She felt, to be sure, a tumult which was fear of the unknown and relief from much greater fear of the familiar. She felt warm, prideful memories of the sight of Burl leading and commanding the others. She had absorbing fresh memories of the look and feel of sunshine, and mental pictures of sky and grass and trees which she had never seen before. Confusedly she remembered that Burl had killed a spider, no less, and he had shown how to escape a praying-mantis by flinging it at an ant, and he had grandly led the others up a mountainside it had never occurred to anybody else to climb. And the giant millipede would have devoured them all, but that Burl gave commands and set the example, and he had marched magnificently up the mountainside when it seemed that all the cosmos twisted and prepared to drop them into an inverted sky....
Saya dozed. And Burl sat awake, listening, and presently with fast-beating heart he slipped out of the entrance to the cave and stared about him in the night.
There was coolness such as he had never known before, but nightfall was not long past. There were smells in the air he had never before experienced,--green things growing, and the peculiar clean odor of wind that has been bathed in sunshine, and the oddly satisfying smell of resinous trees.
But Burl raised his eyes to the heavens. He saw the stars in all their glory, and he was the first human in two thousand years and more to look at them from this planet. There were myriads upon myriads of them, varying in brightness from stabbing lights to infinitesimal twinklings. They were of every possible color. They hung in the sky above him, immobile and unthreatening. They had not descended. They were very beautiful.
Burl stared. And then he noticed that he was breathing deeply, with a new zest. He was filling his lungs with clean, cool, fragrant air such as men were intended to breathe from the beginning, and of which Burl and many others had been deprived. It was almost intoxicating to feel so splendidly alive and unafraid.
There was a slight sound. Saya stood beside him, trembling a little. To leave the others had required great courage, but she had come to realize that if Burl was in danger she wished to share it.