Later that day, she overheard him tell Sam that, theoretically at least, there could be millions of versions of the Earth, each removed an infinitesimal point from the next. There was the chance the flaw in the torque motor, which still eluded him, might not automatically take them back to the right cross-section, even if he found it. They might have to make an incredible number of trials, and then again they might hit it on the very next combination.

"And you might not!" she cut into the conversation, with perhaps more acid in her voice than she intended. "It might not be your next, nor tomorrow, nor next spring--nor ever!"

Odd that she had felt an obscure satisfaction at the stricken looks on their faces when she had said it. Yet they had it coming to them. It was time someone shocked them into a sense of reality. It took a woman to be a realist. She had already faced the possibility and was reconciled to it. They were still living in an impossible dream.

Still she was sorry. She was sorry in the way she had always regretted having to make a bad boy in kindergarten go stand with his face to the wall. She tried to make up for it that evening.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"I understand," she said as they sat near the campfire outside the half-finished cabin. "You alter the torque, then try the various radio wave bands in the new position."

They both looked at her, a little surprised.

"It must be a slow and tedious procedure," she continued.

"Very," Sam said with a groan.

A shifting air current, carrying the sound of the waterfall, gave her an idea.

"Too bad you can't borrow the practice of Tibetan monks," she mused.

"They tie their prayers to a wheel, set it in a running stream. Every turn of the wheel is a prayer sent up to their G.o.ds. That way they can get their praying done for them while they go about the more urgent matters of providing a living for themselves and their families."

She hadn't meant it to be so pointed, implying that all they were doing was sending up futile prayers to unheeding G.o.ds, implying they should be giving more attention to setting in winter stores. But even so....

"Miss Kitty," Sam said in a kind of awe. "You are a wonderful woman!"

In spite of her sudden flush of pleasure, she was irritated. As pointed as she had made it, he had missed it.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

He turned and began talking excitedly to Lt. Harper. Yes, of course, they could rig up an automatic method instead of doing it by hand. It could be done faster and more smoothly with electric motors, but the idea was the same. If Lt. Harper could rig a trip to kick the warp over another notch each time, they could run it night and day. Just let some kind of alarm bell start ringing, if they hit anything at the other end!

The two of them jumped to their feet then, grabbed her arms, squeezed them, and rushed away to the little shed they'd constructed beside the lifeship to hold some of their scattered equipment.

She felt vaguely regretful that she had mentioned it.

Still she gained a great deal. The men finished the cabin in a hurry after that, and they put up their own bunkhouse in less than a week.

Both jobs were obviously not done by experts, and she had fussed at them, although not unkindly, because she had had to c.h.i.n.k such wide cracks with a mixture of clay and dried gra.s.s.

She moved into the larger cabin, discovered a dozen roof leaks during the first hard rain they'd had; got them patched, began molding clay into dishes and containers, started pressuring the boys to build her a ceramics kiln, began to think about how their clothes would eventually wear out and how she would have to find some way to weave cloth to replace them. Day by day she was less irritable, as the boys settled into a routine.

"I do believe," she said to herself one day, "I would be disappointed if they found a way back!" She straightened up and almost spilled the container of wild rice she had been garnering from the swampy spot at the upper reaches of the lake. "Why! The very idea of saying such a thing, Katheryn Kittredge!" But her heart was not in the self chiding.

But what reason, in heaven's name, would they have for staying here?

Three people, marooned, growing old, dying one by one. There was no chance for Man's survival here. From the evidence about them, they had come to the conclusion that on this New Earth, in the tree of evolution, the bud to grow into a limb of primates had never formed.

She turned and looked at the tall, straight pines ahead of her. She saw the deciduous hardwoods, now gold and red, to one side of her. Behind her the lake was teeming with fish. The spicy smell of fall was all around her, and a stray breeze brought a scent of grapes she had overlooked when she was gathering all she could find to make a wine to pleasantly surprise the boys.

She thought of the flock of wild chickens which had learned to hang around the cabin for sc.r.a.ps of food, the grunting lazy pigs, grown quite tame, begging her to find their acorns for them, the nanny goat with two half-grown kids Lt. Harper had brought back from a solitary walk he had taken.

New Earth was truly a paradise--and all to be wasted if there were not Man to appreciate it truly.

A thought knocked at her mind, but she resolutely shut it out, refused it even silent verbalization.

Yet, while she stooped over again and busied her hands with stripping the rice from the stalks without cutting them on the sharp dry leaves, she found herself thinking about Mendelian law. Line breeding from father to daughter, or brother to sister--in domestic animals, of course--was all right in fixing desirable traits, providing certain recessives in both the dam and the sire did not thus become dominant.

"There, Katheryn Kittredge," she mumbled with satisfaction. "a.s.suming the responsibilities of domesticity has not made you forget what you learned."

But the danger of fixing recessives into dominants through inbreeding was even less with half-brothers and sisters. Now daughters by one--er--sire could be bred to another sire to get only a quarter relationship to a similar cross from the other father--er--sire. She must work it out with a stylus in smooth clay. The boys had preempted every sc.r.a.p of paper for their pointless calculations. But she could remember it, and it would be valuable in breeding up a desirable barnyard stock.

Yet it was odd that she a.s.sumed two males and only one female!

Then and there, standing ankle deep in the bog of wild rice, muddy to her knees in her torn coveralls, slapping at persistent mosquitoes, she came to terms with herself. In the back of her mind she had known it all the time. All this was without meaning unless there was Man--and a continuity of Man. Even so little as this gathering of wild rice, before the migrating ducks got it, was without meaning, if it were merely to stave off death from a purposeless existence. If there were no other fate for them than eventually to die, without posterity, then they might as well die tomorrow, today, now.

The men were still living in a dream of getting back. No doubt their l.u.s.ting appet.i.tes were driving them to get back to their brazen, heavy-breasted, languorous-eyed hussies who pandered to all comers without shame! Miss Kitty was astonished at her sudden vehemence, the red wave of fury which swept over her.

But of course she was right. That was their urgent drive. "A male human is nothing more than a s.e.x machine!" Wasn't that what her roommate at college had once said? Or was it her maiden aunt who had dominated her widowed mother and herself through all the years she was growing up?

What did it matter who said it? She knew it was true. No wonder they were so anxious to get back to Old Earth! Her lip lifted in cynical scorn.

"You don't dare leave a young girl alone with a boy for five minutes,"

her aunt had once complained bitterly. "All they ever think about is...." her voice had dropped to a whisper and she had given that significant look to Katheryn's mother. But Katheryn had known what she meant, of course.

And it was true of all men.

Women, back on Old Earth, had looked at her with pity and a little contempt, because she had never, she had never.... But you didn't have to have first hand experience to know. She had authoritative knowledge gleaned from reading between the lines of the very best text books on abnormal psychology. She hadn't had to read between the lines of sundry surveys and reports. And if there had been no organized study at all, the movies, the TV, the published better fiction--all of it centered around that one theme--that one, alone, romanticize it or obscure it though they might.

It was all men ever thought about. And many women pandered to it--those sultry, shameless, undulating....

But Sam and Lt. Harper? It had been almost two months now since they had left Earth and those vile blondes. How had they restrained themselves during all this time!

Her fuming anger was suddenly overwhelmed by a warm rush of grat.i.tude, a sympathy which brought a gush of tears into her eyes to stream down her cheeks. How blind she had been. Of course! They were still bound by their gentleman's Word of Honor, given to her on that first night in the lifeship.

What splendid men! All right, so they had their faults; a little impractical, dreamers all, but with such n.o.bility of character, truly they were fit to be the fathers of a proud and n.o.ble race. And, in time, with herself to shape and guide them....

She straightened her aching back from bending over the rice reeds, thrust out her scrawny chest, and breathed deeply. She lifted her chin resolutely.

"Katheryn Kittredge," she said firmly. "A woman's place is more than merely cooking and cleaning and mending!"

Supper, that evening, was a dinner, a special dinner. She set before the two men a whole roast young tom turkey, with a touch of frosted persimmons mixed with wild honey to enliven the light meat. There was a dressing of boiled maise and wild rice, seasoned with wild onion and thyme. There were little red tomatoes, tough but tasty. There were baked yams. There was a custard of goat milk and turkey eggs sweetened with honey.