Michael Daniels stood at the window and watched the ground crew at the Riverside development across the boulevard bring the houses in. The black foundation blocks gleamed wetly in the night and the Potomac, a quarter-mile beyond, was a sheet of inky darkness that picked up and reflected back the gleam of the landing lights.

Slowly, one by one, the houses came lumbering down out of the cloud-fogged sky, to stop above their assigned foundations, hovering there and moving slowly and deliberately to square their landing grids with the foundation patterns.

Patients coming in, thought Daniels. Or, perhaps, staff members returning from a holiday. Although there might be, as well, others who were unconnected with the hospital, either as patient or as staff. The town was crowded, with the regional bioengineering hearings due to open in a day or two. Space was at a premium and migrating houses were being squeezed in wherever accommodations could be found.

Far across the river, somewhere over Old Virginia, its lights dimmed by fog and drizzle, a ship was coming in, heading for a landing at the spaceport.

Following its flight, Daniels speculated from what far star it might have come. And how long away from home? He smiled ruefully to himself. These were questions that he always asked — a hold-over from a boyhood when he had held the hard determination that some day he would travel to the stars.

But in this, he knew, he was not unusual. Every boy, these days, dreamed of going to the stars.

Streams of moisture ran in jagged patterns down the smooth glass of the windows and beyond the windows the houses still came floating in, filling up the few foundations still available. A few ground cars went sliding smoothly along the boulevard, the cushions of air on which they rode throwing out a wide spray of water from the dampened surface. It was too foul a night, he told himself, for many floaters to be out.