Yet I might as well have been dead. My trip having been unauthorised, I had no radio with which to summon help. Nor had I a suit in which to attempt to extricate myself. Could I have climbed into a suit? That was doubtful with my ruined leg. I could do nothing but crouch there, waiting to die.
But the Martians look after their own. They had instituted a search once the buggy had been reported missing. When the dust storm died, they were out in strength.
I became hazily aware of a noise overhead. A man was scraping the dust away from a side window and looking down at me. I could not recognise his face, and fainted away.
When I roused, I was in a hospital bed, in the Reception House, coming round from anesthesia. A handsome but stern woman bent over me. Gently brushing my forehead with her hand, she said, ‘You see, it was irrational to take out an unauthorised buggy, wasn’t it?’ Those were the first words Mary Fangold ever said to me.
Only later did I find that my shattered right leg had been removed and a synthetic limb grown in its place.
Now I understood the meaning of the silver carp that my dear friend had shown me in a dream. It swam away from her to indicate that one could live well without legs.
Tom Jefferies came to visit me every day. It was he who had discovered me, trapped in my stolen buggy.
Perhaps he felt he had been given my life to compensate for the loss of Antonia’s. I loved him platonically. It was like a fairy tale. I clung to him. I could not let him out of my sight; he was to me the father and mother I had never had.
When I was out of hospital, I besought him and besought him, as a man of destiny, to let me love him and look after him. So I became his adopted daughter, Cang Hai Jefferies.
And all this time – little though I realised it – Tom was planning a constitution for Utopia, and holding discussions with people every day.
Testimony of Tom Jefferies