The Earth Run

Jake Reilly was never meant to leave Kansas. He fixes pumps, patches fence, and keeps the Henderson place running because somebody has to. He's thirty-two, quiet with his hands, and certain no one should count on him for more than that.

The night a strange light comes down in the east section, Jake walks toward it because the pump out there sounds wrong. By the time the hatch seals behind him, he's aboard a survey ship from a human colony that left Earth a thousand years ago, bound for a world Earth lost track of before the Norman Conquest. Out there, for the first time, somebody needs exactly what he knows.