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separated the wanted from the unwanted. It was easy to pick out and throw back the ones that Lela pointed out as inedible, to toss the others into a pail. Periodically, the girl took a pailful of the delicacies back to the floater.
    She was in a visible state of exhilaration. Her eyes flashed with excitement in the light reflections, her face was alive with color. Her lips parted, her nostrils dilated. Several times when Bouvy had moved farther from hearing she shrieked at Cargill, "Isn't it fun? Isn't this the life?"
    "Wonderful!" Cargill yelled back. Once he added, "I've never seen anything like it."
    That seemed to satisfy her and to a point it was true. There was a pleasure to open-air living. What she didn't seem to understand was that there was more to being alive than living outdoors. Civilized life had many facets, not just one.
    What concerned Cargill was the possibility that he might actually have to get used to this kind of existence. Indeed, it might be wise if he did. Here, in these free spaces, he might easily lose himself for a lifetime. Just what that would mean in terms of boredom, a sense of futility, he was not quite prepared to consider. At the moment, the prospect of such a limited life had frightening aspects.
    It was well after midnight before their activities ceased, and he was back in his cot, considering the events of the night. It struck him finally that the girl's actions had been most significant. Her seeking him out frequently, her attempt to convince him of the pleasures of floater life—they added up in very meaningful fashion; and he had had just enough experience with women to guess that she was lonely. Whether her goal included lovemaking, or rather, on what terms it would include love, depended on her upbringing. He surmised prudishness from the way she held herself. However, at the moment, he felt unprepared to take the preliminary actions necessary to overcome the resistance of the simple-minded girl.
    She came into his part of the ship a dozen times the next day. Cargill, who had unsuccessfully sought the secret of how to open the engine-room door, finally asked her how it was done. She showed him without hesitation. It was a matter of simultaneously touching both door jambs.
    When she had gone Cargill headed directly for the engine room, paused for a moment to study the engine —that proved a futile task, since it was completely closed in—and then slid the wall section into the floor and looked down at the ground beneath.
    The world that sped by below was a wilderness, but of a curious sort. As far as the eye could see were the trees and shrubery associated with land, almost untouched by the hand and metal of man. But standing amid weeds and forests were buildings. Even from a third of a mile up those that Cargill saw looked uninhabited. Brick chimneys lay tumbled over on faded roofs. Windows seen from a distance yawned emptily, or gazed up at him with a glassy stare. Barns sagged unevenly, and here and there the wood, or brick, or stone had completely collapsed, and the unpainted ruin drooped wearily to the ground.
    In the beginning the only structures he saw were farmhouses and their outbuildings. But abruptly a town flowed by underneath. Now the effect of uninhabited desolation was clearly marked—tottering fences, cracked pavement overgrown by weeds, and the same design of disintegration in the houses. When they had passed over a second long-abandoned town Cargill closed the panel that had concealed the window and returned uneasily to his cot.
    Coming as he did from a world in which virtually every acre of tillable land was owned and used by somebody, he was shocked by the way vast areas had been allowed to revert to a primitive state. He tried to visualize from what the girl had told him and from what he had observed how the devastation might have happened. But that got him nowhere. He wondered if the development of machinery had finally made agriculture unnecessary. If it had,