But, then, she had spent the first twenty-eight years of her life in the Solar System and she had done graduate work on Earth itself in her twenty-first to twenty-third years.

Odd how the thought of Earth periodically came to her and lingered. She hadn't liked Earth. She hadn't liked its crowds, its poor organization, its combination of anarchy in the important things and governmental force in the little things. She hadn't liked its assaults of bad weather, its scars over the land, its wasteful ocean. She had returned to Rotor with an overwhelming gratitude, and with a new husband to whom she had tried to sell her dear little turning world - to make its orderly comfort as pleasant to him as it was to her, who had been born into it.

But he had only been conscious of its smallness. ‘You run out of it in six months,’ he had said.

She herself hadn't held his interest for much longer than that. Oh well-

It would work itself out. Not for her. Eugenia Insigna was lost for ever between worlds. But for the children. Eugenia had been born to Rotor and could live without Earth. Marlene had been born - or almost born - to Rotor alone and could live without the Solar System, except for the vague feeling that she had originated there. Her children would not know even that, and would not care. To them, Earth and the Solar System would be a matter of myth, and Erythro would have become a rapidly developing world.

She hoped so. Marlene had this odd fixation on Erythro already, though it had only developed in the last few months and might leave just as quickly as it had come.

Altogether, it would be the height of ingratitude to complain. No-one could possibly have imagined a habitable world in orbit about Nemesis. The conditions that created habitability were remarkable. Estimate those probabilities and throw in the nearness of Nemesis to the Solar System and you would have to deny that it could possibly have happened.