The First Day of Spring

"Do people live all over the planet?"

"On most of it. The land sections, that is. Of course, up by the poles it's too cold."

"But how do they know each other?"

He stopped walking and stared at her, not understanding for a minute. Girl's laughter came from the bushes, and the soft urging voice of one of the village boys. Max looked back at the fishermen and then down at Trina and shook his head.

"They don't all know each other," he said. "They couldn't."

She thought of New Chile, where her cousin Isobelle was married last year, and New India, which would follow them soon to the planet, because Captain Bernard had been able to contact them by radio. She thought of her people, her friends, and then she remembered the spacemen's far flung ships and the homes they burrowed deep in the rock of inhospitable worlds. She knew that he would never understand why she pitied the people of this system.

"I suppose we'll see them soon," sh