It was autumn again, the second autumn since he had landed from the City of Asgard at Storisende and taken the Countess Dorothy home to Litchfield. Again the fields were bare and brown; all up and down the Gordon Valley the melons were harvested, and the wine-pressing was ready to start.  
The house was crowded today. All top-level Litchfield seemed to have turned out, and there were guests from Storisende, and even a few who had made the trip from Koshchei to be there, Simon Macquarte, the president of Koshchei Tech; Conn would always remember him in the screen threatening a whole planet with devastation. Luther Chen-Wong, the chief executive of Koshchei Colony. Clyde Nichols, the president of Koshchei Airlines.
 
He almost bumped into Yves Jacquemont, coming in from the hall. Jacquemont's beard had been trimmed down to a small imperial, and he was wearing the uniform of Trisystem & Interstellar Spacelines, nothing at all like a Federation[Pg 188] Space Navy uniform. He was laughing about something; he threw an arm over Conn's shoulder, and they went into the front parlor together.
 
"Oh, Gehenna of a big crop!" he heard Klem Zareff's voice, chuckling happily, above the babble in the room. "You wouldn't believe it. Why, we had to build six new vats...."
 
The thin-faced, white-haired man in the chair beside him said something. Mike Shanlee and Klem Zareff, old enemies, were now fast friends. Shanlee had come in from Force Command with Conn that morning. He had stayed on Poictesme as nominal head of Project Merlin, and intended to remain there for the rest of his life.
 
"Oh, there aren't any more farm-tramps," Zareff replied. "Everybody's getting factory jobs off-planet. I have an awful time getting help, and what I can get won't work for less than ten sols a day. Why, they're even organizing a union...."
 
There were feminine shrieks from across the room, and a stampede. The housecleaning-robot had come in, running its vacuum-cleaning hose around and brandishing its mops. He saw his mother break away from a group of older ladies and shout:
 
"Oscar!"
 
The robot stopped dead. "Yash'm?" a voice came out of it, Sheshan-accented.
 
"Go out!" his mother commanded. "Go to kitchen. Stay there."
 
"Yash'm." The robot floated out the door to the hall.
 
His mother rejoined her friends. Probably telling them, for the thousandth time, that her boy Conn fixed up the sound receptors and voice for Oscar. Or harping on how Conn had been telling everybody the truth, all along, and people wouldn't believe him.
 
Sylvie came up to him and caught his arm. "Come on, Conn; they're going to start the rehearsal," she said.
 
"They've been going to start it for an hour," her father told her.
 
"Well, they're really going to start it now."[Pg 189]
 
"All right. You two run along," Yves Jacquemont said. "And you'd better start rehearsing for your own wedding before long. The Genji will be ready to hyper out in another month, and I don't want to be at space when my only daughter gets married."
 
They pushed through the crowd, dragging Conn's mother with them toward the big living room beyond. On the way, Mrs. Maxwell stopped to try to drag Judge Ledue out of a chair.
 
............