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When he thought the sleeve was sealed, he withdrew it. “Cut blast,” he whispered. “Come and get me.” His airtanks fed him oxygen, pressure climbed again inside the suit. It was good to float at the end of a life line, breathing. Until he began to strangle on his own blood. Then he gave up and accepted the gift of darkness.

XII.

N

OW, about winter solstice, day was a pale glimmer, low in the south among steel-colored clouds. Tamara had

been walking since the first light sneaked across the ocean, and already the sun was close to setting. She wondered if space itself could be blacker than this land. At least you saw the stars in space. On Skula you huddled indoors against the wind, and the sky was a blind whirl of snow.

A few dry flakes gusted as she came down off the moor to the beach. But they carried no warmth with them, there was not going to be a snowfall tonight. The wind streaked in from a thousand kilometers of Atlantic and icebergs. She felt the cold snap its teeth together around her; a hooded cloak was small protection. But she would not go back to the house. Not till day had drained from the world and it would be unsafe to remain outdoors.

She said to herself, drearily: “I would stay here even then,

except it might harm the child, and the old man would come looking for me. David, help me, I don’t know which would be worse!”

There was a twisted pleasure in being so honest with her­self. By all the conventions, she should be thinking only of David’s unborn baby, herself no more than its vessel. But it was not real to her . . . not yet . . . so far it was only sick­ness in the mornings and bad dreams at night. The reality was Magnus Ryerson, animallike hairiness and a hoarse grumble at her for not doing the housework his way and incomprehen­sible readings aloud—his island and his sea and his language lessons!

For a moment her hands clawed together. If she could so destroy Magnus Ryerson!

She fought for decorum. She was a lady. Not a technic, but still a professor’s daughter; she could read and write, she had learned to dance and play the flute, pour tea and embroider a dress and converse with learned men so they were not too bored while waiting for her father . . . the arts of gracious­ness. Her father would call it contrasocial, to hate her hus­band’s father. This was her family now.

But.

Her boots picked a way down the hillside, through snow and heather bushes, until she came out on a beach of stones. The sea came directly in here, smashing at heaped boulders with a violence that shivered through the ground. She saw how the combers exploded where they struck. Spindrift stung her skin. Beyond the rocks was only a gray waste of galloping white-bearded waves, and the wind keening down from the Pole. It rolled and boomed and whistled out there.

She remembered a living greenish blue of southern waters, how they murmured up to the foot of palm trees under infi­nitely tall skies.

She remembered David saying wryly: “My people were Northerners as far back as we can trace it—Picts, Norse, Scots, sailors and crofters on the Atlantic edge—that must be why so many of them have become spacemen in the last sev­eral generations. To get away!”

And then, touching her hair with his lips: “But I’ve found what all of them were really looking for.”

It was hard to imagine that David’s warmth and tenderness and laughter had arisen in this tomb of a country. She had always thought of the religion ‘which so troubled him—he first came to know her through her father, professor and student had sat up many nights under Australian stars while David groped for a God not all iron and hellfire—as an alien stamp, as if the legendary Other Race Out There had once branded him. The obscurity of the sect had aided her: Christians were not uncommon even today, but she had vaguely imagined a Protestant was some kind of Moslem.