Chapter VIII

Phyllis let the deceleration press her into the cot and tried to relax. In ten minutes they would be disembarking in Landing City. Landing City, with its wide, paved streets and modern buildings, the neatly laid-out farms and the modern rocket port.

There was a clanging of bells, a sudden feeling of nausea, and she knew they had landed. In the excited buzz of conversation from the others, she got her small suitcase and filed toward the hatch.

They took her name and gave her the emigration bonus, and then she was on the ramp going down, smelling the cool fresh air and feeling a damp breeze against her face.

She looked down....

The modern rocket port was a scorched expanse of dirty ground, with a rusting shed at one end that she guessed was the office. Landing City was a collection of rundown shacks and corrugated huts with mud streets and wooden sidewalks running between them.

She should have guessed, she thought bitterly. She had been sold a bill of goods. And there was no going back now; she was stuck with it.

Stuck with it.

She took another look. At least it would be healthy, and there was something besides the concrete and granite of a city to look at. It wouldn't be day in and day out of sitting eight hours behind a typewriter, and then back to her lonesome two rooms for an evening of bridge or a night with a boring book.

And there was nothing wrong with the town that couldn't be remedied and improved with a little work. She and the others would see to that. Progress was going to hit Landing City whether the colonists like it or not.

The colonists....

She stared at the whiskery, ragged lot of men of all shapes and sizes that were waiting to welcome them.

They had probably, she thought queerly, never heard a lecture on art in their lives. And they wouldn't have any interest in historical novels and it was an even-money bet that bridge and canasta games would bore them.

They were _uncultured_, she thought happily, _thoroughly_ uncultured! Their main interest was probably in having a home and raising a family and working....

And with a shave and clean clothes, they might even be handsome! A dimly remembered poster of a blond-haired giant flashed into her mind, but she dismissed it. The men below had a hard, healthy look about them, a certain virility, an individuality that the pale men back on Earth, now that she thought of it, seemed to lack.

She was very definitely going to like it here.

Then she had a sudden, nagging thought.

How would the colonists take to her and the other bedraggled females?