Worlds Apart Read Online Free PDF

and sufficient reason, and can promise you it's safe?"
    "I suppose so. I mean, I expect that's what I mean."
    Rog grinned in return. They respected each other, he and Alice, and neither was likely to underrate the other. Having been, always, the leading boy and the leading girl among their contemporaries, they had spent their whole lives now in competition, now in alliance, now in a secret understanding, now at war. Rog didn't have to marry Alice to cement their understanding -- nothing could, break it.
    He climbed to his feet. "All right," he said, and raised his voice slightly. "June!"
    Everybody turned and looked at June. Taken by surprise, she put her chin up and came a step forward. Rog liked that. In a girl who would always be quiet and reserved, it was a good sign that when something startled her she came to meet it instead of retreating from it.
    "Never mind me, folks," he said. "Go back to your necking or whatever you were doing. June, let's take a walk, shall we?"
    June went pale. Rog wasn't really throwing his weight about. He had made a sort of preliminary announcement, and now everyone knew that Rog Foley was just about to ask June Smith to marry him. There was a buzz of talk as Rog took her arm and they went out. June was glad to get out in the open, even if that was a step nearer a proposal that was going to scare the life out of her.
    It was obvious to her as to everyone else that Rog could have any girl in Lemon. It had never occurred to her to work out what she would do if he asked her to marry him.
    It was flattering but terrifying. It was like being acclaimed as a heroine -- but having to commit the act of heroism first.
    It was the kind of thing that didn't happen to June Smith.
    5
    Mundan night was the only spectacle on the planet which transcended the Terran variety in grandeur. Mundan air was usually clearer than Earth's. When one raised one's eyes to the night sky, the stars exploded in one's face. They were bright and clear and warm, a million little fires burning in the fabric of space.
    Mundis had no moon, but often at night a glorious orange star would compensate for a dozen moons. The orange star wasn't a star at all, but Secundis, the sun's second planet. Brinsen's Star was a small sun, practically invisible from Earth, though the distance was oniy fourteen light-years. It hadn't been seen until the first observatory had been set up on the moon, clear of Earth's fog of air. Then very little attention had been paid to it, for it was a thing among the new glories that the lunar observatory revealed.
    It wasn't until a century later, when Earth was dying, and Venus and Mars were soon going to be dying, and the first interstellar flight was absolutely essential, that the astronomers checked the predictions of the chemists and physicists and said yes, it seemed they were right in suggesting that there was an Earth-type planet going round Brinsen's Star, though no one would ever see it even from the moon, and that even if it didn't have conditions close enough to those of Earth to support human life, very likely the second planet had. It was possible that both planets would be suitable; highly probable that one at least of them would be.
    The Mundis had never investigated Secundis. One planet was more than enough. It would be centuries before the Mundans, for all they knew the only human beings left in the galaxy, would be interested in another world.
    From the surface of Mundis, Secundis was usually a splendid sight. It was always predominantly orange, but it was shot with yellows and pinks and rubies and crimsons which changed as one watched. And Secundis had two satellites which shared in the spectacle. Secundis was occasionally less than eight million miles from Mundis, as at present, and it was considerably larger than the first planet.
    The silence of Mundis was relieved, for June and Rog, by the noise of the cattle close at hand and the muffled chuf-chuf-chuf of the steam engine which worked