Jacob had been sick during the
entire trip back. First it was the mumps, swelling the undersides of his jaw
until he could take only liquids and swallowing took an effort of will. At the
height of the mumps, he got the measles, peppering his face like that of an
adolescent candy taster. Just as the measles retreated, their garnet speckles
fading to an inflamed rose color, they seemed to reassert themselves with
renewed vitality, but it turned out to be chicken pox and Jacob spent two days
in delirium, muttering about stampeding totenpferds circling around and
around and around the white walls of the ship's sickbay, their poisonous tails
flicking out just inches before his eyes and their hooves thundering and
deafening him even when he clapped his hands over his ears and screamed to
drown the pounding.

When Jacob regained his senses, he
realized the incongruity of the image. The wild totenpferds on Xenos IV,
the planet he had left only a month ago after seventeen years of life there,
were silent in spite of their horny hooves and deadly. The waist-high
"horses" crept up on a man and with a bullwhip flick of their tails
would cut through any fabric short of metal weave, scratching the skin of their
victim and depositing a poison that paralyzed the skeletal muscles, leaving the
prey still alive when a pack of "horses" began eating.

Only the domesticated totenpferd
was shod and made noise and the domesticated ones had their tails cropped,
a precaution more against potential lacerations by the tail than the poison
since all of Xenos's human colony had developed a tolerance to it through a
mandatory series of innoculations.

But now, as the ship dropped out
of hyperspace and the solar system appeared in the ports, Jacob had a sense of
coming home, a sense of exhilaration and excitement that momentarily suppressed
his remaining symptoms.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

Jacob looked around from the
viewport at Dr. Hurley. The ship's surgeon, a man about Jacob's age but unlike
Jacob, who looked ten years older than he was, Dr. Hurley looked younger,
except for the pattern of wrinkles splaying out from the corners of his eyes
and the forehead that was making its way through his hairline.

"Yes," answered Jacob
and turned back to the viewport. They had appeared in normal space about 500
million miles from Earth and the position of the moon, a half-moon from their
angle, made it appear the same size as Earth. But there was no mistaking which
was which. The moon was precisely divided into bright white and a black whose
only contrast with the space around it was an absence of stars, while
EarthEarth, thought Jacobwas a swirl of greens from jade to emerald and blues
as pale and watery in some spots as they were rich and deep in others. It was
Earth and Jacob felt an unexpected surge of emotion warm his cheeks as he
watched.

"You know, Doctor, I haven't
been back in seventeen years, since I left at fourteen," said Jacob, still
staring out the viewport, but sensing the other man's presence and attention.
"What's it like?"

"The same."

"The same?" asked Jacob,
turning his head to look at Dr. Hurley. "Only more so."

Jacob looked back at Earth. When
he spoke, it was in an abstracted way, as if more to himself than the doctor.

"Me, too."

"I know what you mean,
Jacob," said Dr. Hurley behind him. Jacob could see the doctor's
reflection in the viewport, staring past him at Earth. "Six months is
about the longest I'm gone, but even then I feel a certain elation during this
part of any trip. I look out at Earth and see that it's still there, unchanged,
the same as ever, a constant reference point and say, `Hurley, how have you
changed since you saw it last?' "

Jacob looked away from the
viewport and nodded down the corridor in the direction of the ship's lounge.

"Coffee?"

The doctor smiled and Jacob
realized Hurley had discovered his one passion, coffee. It wouldn't grow on
Xenos and the few ships that passed seldom carried enough for the colony. They
began walking toward the lounge.

"What kind of answers do you
get, Doctor?"

"To what?"

"When you ask how you've
changed."

"Oh, sometimes I get answers,
sometimes not. It depends on the trip. The point was that an approach to Earth
is somehow conducive to that kind of reflection. If there are any answers, that's
the time they come out."

The lounge door slid open ahead of
them and they walked in. It was a small room, empty at this hour of the crew's
workcycle, with a half dozen tables and one wall that dispensed the galley's
food from behind panels. Jacob gestured for Dr. Hurley to sit down and walked
to the wall, plucking two cups from the dispenser and filling them under a
shiny faucet. Steam rose from the cups and fogged the tap.

"How have you changed,
Jacob?" asked the doctor after Jacob put the cups on the table and sat
down.

"I can't really say. It's
been so long I feel like I'm a completely different person and at the same time
I'm the same. Except for my childhood on Earth, I grew up on Xenos."

"How do you feel?"

"Excited, anxious, I can't
put my finger on it exactly."

"No, I mean physically."


"The doctor in you is
asking." "Yes."

"Weak, I suppose. This trip
has taken a lot out of me. By the way, I think I'm coming down with a cold. Do
you have anything for it?"

The doctor thought a moment.

"Frankly, we've pumped you so
lull of antibiotics the last few weeks that it would be better if you just took
two aspirins"

"And went to bed."

"Yes. I wanted to talk to you
about that, Jacob."

"About what?"

"Your illnesses. When we get
in orbit, I'd like to do a few tests and have them sent down to Earth for
analysis before you go down."

Jacob had expected something like
this and as his illnesses had become more complicated, he had begun to dread
it.

"And if I flunk your
tests?"

"We don't have to worry about
that now. The tests are for your own benefit and safety. They won't delay you.
The information will be back before the first shuttle reaches our air
lock."

"What do you expect to
find?" "I hope nothing, Jacob."

 

Six hours later the ship was in orbit
around Earth, sweeping over continents every few minutes while the crew readied
it for the shuttles. Jacob was in his cabin, packing the few things he had
brought on the journey: a depthphoto of his family, Barbara, Jimmy and Peter; a
manuscript on Xenosian ecological cycles he had promised to deposit with
publishers on Earth as a favor to his employer, Dr. Sherman, who wanted to
avoid the possible delay of a year if he waited for one of the slow-moving
Federation mail packets to make its circuit past Xenos; and a carving of a totenpferd,
caught in a moment of anger with its wooden tail lashing out and its fierce
head turned back baring its teeth. It was made of Native Xenosian wood and
Jacob planned to give it to his older sister, a woman now in her early forties
who had remained behind with her husband after Jacob's parents decided to
leave.

"Jacob," said Dr. Hurley,
smiling out of the visiphone with the familiar walls of the sickbay behind him.
"I just wanted to let you know that I sent those tissue and blood samples
down with a supply shuttle. They should have them analyzed before the first
personnel boat gets here."

Jacob felt a momentary irritation
with the doctor, with this potential threat to his long awaited visit.

"What I want to know, Hurley,"
said Jacob, shaking the wooden totenpferd vigorously at the screen,
"is why no one thought of this sooner!"

"Jacob, they"

"Why did they let me get this
far just to throw up another barrier?"

"Jacob, please. I know it's
difficult, but your people on Xenos cleared you. They thought since you grew up
on Earth, you would have retained the normal immunities you developed in
childhood and there would be no danger in letting you return. We've been over
all this before, the first time you became ill. It's the reason you were
allowed to come but your wife and children had to stay behind. They had spent
too much of their lives on Xenos. Your people cleared you and we naturally
assumed"

"You should have had an
independent procedure. My people were wrong."

"Look, Jacob, Xenos is our
first experience with this kind of thing. It's the first colony to be
completely out of physical contact with Earth for almost a generation. I'm sure
in the future there will be procedures"

"That doesn't help me."

". . . And we don't know your
people were wrong yet, Jacob."

Jacob turned back to his open
suitcase and continued packing, positioning the wooden horse among his clothes
to avoid any chance of its breaking, but left the visiphone on. When he spoke,
his voice was soft but with a definite edge of controlled anger.

"Don't we, Doctor."

"Not until the tests are
completed."

"If you're so sure I'll pass
your tests, Doctor, how do you explain the fact that I've had every Earthbound
disease in the book since I came in contact with this crew? Anything they'd
been exposed to, I got."

"If you're so sure you'll
flunk" said Dr. Hurley. He paused for a moment and Jacob looked up at the
screen to see the cause of the interruption. The blue sleeved arm of an Earth
shuttle crewman was handing Dr. Hurley a manifest which he glanced over
briefly, signed and returned to the hand extended into view of the visiphone.
He looked up at Jacob. "If you're so sure you'll flunk, why are you
packing?"

Jacob glanced down at the
half-filled suitcase and his anger broke, his intense expression dissolving
into a self-conscious smile.

"All right, so the tests are
still out."

The doctor nodded.

"How about some coffee in the
lounge?" asked Jacob.

"Why not the forward
observation room?" suggested Dr. Hurley. "No one uses it while we're
in orbit and you get an excellent view of Earth." The doctor reached
toward the screen as if preparing to touci it off, then looked up at Jacob.
"I'll bring the coffee."

"I may just stay on this
ship," said Jacob, "with service like that."

Dr. Hurley said nothing, his face
blank as if the appropriately glib response had been edited somewhere between
the sickbay and the screen in Jacob's cabin.

"A half hour, then,"
said the doctor at last.

"Fine," answered Jacob
and the screen went blank.

 

The Earth, its dark side below
them as they sat in the contour chairs of the dimly lit observation room,
seemed to hang just outside the observation port, more like an ebony marble
suspended in some thick transparent liquid than a planet in space. Occasionally
a red spark became visible and grew as a shuttle cut up through the atmosphere
to service either their ship or one of the others Jacob knew were in orbit. The
coffee cup in his hand was still warm.

"I didn't start missing it
until I was about twenty," Jacob was saying. "Even then I didn't miss
it much. I had my studies. But after Barbara and I were married and Jimmy was
born, I started looking at Xenos. It isn't a place to raise children."

"One place is as good as
another," said Dr. Hurley, his face heavily shadowed in the dim light.
"To them it's home. Earth would probably be as strange to them as Xenos
was when you first arrived there with your parents."

"I don't think so. I've tried
to teach them about Earth, its history and heritage. They would know more about
it than I did about Xenos."

"Ancient Greece."

"Pardon me?"

"It's Ancient Greece to
them," said Dr. Hurley, without looking away from Earth. A thin slice of
reflected sunlight was appearing on one edge of the planet as the ship caught
up with dawn somewhere on Earth. "Something to be admired, even honored on
proper occasions, but it's not life for them."

Jacob looked past Earth, as if
better to compare it in his mind with Xenos, his children's world.

"Perhaps you're right,
Doctor."

They were silent a few minutes,
each sipping his coffee and following his own thoughts. Finally Dr. Hurley
gestured at Earth with his coffee cup.

"Who do you know down there,
Jacob?"

"My sister. She stayed behind
with her husband."

"Anyone else?"

"The people I went to school
with."

"Have they changed as much as
you have?"

"I suppose so. I can't really
say. If you're trying to soften the blow, that isn't the way to do it. I didn't
really come to see friends."

The doctor continued looking at
the Earth, now a quarter-Earth with distinguishable features beginning to show.
Jacob recognized Suez and Saudi Arabia, comparing them with the maps he had
studied before the trip.

"Why did you come,
Jacob?" Jacob thought a moment before answering.

"I'm an Earthman and I had to
know Earth once as an adult. What I am has developed here over the last million
years. It's the only planet in the universe where a naked man can stand on the
soil and feel at home."

"I've known men from a dozen worlds
who felt at home off Earth."

"But I'll never," said
Jacob before sipping the last of his coffee.

The doctor smiled. "No, I
suppose not. What do you do on Xenos?"

"Echo team."

"Do you like it?"

"Sure, most of the time. I'm
outside a lot, mapping the ecological systems of an area before a community
moves in. The only part of it that's dull is converting our data into a
usufructuary scheme."

"A what?"

"Regulations on land use to
keep the balance. Did you see that carving I'm taking to my sister? It's a good
example."

"The horse?"

Jacob nodded. "It's sort of
the jackal of Xenos. When the colony was first set up, they tried to wipe out
the totenpferd as a menace to human existence, or to domesticate it. The
result was a plague of Xenosian rabbits, little two-legged creatures that can
run as fast as a totenpferd but not quite as far. What we wound up doing
was innoculating everyone with totenpferd poison in small dosages until
they built up a tolerance. We had to adapt the people to the planet, not the
other way around."

"I'm sure that didn't make
the horses harmless," said Dr. Hurley.

"No, not harmless, but not
lethal either, and the balance was maintained. Anyway, that's what I do. It
takes several years to map an area properly."

"A frontiersman."

"In a way."

The doctor stood up, crushing his
cup and dropping it into a chute next to the observation chair.

"I'll let you know,"
said Dr. Hurley, nodding toward the Earth, "when they send up the
results."

"Thank you."

Dr. Hurley left and Jacob sat
alone for a while, watching the Earth. When he finally rose, the planet was
completely in sunlight. He could make out Africa below, though he could
distinguish none of its tribally balkanized nations. It was simply Earth, man's
home, but perhaps not his. Had Xenos been below him, he would have seen the
variety and diversity of human life in his mind's eye, superimposed on the
planet: The upland settlements with their hardy mountain men; the Xenos City
population, a city that would only be a backwater town on Earth but was the
only city on Xenos; a backwater worldall of the subtle differences that had
developed in the planet's twenty-year human history in spite of the homogeneous
nature of the original group, differences that would probably be as
indistinguishable to Dr. Hurley as the nations of Africa were to Jacob. But it
was Earth below him and the gift of its past to Xenos was the reason he had
come.

Several hours later, after the
purser made a general visiphone call to inform all passengers that the first
personnel boat had lifted off from Earth and that they were to report to the
transfer lock, Jacob went instead to sickbay.

Dr. Hurley was at his desk,
reading a report which he held up by one corner when Jacob entered to indicate
that it was the laboratory analysis they had requested. Jacob paid no attention
to it, but scrutinized Dr. Hurley's face instead. It was impossible to
interpret the doctor's impassive expression.

"Sit down, Jacob."

Jacob sat down in the chair next
to Dr. Hurley's desk.

"Is it yes or no?"

"Let me tell you about the
report first."

"Just tell me whether I
should finish packing or not. We can talk about the report after that."

"I can't tell you that,"
said Dr. Hurley, his expression more like that of the Dr. Hurley who had first
treated Jacob than the friend he had come to know on the trip. "The
decision is yours. All I can do is give you the information to base it
on."

Jacob gave an exasperated smile and
pointed assertively at the report on Dr. Hurley's desk.

"You know perfectly well that
what's in that report and what you tell me will control my decision. You can't
push it off onto me. I made a decision to go to Earth over a year ago."

"It isn't that simple,"
said Dr. Hurley, still with the same professional impassivity. "And I'm
not trying to evade any responsibility. The report says that the immunities you
developed as a child are either gone or minimal. According to the blood tests,
the reason for it is the immunities you developed on Xenos, both natural and
induced. They were antithetical to the immunities you brought from Earth. In
order to survive on Xenosand you did surviveyour system had to make a choice
of sorts. Were you sick much when you first arrived there?"

"Almost constantly for the
first year or so. Everyone was."

"Did anyone die?"

"Some did. Older people
mostly. My parents."

"Their systems couldn't
adjust," said Dr. Hurley, "Yours did."

"So that's that," said
Jacob. "I stay on the ship."

 

Jacob felt none of the relief he
had expected. They had the answers they had waited for, but somehow Dr.
Hurley's presentation had no ring of finality to it.

"Not exactly, Jacob. If you
went down to the surface and started playing tourist, I can almost guarantee
you would be dead within a month. I can't say of what, but it would happen. On
the other hand, there are drugs, immunizations, that sort of thing. After a
series of treatments and careful observation, your natural immunities would
develop. You were born on Earth, so the diseases you would be exposed to would
not be completely hostile."

"And Xenos?"

"As you said yourself, the
older people died. That might not happen in your case, but we don't know."


Jacob glanced down at the report,
then back up at Dr. Hurley. To see Earth again and walk on it had been a dream
that had grown over the years, grown until Jacob decided he had to go before he
was too old. When he was told Barbara and the children must stay behind, he
considered calling it off, but Barbara, knowing what Earth meant to him, had
convinced him to go. At last Jacob smiled. There wasn't really any decision to
make.

"I hope you haven't taken on
any new crewmen."

"Why?"

"I think I've had everything
this crew brought with them. I'd rather not be sick when I get back to
Xenos."

"I'll tell the purser,"
said Dr. Hurley.

 

A week later the big ship broke
orbit and headed away from the sun, preparing to shift into hyper-space. Jacob
and Dr. Hurley, whose duties during this part of a journey were minimal, stood
at a viewport, looking back toward Earth. The moon was out of sight behind it
and they were unable to see the sun from where they stood. The Earth hung in
space as if alone, obscured by cloud cover on its light side and with its continents
hidden, seeming like any of a thousand anonymous worlds.

Jacob's first feelings of
disappointment had passed, but as he made arrangements to send the carving and
manuscript down without him, he noticed that he still felt the tension he
associated with waiting for the laboratory analysis, as if something were still
unresolved. He thought of the call he had made to his sister that had died out
after five minutes for lack of anything to say, and the fact that she had
failed to recognize him when she answered. Yet that wasn't the source of his
uneasiness. It was something about himself, something he was unable to put his
finger on.

"I suppose the choice was
made before I left Xenos," said Jacob quite casually.

Dr. Hurley was quiet several
seconds before he responded.

"If it's any consolation,
Jacob, I sent in a report on what happened with recommendations for back up
procedures to catch this kind of thing."

Jacob was silent, examining
himself for any feelings of regret, or loss, as he watched the clouded planet
recede. The ship's bulkhead trembled slightly as the hyperspace drive locked in
phase. Outside the viewport, the Earth began to fade. As it disappeared, Jacob
thought of his wife and family, of his work and the new area of Xenos he would
begin mapping when he returned, of Xenos itself, not only his children's world,
but his own. He wondered whether there was one day at sometime during the past
seventeen years when he had ceased

to be an Earthman in anything but
spirit. He turned from the empty viewport to Dr. Hurley.

"Ancient Greece, Doctor." "Pardon me?"

"Nothing. How about some
coffee? I have to get my fill before I get home."