The first person narrator, still unnamed, has spent a month unaccompanied on the gloomy, cold and poisonous fifth planet of the system. Most of the colonists on Harbor have settled on a peninsula in the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere. Around the landing field, long grass rustles in the wind. In his later sf, Anderson usually describes some equivalent of grass on extra-solar terrestroid planets. Leaving his spaceboat, the narrator sees sunlight streaming from the blue sky, smells the land and hears the unseen sea: three senses.
Life is leisurely. The portmaster merely sits on a porch, smokes a pipe, watches the clouds and greets the returned space traveler. We begin to learn names. The portmaster, Tokogama, addresses the space traveler, Erling. The latter has traded machines for ores and alloys and has improved his communication with the inhabitants of the fifth planet. Flying his carplane low over woods and meadows, he returns to his house by the sea and thinks that it is good to be home. But where is home? They have been on Harbor for a mere three years and Erling:
"'...was one of those who voted to continue the search for Earth.'" (p. 14)
We begin to learn their predicament. Earthman, come home, go home, whatever?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
A small colony like that of Harbor, with only a few hundred people, wouldn't need much of a political structure or civil service. That's why the portmaster's job can be a part time and unpaid position. That will change, of course, as time passed and the colonists increased in numbers.
Ad astra! Sean
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