Julia Heller sighed, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and considered her final group of the day. The good news was, they were her final group of the day. The bad news was, they were on a school field trip.

Every Council Museum employee in their right mind loathed field trip groups, but nobody more than Julia Heller. Children scared her, with their inquisitive minds, boundless energy, and sheer unpredictability. She dearly hoped her mother wouldn’t have her specialize in pediatrics.

Six months before, Councilor Joanna Heller had abruptly decreed that her only daughter give up valuable study time in this, her final semester of undergrad, to work at the Council Museum. Of course, Julia knew it was to give her an appreciation of the Council’s long history and glorious work, but couldn’t she have gained that through study? Something, at least, that rarely involved anyone under four foot high.

But Julia Heller had been programmed before birth to do as she was told, so every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, she obediently took mass transport to the Council Museum and led tourists, time-killers, and--ugh--school groups around the museum.

The teacher shouted, "All right, everyone! Calm down! Sit, please. Sit! Billy, don’t think I don’t see that mini-gear you’ve got hidden. You’ll get it back after the trip. Everyone, quiet. Wonderful." She gave Julia a bright smile and sat herself by the troublesome Billy.

"Good morning, everyone," Julia said. "My name is Julia--"

"Everyone say hello, Julia!" the teacher chirped.

There was a lackluster chorus of "Hello, Julia," before the group fell silent again.

Julia hated it when that happened. She had to find her place in the script again. It was completely memorized, of course--one of the advantages of a literally perfect memory--but she still wasn’t comfortable reciting it after close to two months of working. "I’ll be your guide on today’s tour of the Council Museum. You’ll learn about the creation of the stations, the formation of the Council, and their joint history up to the present day."

"Big deal," Billy muttered, and was shushed.

Damn. Once again, she had to hesitate a moment to search out where she’d left off. "First, I’ll be showing you a short film about life before the stations." She hit a few switches, and the room plunged into darkness. There was the obligatory pretend scream from one of the girls, and woo-woo noises from some of the boys. Julia hit another button, and an enormous holograph of the earth sprang up before them. A portentous voice said, "This is the planet Earth, the cradle from which mankind sprang--"

Julia ignored the ridiculous, overblown narration and kept her eyes on the audience. It was part of her job to make sure there wasn’t any mischief in the dark. She still remembered with extreme distaste the one time she’d had to ask that pilot and his girlfriend to leave the theater.

There shouldn’t be any trouble of that kind with this group, of course, but they could think up other types. Even as she looked at him, Billy licked his index finger and started to stick it in the ear of the girl just in front of him. The teacher’s hand whipped out, caught his wrist, and pressed his arm back down to his side. "Watch the movie," she said in an undertone that somehow managed to sound sunny and threatening at the same time. "It’s very interesting."

She was one of the few who thought so. Most of the children were squirming, whispering, or flat-out dozing. Only a few were paying attention, one of whom was the girl right in front of Billy. She was so fascinated that she had no idea how narrowly she’d escaped a wet willy.

"Even when they first ventured into space," the narrator boomed, "mankind had no inkling that they could one day live there. Indeed, one early explorer complained, ‘You look down and you get homesick. You want some sunshine, fresh air, you want to wander in the woods.’ Of course, living on Earth soon came to be very dangerous. Acid rain, pollution, and--"

"Ow!" shrieked someone else, further down the front row. "Miss Hoover! Miss Hoover! Billy threw something at me!"

"--created a hostile--" the narrator continued with the blithe unconcern of a recording.

"Did not!"

"Did too!"

"--and soon--"

"Billy! Joshua! Quiet, both of you. Billy, this is your second strike. You know what a third one means."

Billy’s lower lip poked out, and he slid down in his seat. But he didn’t do anything for the rest of the short film.

"And today, we have achieved what was once thought impossible--a world that is wholly under human control."

With deep relief, Julia turned off the projector and flicked on the lights. "If there are no questions," she announced, "we’ll continue on to the museum’s recreation of--" Uh-oh. A hand. It was attached to the arm of the girl in the front row, Billy’s would-be victim. "Yes?" she asked warily. "You had a question?"

"Yes," the girl said. "The man who was homesick. Who was he?"

What? What kind of question was that?

Another boy said with deep scorn, "Don’t be dumb, Molly, she’s not going to know that."

Julia’s spine stiffened. Nobody, especially not some seven-year-old snot, told Julia Heller she didn’t know something. "His name was Vladislav Volkov," she said. "He was a cosmonaut. A cosmonaut is--"

"I know what a cosmonaut is," the girl said. "Did he ever get home?"

A round of groans and mutters circled the room. "Geez--"

"How dumb--"

"C’mon, Molly--"

"Did he?" Molly persisted.

"No," Julia said. "This was before space travel was perfected. There was a leak in their capsule that let all their air out before they could completely re-enter the atmosphere. He and the two other crew members died."

There was a shocked silence. Even Billy looked a little impressed by this.

"He never got home?" Molly said. "Alive, I mean?"

"No," Julia said. A surprising ache settled into her stomach. "I--I suppose it’s rather sad, isn’t it?"

"Uh-huh," Molly said softly.

Julia swallowed once, then again. "We have a tour to continue," she said, turning toward the door and scrambling to find her place in her mental script. "If you’ll all just follow me, you can walk through a recreation of the first permanent residential station in orbit, owned and operated by the corporation that would one day become the Council."

She led the remainder of the tour on autopilot, rattling off her script with practiced efficiency and answering the occasional question. There weren’t any more from Molly, who wandered along at the back of the group, glancing at the displays of station evolution and Council history with little interest.

After the tour group left, Julia went back into the holo-theater to make sure everything was shut down. She hesitated, looking at the controls. Then, acting on a rare impulse, she turned off the lights, hit the switch for the film, and paused it, leaving the great holo of the earth hanging in the air. She sank into a seat in the front row, staring up at the swirl of clouds, the brown-green land masses underneath, and the broad, deep blue of the ocean.

You want some sunshine, fresh air, you want to wander in the woods . . .

She'd never wandered in the woods. Not even in VR. She had other priorities, like her studies, and . . . and her studies.

What would it be like to smell fresh air? Real fresh air? To stand in sunlight? She could almost feel it, warm on her hair, the breeze whispering against her skin--

The door opened. "Julia? Are you in there? We're closing up."

Julia leapt to her feet. "Sorry, I--"

The other tour guide, another student, came in and looked at the planet hanging in the air. "Why are you sitting here alone in the dark? Testing out the projector?"

"Yes, it--uh--hiccuped during my last group." Flustered, Julia shut off the projector and followed the other guide out to the staff lockers. "Is everyone waiting?"

"Yeah, let's go."

"Coming."

She scrambled to gather her things and almost ran out the door when the docent let them go, but she got to the train platform just as the one she rode three nights a week pulled away. Damn. Now she’d have to wait ten minutes for the next one, and that would throw off her entire study schedule for the evening.

And why? Because she’d wasted time mooning over a world that was gone.

There was no fresh air anymore. It was choked with smog, and even if the sun could get through, it would either give you third-degree burns or instigate malignant tumors, if not both. There weren’t even any more woods. They were burned-out sticks or bare wasteland. The only healthy trees left were in the DNA databanks maintained in the station museums.

She sat on the steel bench, clutching her bag in her lap, looking around at the dull grey walls that threw back fuzzy reflections of all the other commuters. They stood or sat, chattering on gear, studying mag or news readers, or simply staring at the far wall with dull, patient eyes. They were content to be here, in a metal box, waiting for another metal box that would take them back to a third metal box, and so on, and on, and on into forever.

But this was her world, the one she’d been born into. It was silly, Julia admonished herself, to think so much of a place she’d never known, and never would.

It was even sillier to feel homesick.

FINIS