MacAran met her lost eyes and said very gently, “Does it matter, Judy? We know. Maybe we’ll just have to wait, and start thinking in terms of generations, too. Maybe our children will all know.”
On the world of the red sun, the summer moved on. The sun climbed daily a little higher in the sky, a solstice was passed, and it began to angle a little lower; Camilla, who had set herself a task of keeping calendar charts, noted that the daily changes in sun and sky indicated that the days, lengthening for their first four months on this world, were shortening again toward the unimaginable winter. The computer, given all the information they had, had predicted days of darkness, mean temperatures in the level of zero centigrade, and virtually constant glacial storms. But she reminded herself that this was only a mathematical projection of probabilities. It had nothing to do with actualities.
There were times, during that second third of her pregnancy, when she wondered at herself. Never before this had it occurred to her to doubt that the severe discipline of mathematics and science, her world since childhood, had any lacunae; or that she would ever come up against any problem, except for strictly personal ones, which these disciplines could not solve. As far as she could tell, the old disciplines still held good for her crewmates. Even the growing evidence of her own increasing ability to read the minds of others, and to look uncannily into the future and make unsettlingly accurate guesses based only on quick flashes of what she had to call “hunch”–even this was laughed at, shrugged aside. Yet she knew that some of the others experienced much the same thing.
It was Harry Leicester–she still secretly thought of him as Captain Leicester–who put it most clearly for her, and when she was with him she could see it almost as he did.
“Hold on to what you know, Camilla. That’s all you can do; it’s known as intellectual integrity. If a thing is impossible, it’s impossible.”
“And if the impossible happens? Like ESP?”
“Then,” he said hardily, “you have somehow misinterpreted your facts, or are making guesses based on subliminal cues. Don’t go overboard on this because of your will to believe. Wait for facts.”
She asked him quietly, “Just what would you consider evidence?”
He shook his head. “Quite frankly, there is nothing I would consider evidence. If it happened to me, I should simply certify myself as insane and the experience of my senses therefore worthless.”
She thought then, what about the will to disbelieve? And how can you have intellectual integrity when you throw out one whole set of facts as impossible before you even test them? But she loved the Captain and the old habits held. Some day, perhaps, there would be a showdown, but she hoped, with a quiet desperation, that it would not come soon.
The nightly rain continued, and there were no more of the frightening winds of madness, but the tragic statistics which Ewen Ross had foreseen went on, with a fearful inevitability. Of one hundred and fourteen women, some eighty or ninety should, within five months, have become pregnant; forty-eight actually did so, and of these, twenty-two miscarried within two months. Camilla knew she was going to be one of the lucky ones, and she was; her pregnancy went on so uneventfully that there were times when she completely forgot about it. Judy, too, had an uneventful pregnancy; but the girl from the Hebrides Commune, Alanna, went into labor in the sixth month and gave birth to premature twins who died within seconds of delivery. Camilla had little contact with the girls of the Commune–most of them were working at New Skye, except for the pregnant ones in the hospital but when she heard that, something went through her that was like pain, and she sought out MacAran that night and stayed with him a long time, clinging to him in a wordless agony she could neither explain nor understand.
At last she said, “Rafe, do you know a girl named Fiona?”
“Yes, fairly well; a beautiful redhead in New Skye. But you needn’t be jealous, darling, as a matter of fact, I think she’s living with Lewis MacLeod just now. Why?”