifteen credits. And that's the way Daniels and his company will get back the thousand credits we owe them for the trip." Brink laughed. "With food that we raise and meat that we kill, Carby. Daniels flies it to Earth and smuggles it into the domes as native to Earth. His profit must be enormous."

Carby frowned and rubbed a stubby finger across the bridge of his huge nose. And Brink edged away from his neighbor toward the slim tallness of Rea Smyt.

"Attention all of you!" Len Daniels had climbed atop a sturdy metal table.

"On the bulletin board just behind me the Commission has posted a list of your assignments and partners for the current year. Some of you will remain here in Low Park to work off your indebtedness, and others will be sent out to Middle Park and Devil's Elbow."

Something in the agent's tone, a touch of ironic amusement or arrogance, perhaps, angered Brink. But he kept his lips shut. In the ancient records that he had studied in the long idle years back there in York Dome, he had read of serfdom and slavery. He could afford to wait and learn if what he feared was true. After all, they were many light years from home and at Daniels' mercy—for the moment at least.

"After you have paired up and found the locations assigned you go to Warehouse Seven and draw your rations and tools. Your plastic tents will serve for shelter even in winter, but my advice to you is to build with logs."

The little man smiled a trifle grimly as he studied them.

"I would advise you to hunt game and raise crops as quickly as possible," he added. "Supplies and tools are expensive to freight out here to Sulle II. They will cost you five hundred more credits."

The colonists' faces paled and their eyes were sick. Brink smiled grimly as he watched. Well they'd asked for it. Most of them were regretting their decision to abandon the ease and plenty of the giant domes already, but they had no choice now. Uncertainly they crowded about the bulletin board, and paired up as the directive indicated.

Brink found himself with a partner named Tzal Evans. She proved to be a genial, oversized, blonde giantess at least five years his senior. He had been hoping for a younger, more attractive companion—possibly dark-haired Rea Smyt. Yet he realized that the Commission could not permit its colonists to choose their jobs and partners at random. There was work to be done.

He found the map and learned that both he and Bryt Carby were assigned to the untamed, forested section named Middle Park. And Bryt Carby had drawn Rea Smyt as his partner.

Brink scrubbed at his chin. He foresaw difficulties ahead for Carby. The few moments that he had spent with Rea had acquainted him with her lightning changes of mood and her disdain for rules and regulations. Those two had nothing in common. After the legal year of partnership was ended neither of them would be likely to renew the agreement for another year.

Perhaps he, Brink, would draw her in next year's pool of unattached citizens, and then....

Tzal nudged at him. "Let's get our supplies," she said, her voice deep as a man's.

"Sure, Tzal." The top of her fair-haired skull was level with his eyes, and across it he caught a glimpse of Rea Smyt leading Carby from the reception center. "Sure. We better."

Rea danced along ahead of Carby like a child—a lovely slender child.

Dusk caught them, hours later, on the wooded ridge high above the broad valley that was their destination.

Carby followed Rea off the crumbled highway, that the vanished Sullans had built, and into a sheltered grove of long-leaved trees. Brink and Tzal, pushing easily together at the harnesses behind the rubber-tired cart, followed them.

Clumsily, for they had never seen a tent before, they released the forward section of the cart and drew out the slender jointed ribs of metal. They snapped these together into a low dome ten feet in diameter; and then Tzal controlled the extensible arms feeding out the plastic covering, while Brink locked the opaque skin into place.

Five minutes later, with the wind cone driving the generator and the bottled gas feeding the small stove, Tzal was preparing their evening meal under the soft glowing tubes.

She turned to Brink.

"Better go help Carby," she suggested, smiling. "That Rea—" And she shook her head.

Brink found Carby struggling doggedly with the metal ribs. His partner was not in sight, but they could hear her voice, singing softly somewhere out among the dusky trees. When at last the lighting tubes were glowing and Carby had lighted the stove, Brink eyed the weary, large-featured man curiously.

"What are you going to do about it?" he blurted. "You can't go on doing all the work. She needs a good—a good, lumping, I think the Ancients called it."

Carby grinned faintly.

"When she is ready," he said mildly, "she will help."

"Hah!" Brink snorted and went to the zippered entrance. "See you tomorrow, Bryt."

He crossed the near-darkness of the needle-strewn glade to his own tent. How bright were these stars and how sweet and cold was this raw air. In York Dome, with its thirty million citizens and its mild, conditioned atmosphere, one saw the stars only through telescreens or viewing ports.

Somewhere in the darkness a mournful wail, an aching ghost of a howl, sounded, and faded into the unfamiliar chirps, and hums of the night prowlers of the Sullan uplands....

There was a choked scream from nearby and Brink heard the crashing progress of Rea Smyt toward her tent. The zippered entrance brightened and then dimmed as she shut it behind her. Brink shrugged. Stooping he entered his own savory-smelling tent.

Tzal had covered the sleeping cots with the gay scarlet-and-blue blankets provided them, and their sliced and steaming rations were ready on the extended table shelf of the cart. Tzal smiled at him from the cot that doubled as a chair.

"Better eat before it gets cold," she invited, and helped herself to a serving of salmon-hued promine.

"Tomorrow," Brink said as he seated himself beside her, "we will dine on real meat—meat that I kill."

"Of course," Tzal agreed placidly.

Brink was remembering that easy promise, a month later, as he bound the last raggedly split shake atop the cabin roof. The cabin was but ten feet wide and twice as long, and built of smallish logs, but its cost in blistered flesh and exhaustion had been terrific....

Six days had passed after their arrival here in Middle Park before his unfamiliar, lead-propelling rifle finally had brought down a small deerlike creature ... the hunting wasn't easy—nothing here on Sulle II was easy.

He slid off the roof and down the trunk of a small tree that he had left here atop this grassy knoll. He straightened his hunched shoulders and heard the muscles grate and snap across the cartilage. He looked down over the grassy parkland, where a meandering stream watered the soil, and counted, for the hundredth time, the five young spotted ruminants that Carby, Tzal, and he had captured from a herd of wild creatures.

"Cows," Carby, and Tzal, his partner, called these giant cattle-like creatures, and he followed suit. It was easier to apply the familiar names to creatures that resembled those of Earth than to use the names supplied them at the Reception Center.

"Dorav!" He heard the voice and then the pressure of two rounded soft arms were around him.

"Rea!" he grunted, facing her. He pushed her arms aside, all too conscious of the shielded breast that brushed the back of his hand.

"Why are you here?" he demanded. "You have work at your cabin. The walls are only half finished."

The girl smiled at him. She was very attractive in a slim boyish sort of way. The palm of her sun-tanned hand, as she laid it upon his wrist, was not calloused as were Tzal's and his own.

"My partner and yours are cutting logs above us," she said. "We can be alone for several hours...."

Brink pushed her soft palm from his arm. For the past three weeks physical exhaustion and unwonted exercise had driven any desire for her from his thoughts. She was Carby's partner for a year—and Carby was his friend.

"Don't get me wrong, Dorav!" Her eyes flashed. They were blue and very dark and clear. "I want to go back to the Earth—to York Dome, to Sippi Dome or one of the other two domes in North America."

"I think we all do at times," Brink said coldly. "But it's not possible. Earth is forty or fifty light years away."

"I know a way." Rea Smyt's eyes were bright. "But I need a partner. Bryt won't go—he likes it here. And your blonde cow of a partner...."

"Tzal is okay," Brink said angrily. "Shut your mouth and go back to your own cabin before I—"

"We could go across the plains to the old ruins," Rea cried hastily, "and then journey down...."

Brink's work-roughened fingers spun her about facing toward Carby's cabin and the round gray tent beside it at the opposite end of the knoll.

Rea was sobbing angrily.

"I'll go by myself," she cried. "You fools can stay here and live like beasts—it's so simple if you only...."

Brink gave her a shove.

"If you worked as you should, you wouldn't find time to be discontented. And next year you can draw a new partner from the unattached pool."

The girl's eyes were hot as she turned and raced off along the path bisecting the knoll's green-swarded crown.

And Dorav Brink set to work building the huge stone-and-clay chimney that was to warm them in the winter ahead. The memory of Rea's words and the softness of her, kept intruding. Suddenly, he found himself longing for the comforts and the security of York Dome—he had been a peace guard, serving two hours every month—life had been soft and easy....

Savagely Brink swung his stone hammer, trying to smash his memories of mechanized, pleasant sloth as well as the harsh substance of the rocks.

It was another morning, the weeks of feverish planting and hunting for game to trade at the frozen locker plant at Center, were behind them. Now it was late summer on Sulle II, and even the early morning was uncomfortably warm.

Brink yawned and stretched luxuriously on his cot. Across the room Tzal still slept, her tousled, short-cropped hair faded by the sun, and her exposed firm flesh a ripe, golden-red. Her face was turned toward him and she was smiling faintly, as though at some pleasant dream fantasy.

Brink felt a pleasant lethargy. Tzal was a good partner, she never criticized without reason, and he trusted her judgment. His eyes ranged over the cabin. It was stout and well-joined—and their hands had erected it. Their credits at the locker plant were growing, despite the disappearance of most of the wild herds of "cattle". In another eight or ten years they would have repaid the passage advances and own a valuable property.

It was odd, he thought idly, that he never considered any woman other than Tzal as his partner when he thought of the future. Actually, of course she would request a change of partners, as he also intended to do, at the year's end. If the Commission allowed it she might even specify Bryt Carby—they worked well together in the fields and forest, and the three of them were good friends.

Suddenly he was aware of Carby's voice shouting somewhere outside. Brink pulled on his knee-length shorts and a sleeveless tunic, and struggled into his high, clumsily cobbled boots of "cowhide". He took down his repeating weapon and pocketed a handful of cartridges.

"What's it?" asked Tzal sleepily.

"I expect something is after the herd again," Brink told her as he went out the heavy, double-planked door.

He could hear Carby clearly now. He was calling for Rea. Brink swore under his breath and turned to re-enter the cabin, but Carby had seen him and hailed him.

"Rea left in the night," the big man said. "She took one of the horses and a rifle. And she left a note. Says she is going back to live in one of the domes."

Brink whistled. The "horse" she had taken, actually a ystan according to the Commission, was only half-broken and a giant animal three times as large as its Earthly counterpart.

"The loneliness must have driven her insane," the big man cried. "We've got to follow her—get her to come back."

Carby's eyes were wild. He clamped Brink's right shoulder.

"Are you coming or not, Dorav? She needs us. We've got to find her."

The big man's eyes leaked tears. Brink realized, astounded, that the selfish, shallow, lazy woman—the woman, Rea Smyt—had won Carby's love.

"Of course, Bryt. I'll help you search."

"I will go too." Tzal's eyes were steady. "We must work together. When our child is born another woman will be needed."

Brink opened his mouth to object—closed it.

"Of course, but whether Rea is the one to...."

"She is a woman." Tzal smiled faintly and nodded.

"I'll follow her tracks, the ystan's tracks, westward across the park," Bryt Carby said impatiently. "She must head south or north to climb out of the valley. You, Tzal, go to the north end of the valley and pick up the trail—if it's there."

He shook the graying coarse hair out of his reddened eyes.

"You go south, Dorav. I'll meet up with you in a few hours if the trail leads in that direction. If neither of you find a trail and a day passes, I suggest that you return to the cabins."

"Best plan," Brink agreed. He called in to Tzal: "I'll saddle up."

"Right with you," his partner replied.

But, with the approach of night, Brink's big black ystan and his saddle-weary rider followed alone on the trail. Rea's partner had not overtaken Brink as he had promised.

The trail was clearcut and easy to follow—Rea was letting her mount race at top speed southward along the dirt crusted ancient highway. And Brink's half-tamed black stallion was endowed with stamina and speed that Carby's dun mare could never match.... Now, darkness had blanked out the spoor.

At a miniature park's brush-screened entrance, Brink urged the weary ystan into the natural hedge of leafy growth. The big black snorted half-hearted protest and reared as branches clawed and stung him. When they were through they were in a broad grassy meadow, and in the fading light of a full moon jagged ruins stood etched against the darker trees.

He did not attempt any exploration until he had eaten of fire-warmed, greasy meat and portions of bread sopped in the frying pan. Then he took a flaming branch, as thick through as his lower leg, and carried this rude torch into the ruins.

What had once been a street lay before him. Jumbled walls of brick and stone marked widely separated buildings.

In all, he counted no less than forty-five mounds, when he came across an isolated squared block of stone tilted at an awkward angle and half buried. And cut into the stone was a blurred inscription.

The lettering was alien, yet somehow, achingly familiar. Brink dropped to his knees to clean away the concealing sod; but the spell of concentration was broken by a racing, swelling tattoo of hoofbeats. He sprang to his feet, remembering that he had left his rifle near the fire.

The rider could be Bryt Carby—or it could be some, as yet undiscovered savage, native to the planet, or even Rea returning in panic.

He found his rifle, stepped through the rim of bushes beside the ancient highway and waited in their shadow. The indistinct bulk of a ystan grew larger in the pale light of Sulle II's lone satellite. At first Brink could see no rider; then he saw the huddled lump of darkness above the saddle. He stepped out into the road.

"Rea?" he said. His rifle lifted above the horizontal, its butt at his hip.

"Woa," the rider moaned faintly, and the trembling ystan came to a drooping stand.

Brink reached up to the rider to help her down.

"No," Rea whispered. "Hide me—hide—horse. Savages...."

Brink grunted under his breath and tugged at the steaming ystan's bit to lead the beast off the highway. They pushed through the clawing branches, the ystan's breathing stentorian and ragged. The exhausted mount was dying on its feet.

They had scarcely reached the open meadow within, when the ystan collapsed. Rea fell with him, her right leg pinned under the twitching wet hulk. As Brink tugged her leg free, she groaned and went limp in his arms. Only then did he feel the stickiness of half-dried blood on her tunic and discover the sharp arrowhead that projected a full two inches from the front of her left shoulderblade.

Gently he whittled at the arrow's exposed shaft until the irregular metal head dropped off and then he jerked the arrow from the wound. He was glad that she was unconscious.

The distant voices of humans, shouting unintelligible phrases, warned him of the approach of the savages. The fire! With his hands he smothered and buried the flames. It was possible that the aborigines might pass them by. He could not banish the smell of smoke as he had the telltale glow of the coals, but the direction of the wind might protect them....

The stiffening loom of the ystan lay between them and the park's brushy entrance. Carefully he slid his rifle up and over the saddle.

Voices and the sliding, chomp-tramp of hide-shod feet came and passed on. They had missed the break in the return tracks of Rea's ystan. Or, perhaps, the hoofprints of Brink's mount seemed to them a continuation of her spoor.

"I am awake," a small voice whispered beside him.

"Are you in pain, Rea?"

"Not much. Too near being dead for that. I'm done."

"No chance." Brink's voice was flat and false. She must have lost most of her blood. "How did it happen?"

"Was heading south on this highway. Planned to turn east soon. To Denver or some other deserted city where I might find a tube shuttle to Sippi Dome. You realize—this is really Earth?"

"Just now," Brink agreed gruffly. "Found a cornerstone. Must have been a public building—a bank they called it. This was Collrada Nation, or State."

"I knew ... weeks ago. Tried to tell you. So ... started alone."

She sat up suddenly, as though propelled by springs, and her good arm motioned toward the moonlit heights. She tried to say something, choked, and fell back.

There was no pulse....

The third day after Rea's death. Three days, and three of the hairy, half-naked white savages, he thought grimly. He had never killed a fellow being before—in York Dome hatred and love and loyalty were mere words from the barbarian centuries—but now he had destroyed three of his own kind. Nor did he feel any shame or regret....

The savages on Rea's backtrail had come upon Bryt Carby. He had killed one of them before they had overpowered him and built their fires.

Carby had not died until an hour after Brink had come upon the howling pack of six warriors and had emptied his gun into them. He had killed two of them outright and wounded three others; and then he had cared for the broken, blistered thing that had been his friend, until Carby died.

Now he watched before the cave where two savages lay hidden—and he watched the growing swarmings of green-bodied flies about the elevated rocky lip of their shelter.

The warriors must not escape to carry word back to their tribesmen of the settlement of the men from York Dome....

At a sound from behind him, he turned about, his rifle butt dug into his shoulder and chest, his finger pressing the firing button.

"Tzal!"

Behind the boulder overlooking the savages' rocky death trap he took her in his arms. She was Tzal, smiling and full-bodied as always, and his partner for this year and for the other years. The years yet to come.

She was dirt-streaked and sweaty. Her clothes were torn and her hair was matted and discolored with dust. Weariness darkened the skin beneath her eyes.... She was beautiful!

"Where," she asked him after a time, "are they hidden?"

"Up there, just back of those—"

He spun about, racing back to where he had dropped his rifle. The two savages, wounded and limping grotesquely, were scuttling toward a broken jumble of rock fragments. Once hidden there they might work up the slope and escape.

Tzal's rifle cracked, once, twice, even as he turned and brought up his own weapon. A defiant yell slapped across the rocky slot and an arrow thudded weakly at Tzal's feet. Brink's thumb hit the firing button and the warrior spun about and fell across the man Tzal had shot.

For now the settlements were safe. The colonists, bargaining years of hard work for a supposed passage to a distant unsettled world, were secure from attack. Only a few hours from their luxurious home domes, they could sweat and toil and suffer as the hardy explorers of the earlier centuries must have done.

Dorav Brink wanted to laugh—to tell Tzal and the others of the colossal duping they had experienced. Yet he kept silent. From the evil of the trickery a great good might come. For the first time in centuries men were living an active, brain-stimulating life.

Let the great hothouse domes with their dwarfish inbred animals in their parks, and their controlled atmosphere, and odor content index, and mass-produced pleasure booths go their way. Let the pale, thready-muscled humans nibble their synthetic promines and yea-steaks—the pioneers had no need for substitutes....

Brink's arm went around Tzal's shoulders and he was looking into her shaken, tear-stained eyes. He smiled. It was the first time he had ever seen his placid partner so moved.

"All this," Brink said, his hand sweeping, "for our son, and for the sons to follow him. Our children will make of Sulle II a better world than Earth."

Tzal's lips trembled. She had not heard him, he thought. His head lifted yet higher and he filled his lungs with the crisp upland air. Tzal was clinging to him, depending on him....

Precisely, perhaps, as Tzal wished him to feel.