Base B was gone. In the little dell where there should have been a metal shed with a metal door leading underground, to safety, to home, to the Army, to a room where the ceiling whirled so familiarly (“a little bit of home”) and coiled thingamajigs ate whatever you dropped on the grassy floor, there was no metal shed and no metal door. There was something like a splotch of metal foil smashed flat and a ragged hole in the middle of it, and as they watched, something indeterminate came out of the hole. There was a faint noise in the sky.

“Scatter!” cried Alyx. “Down on your knees!” and as they stood there gaping, she slammed the three nearest across the face and then the others so that when the air vehicle—no one looked up to get a clear view of it—came barreling over the horizon, they were all down on their hands and knees, pretending to be animals. Alyx got down just in time. When the thing had gone, she dared to look into the dell again, where the indeterminate thing had split into four things, which stood at the edges of an exact square while a box the size of a small room floated slowly down between them. The moment it landed they burrowed into it, or were taking it apart; she could not tell. “Lie flat,” said Alyx softly. “Don’t talk. Gunnar, use your binoculars.” No decent knife, she thought wryly, not even a fire, but these marvelous things we do have.

“I don’t see—” began Iris spiritedly.

“Shut up,” said Alyx. He was focusing the binoculars. She knew about lenses because she had learned to do it with her own pair. Finally he took them away from his eyes and stared for a few moments into the snow. Then he said, “You can stand up now.”

“Is it safe?” cried one of the nuns. “Can we go down now?”

“The snow makes it hard to see,” said Gunnar slowly, “but I do not think so. No, I do not think so. Those are commercial usuforms, unpacking a food storage container. They are not Army. Army never uses commercial equipment.”

“I think,” he said, “that Base B has been taken,” and he began quite openly and unashamedly to cry. The snow of Paradise (for it had begun to snow) fell on his cheeks and mingled with his tears, fell as beautifully as feathers from pillows, as if Hera were shaking out the feather quilts of Heaven while the amateur explorer cried and the seven people who had looked to him as their last hope looked first at each other—but there was no help there—and finally—hesitantly—but frightened, oh were they frightened!—at Alyx.

“All right,” she said, “it’s my show.”

“Come on, come on!” she snapped, with all the contempt she could muster, “what’s the matter with the lot of you? You’re not dead; you’re not paralyzed; look alive, will you? I’ve been in tighter spots than this and I’ve come out; you there” (she indicated Machine) “pinch them awake, will you! Oh, will you snap out of it!” and she shook Gunnar violently, thinking him the most likely to have already recovered. He, at least, had cried. She felt surrounded by enormous puppies.

“Yes—yes—I’m all right,” he said at last.

“Listen,” she said, “I want to know about those things. When will there be another air vehicle?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“How long will it take them to unpack, unload, whatever?”

“About… about an hour, I think,” he said.

“Then there won’t be another box for an hour,” she said. “How far can they see?”

“See?” said Gunnar helplessly.

“How far can they perceive, then?” persisted Alyx. “Perceive, you idiot, look, see, hear, touch—what the devil, you know what I mean!”

“They—they perceive,” said Gunnar slowly, taking a deep breath, “at about three meters. Four meters. They’re meant for close work. They’re a low form.”

“How do you kill them?”

He indicated the center of his chest.

“Can we do it with a crossbow?” she said.

“Ye-es,” he said, “very close range, but—”

“Good. If one of them goes, what happens?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, sitting up abruptly. “I think nothing would happen for a few seconds. They’ve—” (he lifted the binoculars to his eyes again) “they’ve established some kind of unloading pattern. They seem to be working pretty independently. That model—if it is that model—would let one of them lie maybe fifteen-twenty seconds before radioing down for a removal…. Perhaps longer. They might simply change the pattern.”

“And if all four went dead?”

“Why, nothing would happen,” he said, “nothing at all. Not—not for about half an hour. Maybe more. Then they’d begin to wonder downstairs why the stuff wasn’t coming in. But we do have half an hour.”

“So,” said Alyx, “you come with me. And Machine. And—”

“I’ll come!” said Iris, clasping her hands nervously. Alyx shook her head. “If you’re discriminating against me,” said Iris wonderingly, “because I’m a girl—”

“No, dear, you’re a lousy shot,” said Alyx. “Gunnar, you take that one; Machine, that one; I take two. All of you! If they fall and nothing happens, you come down that slope like hell and if something does happen, you go the other way twice as fast! We need food. I want dried stuff, light stuff; you’ll recognize it, I won’t. Everything you can carry. And keep your voices down. Gunnar, what’s—”

“Calories,” said Machine.

“Yes, yes, lots of that,” said Alyx impatiently, “that—that stuff. Come on,” and she started down the slope, waving the other two to circle the little dell. Piles of things—they could not see very well through the falling snow—were growing on each side of the box. The box seemed to be slowly collapsing. The moving things left strange tracks, half-human, half-ploughed; she crossed one of them where a thing had wandered up the side of the hollow for some reason of its own. She hoped they did not do that often. She found her bare hands sweating on the stock of the bow, her gloves hanging from her wrists; if only they had been men! she thought, and not things that could call for help in a silent voice called radio, or fall down and not be dead, or you didn’t know whether they were dead or not. Machine was in position. Gunnar raised his bow. They began to close in silently and slowly until Gunnar stopped; then she sighted on the first and shot. They were headless, with a square protuberance in the middle of the “chest” and an assemblage of many coiled arms that ended in pincers, blades, hooks, what looked like plates. It went down, silently. She turned for the second, carefully reloading the bow, only to find Machine waving and grinning. He had got two. The fourth was also flat on the ground. They ran towards the big box, Alyx involuntarily closing her eyes as she passed the disabled things; then they leaned against the big box, big as a room. Piles of boxes, piles of plastic bladders, bags, cartons, long tubes, stoppers, things that looked like baby round cheese. She waved an arm in the air violently. The others came running, skidding, stumbling down the slope. They began to pick up things under Gunnar’s direction and stuff them into each other’s packs, whispering a little, talking endlessly, while Alyx squatted down in the snow and kept her bow trained dead-steady on that hole in the ground. There was probably not much sense in doing so, but she did it anyway. She was convinced it was the proper thing to do. Someone was enthusiastically stuffing something into her pack; “Easy, easy,” she said, and sighted on that hole in the ground, keeping her aim decent and listening for any improper sounds from above or below until someone said in her ear, “We’re done,” and she took off immediately up the slope, not looking back. It took the others several minutes to catch up with her. Thank God it’s snowing! she thought. She counted them. It was all right.

“Now!” she gasped. “We’re going into the mountains. Double quick!” and all the rest of the day she pushed them until they were ready to drop, up into the foothills among the increasingly broken rocks where they had to scramble on hands and knees and several people tore holes in their suits. The cold got worse. There were gusts of wind. She took them the long way round, by pure instinct, into the worst kind of country, the place where no one trying to get anywhere—or trying to escape—would go, in a strange, doubled, senseless series of turns and returns, crossing their path once, up over obstacles and then in long, leisurely curves on the flattest part of the hills. She kept carefully picturing their relation to the abandoned Base B, telling herself They’ll know someone was there; and then repeating obsessively Part of the landscape. Part of the landscape and driving them all the harder, physically shoving them along, striking them, prodding them, telling them in the ugliest way she could that they would die, that they would be eaten, that their minds would be picked, that they would be crippled, deformed, tortured, that they would die, that they would die, die, die, and finally that she would kill them herself if they stopped, if they stopped for a moment, kill them, scar their faces for life, disembowel them, and finally she had to all but torture them herself, bruise them and pinch them in the nerves she alone knew about until it was less painful to go on than to be goaded constantly, to be terrified, to be slapped and threatened and beaten. At sundown she let them collapse out in the open and slept immediately herself. Two hours later she woke up. She shook Gunnar.

“Gunnar!” she said. He came awake with a kind of convulsive leap, struggling horribly. She put an arm around him, crawling tiredly through the snow and leaned against him to quiet him. She felt herself slipping off again and jerked awake. He had his head in both hands, pressing his temples and swinging his head from side to side.

“Gunnar!” she said, “you are the only one who knows anything about this place. Where do we go?”

“All right, all right,” he said. He was swaying a little. She reached under the cuff of his suit and pinched the skin on the inside of his forearm; his eyes opened and he looked at her.

“Where… what?” he said.

“Where do we go? Is there any neutral area in this—this place?”

“One moment,” he said, and he put his head in his hands again. Then he looked up, awake. “I know,” he said, “that there is a control Embassy somewhere here. There is always at least one. It’s Military, not Gov; you wouldn’t understand that but it doesn’t matter. We’d be safe there.”

“Where is it?” she said.

“I think,” he said, “that I know where it is. It’s nearer the Pole, I think. Not too far. A few hours by aircraft, I think. Three hours.”

“How long,” said she, “on foot?”

“Oh,” he said, slipping down into the snow onto one arm, “maybe—maybe twice this. Or a little more. Say five hundred kilometers.”

“How long,” said she insistently, “is that?”

“Oh not much,” he said, yawning and speaking fuzzily. “Not much… two hours by aircraft.” He smiled. “You might have heard it called,” he said, “three hundred miles, I think. Or a little less.” And he rolled over on his side and went to sleep.

Well, that’s not so bad, she thought, half asleep, forgetting them all for the moment and thinking only of herself. Fourteen,fifteen days, that’s all. Not bad. She looked around. Paradise had begun to blow up a little, covering the farthest of her charges with drifts of snow: eight big, fit people with long, long legs. Oh God of Hell! she thought suddenly. Can I get them to do ten miles a day? Is it three hundred miles? A month? Four hundred? And food—! so she went and kicked Machine awake, telling him to keep the first watch, then call Iris, and have Iris call her.

“You know,” she said, “I owe you something.”

He said nothing, as usual.

“When I say ‘shoot one,’” said Alyx, “I mean shoot one, not two. Do you understand?”

Machine smiled slightly, a smile she suspected he had spent many years in perfecting: cynical, sullen, I-can-do-it-and-you-can’t smile. A thoroughly nasty look. She said:

“You stupid bastard, I might have killed you by accident trying to make that second shot!” and leaning forward, she slapped him backhanded across the face, and then the other way forehand as a kind of afterthought because she was tired. She did it very hard. For a moment his face was only the face of a young man, a soft face, shocked and unprotected. Tears sprang to his eyes. Then he began to weep, turning his face away and putting it down on his knees, sobbing harder and harder, clutching at his knees and pressing his face between them to hide his cries, rocking back and forth, then lying on his face with his hands pressed to his eyes, crying out loud to the stars. He subsided slowly, sobbing, calming down, shaken by less and less frequent spasms of tears, and finally was quiet. His face was wet. He lay back in the snow and stretched out his arms, opening his hands loosely as if he had finally let go of something. He smiled at her, quite genuinely. He looked as if he loved her. “Iris,” he said.

“Yes, baby,” she said, “Iris,” and walked back to her place before anything else could happen. There was a neutral place up there—somewhere—if they could find it—where they would be taken in—if they could make it—and where they would be safe—if they could get to it. If they lived.

And if only they don’t drown me between the lot of them, she thought irrationally. And fell asleep.

Paradise was not well mapped, as she found out the next morning with Gunnar’s help. He did not know the direction. She asked him about the stars and the sun and the time of year, doing some quick calculating, while everyone else tumbled the contents of their packs into the snow, sorting food and putting it back with low-toned remarks that she did not bother to listen to. The snow had lightened and Paradise had begun to blow up a little with sharp gusts that made their suit jackets flap suddenly now and again.

“Winter has begun,” said Alyx. She looked sharply at the explorer. “How cold does it get?”

He said he did not know. They stowed back into their packs the detail maps that ended at Base B (Very efficient, she thought) because there was no place to bury them among the rocks. They were entirely useless. The other members of the party were eating breakfast—making faces—and Alyx literally had to stand over them while they ate, shutting each bag or box much against the owner’s will, even prying those big hands loose (though they were all afraid of her) and then doling out the food she had saved to all of them. The cold had kept it fairly fresh. She told them they would be traveling for three weeks. She ate a couple of handfuls of some dried stuff herself and decided it was not bad. She was regarded dolefully and sulkily by seven pairs of angry eyes.

“Well?” she said.

“It tastes like—like crams,” said Iris.

“It’s junk,” said Gavrily gravely, “dried breakfast food. Made of grains. And some other things.”

“Some of it’s hard as rocks,” said Maudey.

“That’s starch,” said Raydos, “dried starch kernels.”

“I don’t know what dried starch kernels is,” said Maudey with energy, “but I know what it tastes like. It tastes like—”

“You will put the dried kennels,” said Alyx, “or anything else that is hard-as-rocks in your water bottles, where it will stop being hard as rocks. Double handful, please. That’s for dinner.”

“What do we eat for lunch?” said Iris.

“More junk,” said Raydos. “No?”

“Yes,” said Alyx. “More junk.”

“Kernels,” said Raydos, “by the way,” and they all got up from the ground complaining, stiff as boards and aching in the joints. She told them to move about a bit but to be careful how they bent over; then she asked those with the torn suits whether they could mend them. Under the skin of the suits was something like thistledown but very little of it, and under that a layer of something silver. You could really sleep in the damn things. People were applying tape to themselves when there was a noise in the air; all dropped heavily to their hands and knees, some grunting—though not on purpose—and the aircraft passed over in the direction of what Alyx had decided to call the south. The equator, anyway. Far to the south and very fast. Part of the landscape, she thought. She got them to their feet again, feeling like a coal-heaver, and praised them, saying they had been very quick. Iris looked pleased. Maudey, who was patching up an arm, did not appear to notice; Gavrily was running a tape-strip down the shoulder of one of the nuns and the other was massaging Raydos’s back where he had apparently strained something in getting up or down. He looked uncomfortable and uncaring. Gunnar had the professional smile on his face. My dog, she thought. Machine was relieving himself off to one side and kicking snow over the spot. He then came over and lifted one cupped hand to his forehead, as if he were trying to take away a headache, which she did not understand. He looked disappointed.

“That’s a salute,” said Raydos. He grimaced a little and moved his shoulders.

“A what?” said she.

“Army,” said Raydos, moving off and flexing his knees. Machine did it again. He stood there expectantly so she did it, too, bringing up one limp hand to her face and down again. They stood awkwardly, smiling at one another, or not awkwardly, only waiting, until Raydos stuck his tall head over her shoulder and said, “Army salute. He admires the army. I think he likes you,” and Machine turned his back instantly, everything going out of his face.

I cannot, thought Alyx, tell that bum to shut up merely for clearing up a simple point. On the other hand, I cannot possibly—and if I have to keep restraining myself—I will not let—I cannot, will not, will not let that interfering fool—

Iris burst into pure song.

“OH, SHUT UP!” shouted Alyx, “FOR GOD’S SAKE!” and marshaled them into some kind of line, abjuring them for Heaven’s sake to hurry up and be quiet. She wished she had never gotten into this. She wished three or four of them would die and make it easier for her to keep track of them. She wished several would throw themselves off cliffs. She wished there were cliffs they could throw themselves off of. She was imagining these deaths in detail when one of them loomed beside her and an arm slid into hers. It was Raydos.

“I won’t interfere again,” he said, “all right?” and then he faded back into the line, silent, uncaring, as if Machine’s thoughts had somehow become his own. Perhaps they were swapping minds. It occurred to her that she ought to ask the painter to apologize to the boy, not for interfering, but for talking about him as if he weren’t there; then she saw the two of them (she thought it was them) conferring briefly together. Perhaps it had been done. She looked up at the bleary spot in the sky that was the sun and ran down the line, motioning them all to one side, telling them to keep the sun to their left and that Gunnar would show them what constellations to follow that night, if it was clear. Don’t wander. Keep your eyes open. Think. Watch it. Machine joined her and walked silently by her side, his eyes on his feet. Paradise, which had sloped gently, began to climb, and they climbed with it, some of them falling down. She went to the head of the line and led them for an hour, then dropped back to allow Gunnar, the amateur mountain-climber, to lead the way. She discussed directions with him. The wind was getting worse. Paradise began to show bare rock. They stopped for a cold and miserable lunch and Alyx saw that everyone’s bow was unsprung and packed, except for hers; “Can’t have you shooting yourselves in the feet,” she said. She told Gunnar it might look less suspicious if. “If,” he said. Neither finished the thought. They tramped through the afternoon, colder and colder, with the sun receding early into the mountains, struggled on, climbing slopes that a professional would have laughed at. They found the hoof-prints of something like a goat and Alyx thought I could live on this country for a year. She dropped back in the line and joined Machine again, again silent, unspeaking for hours. Then suddenly she said:

“What’s a pre-school conditioning director?”

“A teacher,” said Machine in a surprisingly serene voice, “of very small children.”

“It came into my mind,” she said, “all of a sudden, that I was a pre-school conditioning director.”

“Well, you are,” he said gravely, “aren’t you?”

He seemed to find this funny and laughed on and off, quietly, for the rest of the afternoon. She did neither.

That was the night Maudey insisted on telling the story of her life. She sat in the half-gloom of the cave they had found, clasping her hands in front of her, and went through a feverish and unstoppable list of her marriages: the line marriage, the double marriage, the trial marriage, the period marriage, the group marriage. Alyx did not know what she was talking about. Then Maudey began to lament her troubles with her unstable self-image and at first Alyx thought that she had no soul and therefore no reflection in a mirror, but she knew that was nonsense; so soon she perceived it was one of their points (by then she had taken to classifying certain things as their points) and tried not to listen, as all gathered around Maudey and analyzed her self-image, using terms Trans-Temp had apparently left out of Alyx’s vocabulary, perhaps on purpose. Gunnar was especially active in the discussion. They crowded around her, talking solemnly while Maudey twisted her hands in the middle, but nobody touched her; it occurred to Alyx that although several of them had touched herself, they did not seem to like to get too close to one another. Then it occurred to her that there was something odd in Maudey’s posture and something unpleasantly reminiscent in the breathiness of her voice; she decided Maudey had a fever. She wormed her way into the group and seized the woman by the arm, putting her other hand on Maudey’s face, which was indeed unnaturally hot.

“She’s sick,” said Alyx.

“Oh no,” said everybody else.

“She’s got a fever,” said Alyx.

“No, no,” said one of the nuns, “it’s the drug.”

“What—drug?” said Alyx, controlling her temper. How these people could manage to get into such scrapes—

“It’s Re-Juv,” said Gavrily. “She’s been taking Re-Juv and of course the withdrawal symptoms don’t come on for a couple of weeks. But she’ll be all right.”

“It’s an unparalleled therapeutic opportunity,” said the other nun. Maudey was moaning that nobody cared about her, that nobody had ever paid any attention to her, and whereas other people’s dolls were normal when they were little, hers had only had a limited stock of tapes and could only say the same things over and over, just like a person. She said she had always known it wasn’t real. No one touched her. They urged her to integrate this perception with her unstable self-image.

“Are you going,” said Alyx, “to let her go on like that all night?”

“We wouldn’t think of stopping her,” said Gavrily in a shocked voice and they all went back to talking. “Why wasn’t your doll alive?” said one of the nuns in a soft voice. “Think, now; tell us, why do you feel—” Alyx pushed past two of them to try to touch the woman or take her hand, but at this point Maudey got swiftly up and walked out of the cave.

“Eight gods and seven devils!” shouted Alyx in her own language. She realized a nun was clinging to each arm.

“Please don’t be distressed,” they said; “she’ll come back,” like twins in unison, only one actually said “She’ll return” and the other “She’ll come back.” Voices pursued her from the cave, everlastingly those damned voices; she wondered if they knew how far an insane woman could wander in a snowstorm. Insane she was, drug or no drug; Alyx had seen too many people behave too oddly under too many different circumstances to draw unnecessary distinctions. She found Maudey some thirty meters along the rock-face, crouching against it.

“Maudey, you must come back,” said Alyx.

“Oh, I know you,” said Maudey, in a superior tone.

“You will get lost in the snow,” said Alyx softly, carefully freeing one hand from its glove, “and you won’t be comfortable and warm and get a good night’s sleep. Now come along.”

Maudey smirked and cowered and said nothing.

“Come back and be comfortable and warm,” said Alyx. “Come back and go to sleep. Come, dear; come on, dear,” and she caught Maudey’s arm with her gloved hand and with the other pressed a blood vessel at the base of her neck. The woman passed out immediately and fell down in the snow. Alyx kneeled over her, holding one arm back against the joint, just in case Maudey should decide to get contentious. And how, she thought, do you get her back now when she weighs twice as much as you, clever one? The wind gave them a nasty shove, then gusted in the other direction. Maudey was beginning to stir. She was saying something louder and louder; finally Alyx heard it.

“I’m a living doll,” Maudey was saying, “I’m a living doll, I’m a living doll, I’m a living doll,” interspersed with terrible sobs.

They do tell the truth, thought Alyx, sometimes. “You,” she said firmly, “are a woman. A woman. A woman.”

“I’m a doll!” cried Maudey.

“You,” said Alyx, “are a woman. A woman with dyed hair. A silly woman. But a woman. A woman!”

“No I’m not,” said Maudey stubbornly, like an older Iris.

“Oh, you’re a damned fool!” snapped Alyx, peering nervously about and hoping that their voices would not attract anything. She did not expect people, but she knew that where there are goats or things like goats there are things that eat the things that are like goats.

“Am I damned?” said Maudey. “What’s damned?”

“Lost,” said Alyx absently, and slipping her gloved hand free, she lifted the crossbow from its loop on her back, loaded it and pointed it away at the ground. Maudey was wiggling her freed arm, with an expression of pain. “You hurt me,” she said. Then she saw the bow and sat up in the snow, terrified, shrinking away.

“Will you shoot me, will you shoot me?” she cried.

“Shoot you?” said Alyx.

“You’ll shoot me, you hate me!” wailed Maudey, clawing at the rock-face. “You hate me, you hate me, you’ll kill me!”

“I think I will,” said Alyx simply, “unless you go back to the cave.”

“No, no, no,” said Maudey.

“If you don’t go back to the cave,” said Alyx carefully, “I am going to shoot you,” and she drove the big woman in front of her, step by step, back along the narrow side of the mountain, back on her own tracks that the snow had already half-obliterated, back through Paradise to the opening of the cave. She trained the crossbow on Maudey until the woman stepped into the group of people inside; then she stood there, blocking the entrance, the bow in her hand.

“One of you,” she said, “tie her wrists together.”

“You are doing incalculable harm,” said one of the nuns.

“Machine,” she said, “take rope from your pack. Tie that woman’s wrists together and then tie them to Gavrily’s feet and the nuns’ feet and Iris’s. Give them plenty of room but make the knots fast.”

“I hear and obey,” said Raydos dryly, answering for the boy, who was apparently doing what she had told him to.

“You and Raydos and I and Gunnar will stand watch,” she said.

“What’s there to watch, for heaven’s sake,” muttered Iris. Alyx thought she probably did not like being connected to Maudey in any way at all, not even for safety.

“Really,” said Gavrily, “she would have come back, you know! I think you might try to understand that!”

“I would have come back,” said Maudey in a surprisingly clear and sensible tone, “of course I would have come back, don’t be silly,” and this statement precipitated such a clamor of discussion, vilification, self-justification and complaints that Alyx stepped outside the cave with her blood pounding in her ears and her hands grasping the stock of the crossbow. She asked the gods to give her strength, although she did not believe in them and never had. Her jaws felt like iron; she was shaking with fury.

Then she saw the bear. It was not twenty meters away.

“Quiet!” she hissed. They went on talking loudly.

“QUIET!” she shouted, and as the talk died down to an injured and peevish mutter, she saw that the bear—if it was a bear—had heard them and was slowly, curiously, calmly, coming over to investigate. It seemed to be grayish-white, like the snow, and longer in the neck than it should be.

“Don’t move,” she said very softly, “there is an animal out here,” and in the silence that followed she saw the creature hesitate, swaying a little or lumbering from side to side. It might very well pass them by. It stopped, sniffed about and stood there for what seemed three or four minutes, then fell clumsily on to all fours and began to move slowly away.

Then Maudey screamed. Undecided no longer, the animal turned and flowed swiftly towards them, unbelievably graceful over the broken ground and the sharply sloping hillside. Alyx stood very still. She said, “Machine, your bow,” and heard Gunnar whisper “Kill it, kill it, why don’t you kill it!” The beast was almost upon her. At the last moment she knelt and sent a bolt between its eyes; then she dropped down automatically and swiftly, rolling to one side, dropping the bow. She snatched her knives from both her sleeves and threw herself under the swaying animal, driving up between the ribs first with one hand and then the other. The thing fell on her immediately like a dead weight; it was too enormous, too heavy for her to move; she lay there trying to breathe, slowly blacking out and feeling her ribs begin to give way. Then she fainted and came to, to find Gunnar and Machine rolling the enormous carcass off her. She lay, a swarm of black sparks in front of her eyes. Machine wiped the beast’s blood off her suit—it came off absolutely clean with a handful of snow—and carried her like a doll to a patch of clean snow where she began to breathe. The blood rushed back to her head. She could think again.

“It’s dead,” said Gunnar unsteadily, “I think it died at once from the bolt.”

“Oh you devils!” gasped Alyx.

“I came out at once,” said Machine, with some relish. “He didn’t.” He began pressing his hands rhythmically against her sides. She felt better.

“The boy—the boy put a second bolt in it,” said Gunnar, after a moment’s hesitation. “I was afraid,” he added. “I’m sorry.”

“Who let that woman scream?” said Alyx.

Gunnar shrugged helplessly.

“Always know anatomy,” said Machine, with astonishing cheerfulness. “You see, the human body is a machine. I know some things,” and he began to drag the animal away.

“Wait,” said Alyx. She found she could walk. She went over and looked at the thing. It was a bear but like none she had ever seen or heard of: a white bear with a long, snaky neck, almost four meters high if it had chosen to stand. The fur was very thick.

“It’s a polar bear,” said Gunnar.

She wanted to know what that was.

“It’s an Old Earth animal,” he said, “but it must have been adapted. They usually live in the sea, I think. They have been stocking Paradise with Old Earth animals. I thought you knew.”

“I did not know,” said Alyx.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” he said, “but I never—never thought of it. I didn’t think it would matter.” He looked down at the enormous corpse. “Animals do not attack people,” he said. Even in the dim light she could see his expression; he knew that what he had said was idiotic.

“Oh no,” she said deliberately, “oh no, of course not,” and kneeling beside the corpse she extracted both her knives, cleaned them in the snow and put them back in the sheaths attached to her forearms under the suit. Convenient not to have water rust the blades. She studied the bear’s claws for a few minutes, feeling them and trying as well as she could to see them in the dim light. Then she sent Machine into the cave for Raydos’s artists’ tools, and choosing the small, thin knife that he used to sharpen his pencils (some day, she thought, she would have to ask him what a pencils was) she slashed the animal’s belly and neck, imitating the slash of claws and disguising the wounds made by her knives. She had seen bears fight once, in a circus, and had heard tales of what they did to one another. She hoped the stories had been accurate. With Raydos’s knife she also ripped open one of the animal’s shoulders and attempted to simulate the bite of its teeth, being careful to open a main artery. The damned thing had such a layer of fat that she had trouble getting to it. When cut, the vessel pumped slowly; there was not the pool of blood there should be, but What the devil, she thought, no one may ever find it and if they do, will they be able to tell the difference? Probably not. They could dig out the bolts tomorrow. She cleaned Raydos’s knife, returned it to Machine and went back to the cave.

No one said a word.

“I have,” said Alyx, “just killed a bear. It was eleven feet high and could have eaten the lot of you. If anyone talks loud again, any time, for any reason, I shall ram his unspeakable teeth down his unspeakable throat.”

Maudey began to mutter, sobbing a little.

“Machine,” she said, “make that woman stop,” and she watched, dead tired, while Machine took something from his pack, pressed it to Maudey’s nose, and laid her gently on the floor. “She’ll sleep,” he said.

“That was not kindly done,” remarked one of the nuns.

Alyx bit her own hand; she bit it hard, leaving marks; she told Machine, Raydos, and Gunnar about the watch; she and they brought more snow into the cave to cushion the others, although the wind had half done their job for them. Everyone was quiet. All the same, she put her fingers in her ears but that pushed her hood back and made her head get cold; then she rolled over against the cave wall. Finally she did what she had been doing for the past seventeen nights. She went out into the snow and slept by herself, against the rock wall two meters from the drop, with Machine nearby, dim and comforting in the falling snow. She dreamed of the sun of the Tyrian seas, of clouds and ships and Mediterranean heat—and then of nothing at all.

The next morning when the East—she had decided to call it the East—brightened enough to see by, Alyx ended her watch. It had begun to clear during the night and the sky was showing signs of turning a pale winter blue, very uncomfortable-looking. She woke Gunnar, making the others huddled near him stir and mutter in their sleep, for it had gotten colder, too, during the night, and with Gunnar she sat down in the snow and went over the contents of their two packs, item by item. She figured that what they had in common everyone would have. She made him explain everything: the sun-glasses, the drugs that slowed you down if you were hurt, the bottle Machine had used that was for unconsciousness in cases of pain, the different kinds of dried foods, the binoculars, a bottle of something you put on wounds to make new flesh (it said “nu-flesh” and she tried to memorize the letters on it), the knives, the grooved barrel of the crossbow (but that impressed her greatly), the water containers, the suit-mending tape, fluff you could add to your suit if you lost fluff from it and a coil of extremely thin, extremely strong rope that she measured by solemnly telling it out from her outstretched hand to her nose and so on and so on and so on until she had figured the length. Gunnar seemed to find this very funny. There was also something that she recognized as long underwear (though she did not think she would bring it to anybody’s attention just yet) and at the bottom a packet of something she could not make head or tail of; Gunnar said it was to unfold and clean yourself with.

“Everyone’s used theirs up,” said he, “I’m afraid.”

“A ritual, no doubt,” said she, “in this cold. I told them they’d stink.”

He sat there wrinkling his brow for a moment. and then he said:

“There are no stimulants and there are no euphorics.”

She asked what those were and he explained. “Ah, a Greek root,” she said. He started to talk about how worried he was that there were no stimulants and no euphorics; these should have been included; they could hardly expect them to finish a weekend without them, let alone a seven-weeks’ trip; in fact, he said, there was something odd about the whole thing. By now Alyx had ambled over to the dead bear and was digging the bolts out of it; she asked him over her shoulder, “Do they travel by night or day?”

“They?” he said, puzzled, and then “Oh, them! No, it makes no difference to them.”

“Then it will make no difference to us,” she said, cleaning the bolts in the snow. “Can they follow our tracks at night?”

“Why not?” said he, and she nodded.

“Do you think,” said he, after a moment’s silence, “that they are trying something out on us?”

“They?” she said “Oh, them! Trans-Temp. Possibly Quite possibly.” But probably not, she added to herself, unfortunately. And she packed the bolts neatly away.

“I think,” said Gunnar, skirting the bear’s carcass where the blood still showed under the trodden snow, “that it is very odd that we have nothing else with us. I’m inclined to—” (Good Lord, he’s nervous, she thought) “I’m inclined to believe,” he said, settling ponderously in a clean patch of snow and leaning towards her so as to make himself heard, for he was speaking in a low voice, “that this is some kind of experiment. Or carelessness. Criminal carelessness. When we get back—” and he stopped, staring into the snow.

“If we get back,” said Alyx cheerfully, getting to her feet, “you can lodge a complaint or declare a tort, or whatever it is you do. Here,” and she handed him a wad of fluff she had picked out of her pack.

“What I should have done last night,” she said, “half-obliterating our tracks around the carcass so they don’t look so damned human. With luck” (she glanced up) “the snow won’t stop for an hour yet.”

“How can you tell?” said he, his mouth open.

“Because it is still coming down,” said Alyx, and she gave him a push in the back. She had to reach up to do it. He bent and the two of them backed away, drawing the wads of fluff across the snow like brooms. It worked, but not well.

“How about those nuns,” said Alyx. “Don’t they have some damned thing or other with them?”

“Oh, you have to be careful!” he said in a whisper. “You have to be careful about that!” and with this he worked his way to the mouth of the cave.

The sleepers were coming out.

Waking up by themselves for the first time, they filed out of the cave and stood in a row in the opening staring down at the corpse of the animal they had not even seen the night before. She suspected the story had gotten around. Twenty hand-spans, she thought, of bear. The nuns started back, making some kind of complicated sign on their foreheads and breasts. Raydos bowed admiringly, half ironically. The two older people were plainly frightened, even though Maudey had begun to crane forward for a better look; suddenly her whole body jerked and she flung out one arm; she would have overbalanced herself and fallen if Gavrily had not caught her. “After-effects,” he said.

“How long do these go on?” said Alyx, a little wearily.

“A couple of days,” he said quickly, holding on to the frightened woman, “only a couple of days. They get better.”

“Then take care of her until they do,” said Alyx, and she was about to add the usual signal for the morning (COME ON!) when a voice somewhere above her head said:

“Agent?”

It was Iris, that great lalloping girl, almost as high as the bear, looking down at her with the unfathomable expression of the very young, twisting and twisting a lock of silver hair that had escaped from her hood. She was really very pretty.

“Agent,” blurted Iris, her eyes big, “will you teach me how to shoot?”

“Yes, my dear,” said Alyx, “indeed I will.”

“Come on!” she bawled then. They came on.

Later in the morning, when she allowed them to stop and eat the soggiest of their protein and dried starch kernels for breakfast, one of the nuns came up to her, squatted gracefully in the snow and made the complicated sign thrice: once on her own forehead, once on her own breast and once in the air between her and the little woman who had shot the bear.

“Violence,” said the nun earnestly, “is deplorable. It is always deplorable. It corrupts love, you see, and love is the expansion of consciousness while violence is the restriction of love so that violence, which restricts love and consciousness, is always bad, as consciousness is always good and the consciousness of the All is the best and only good, and to restrict what may lead to the consciousness of the All is unwise and unkind. Therefore to die is only to merge with the All so that actually violence is not justifiable in the postponing of death, as we must all die, and dying is the final good if it is a dying into the All and not a dying away from it, as in violence.”

“But,” she said, “the recognition of consciousness and the value of expression of consciousness go hand in hand; there is no evil in expressing the impulses of the nature of consciousness, so that there can be no evil in action and action is not violence. Action is actually an expansion of the consciousness, as one becomes more aware of one’s particular true nature and thence slowly more aware of one’s ultimate all-embracing Nature which unites one with the All. Action is therefore a good. It is not, of course, the same thing as the true religion, but some of us go the slow path and some the quick, and who will attain Enlightenment first? Who knows? What is, is, as the sage said: One way is not another. I hope you will attend our services when we return home.”

“Yes,” said Alyx. “Indeed I will.” The tall lady made the sign again, this time on Alyx’s forehead and breast, and went sedately back to her breakfast.

And that, thought Alyx, is the damnedest way of saying Bravo that I have ever heard!

She decided to teach them all to shoot, including the nuns. It was understood, of course, that the nuns would shoot only bears.

Later in the afternoon, when the snow had stopped and before visibility became bad, she lined all of them up on a relatively level snow-field, assigning the two nuns to Gunnar, Gavrily and Raydos to Machine and herself teaching Iris. Maudey rested, a little dazed from the nervous spasms that had been shaking her all day, though perfectly clear in her mind. Most of them tired of the business after the first hour, except for Raydos, who seemed to enjoy handling the new thing again, and Iris, who kept saying “Just a little more, just a little more; I’m not good enough.” When Machine laughed at her, she loftily explained that it was “rather like dancing.”

“Which you have never done for pleasure, I am sure,” she added.

During the late afternoon they slogged up an ever-narrowing path between cliffs, towards what Gunnar swore was a pass in the mountains. It seemed, however, as if these mountains had no pass but only plateaus; no, not plateaus, only peaks; that even the peaks had no down but only up, and on and on they kept in the red light of the setting winter sun, holding the glare always to the proper side of them, plodding up a steeper and steeper path until the red light turned purple and dim, and died, until each of them saw the other as a dim hulk marching in front of him.

She called a halt. They sat down. For the first time during the whole trip they bunched together, actually touching body to body, with only Maudey a little away from them, for she was still having her trouble. (Alyx had one of the nuns put her to sleep and the spasms stopped instantly.) It was very cold, with the stars splendid, icy points and the whole tumbled waste of jagged rock shining faintly around them. They did not, as they usually did, begin to analyze the events of the day, but only half-sat, half-lay in silence, feeling the still air around them drain away their warmth, which (Iris said) “seemed to flow right up into the sky.” They watched the stars. Then out of nowhere, for no reason at all, Gavrily began to sing in a reedy tenor a few lines of what he called a “baby-song” and this nursery tune—for it was not, Alyx was made to understand, real music—put them all into tears. They sobbed companionably for a little while. It got colder and colder. Gunnar suggested that they pack the snow around them to keep in the heat and Alyx, who had noticed that her buttocks seemed to be the warmest place about her, agreed, so they all built a round wall of snow, with Maudey in the middle of it, and then crawled in around her and pulled the whole thing down on top of them, each packing himself in his own little heap. Then it all had to be disrupted and put right again because the first watch had to climb out. This was Iris. She still seemed very excited, whispering to Alyx “Was I good enough? Will you teach me again?” over and over until somebody poked her and she exclaimed “Ow!” There was yawning, sighing, breathing.

“Will you,” said Iris, bending over the little heap of persons, “teach me again? Will you tell me all about yourself? Will you tell me everything? Will you? Will you?”

“Oh, be quiet,” said Machine crossly, and Iris took her bow and went a little aside, to sit watch.

It was the eighteenth night.

The nineteenth. The twentieth. The twenty-first. They were very quiet. They were idealizing, trusting, companionable, almost happy. It made Alyx nervous, and the more they looked at her, asked her about her and listened to her, the more unnerved she became. She did not think they understood what was happening. She told them about her life with one ear on the sounds about them, instantly alert, ready to spring up, with her crossbow always across her knees; so that they asked her what the matter was. She said “Nothing.” She told them legends, fairy tales, religious stories, but they didn’t want to hear those; they wanted to hear about her: what she ate, what she drank, what she wore, what her house was like, whom she knew, all the particulars of the business, the alleyways, the gutters, the finest houses and the worst houses in Tyre. She felt it was all being dragged out of her against her will. They were among the mountains now and going very slowly, very badly; they went far into the night now whenever it was clear and as soon as they settled down for the night (everyone had got into the long underwear one clear and frosty morning, hopping about from one bare foot to another, and discovering wrapped within it what they declared to be artificial arches) they bunched up together against the cold, interlacing arms and legs and squirming together as close as they could, saying:

“Tell us about—”

She told them.

On the twenty-fourth night, when she woke Machine to take the dawn watch, he said to her “Do you want to climb it?”

“Climb what?” muttered Alyx. She was chilled and uncomfortable, stirring around to get her blood up.

“Do you want to climb it?” said Machine patiently.

“Wait a minute,” she said, “let me think.” Then she said “You’d better not use slang; I don’t think I’m programmed for it.”

He translated. He added—off-handedly—“You don’t have to worry about pregnancy; Trans-Temp’s taken care of it. Or they will, when we get back.”

“Well, no,” said Alyx. “No, I don’t think I do want to—climb it.” He looked, as far as she could tell in the dim light, a little surprised; but he did not touch her, he did not ask again or laugh or stir or even move. He sat with his arms around his knees as if considering something and then he said “All right.” He repeated it decisively, staring at her with eyes that were just beginning to turn blue with the dawn; then he smiled, pulled back the spring on his crossbow and got to his feet.

“And keep your eyes open,” she said, on her way back to the snow-heaped nest of the others.

“Don’t I always?” he said, and as she turned away she heard an unmistakable sound. He had laughed.

The next day Raydos started to sketch her at every halt. He took out his materials and worked swiftly but easily, like a man who thinks himself safe. It was intolerable. She told him that if anything happened or anyone came he would either have to drop his sketch-book or put it in his pack; that if he took the time to put it into his pack he might die or betray the lot of them and that if he dropped it, someone might find it.

“They won’t know what it is,” he said. “It’s archaic, you see.”

“They’ll know it’s not an animal,” she said. “Put it away.”

He went on sketching. She walked over to him, took the book of papers and the length of black thing he was using away from him and stowed them away in her own pack. He smiled and blinked in the sunlight. The thing was not real charcoal or gum or even chalky; she considered asking him about it and then she shuddered. She stood there for a moment, shading her eyes against the sun and being frightened, as if she had to be frightened for the whole crew of them as well as herself, as if she were alone, more alone than by herself, and the more they liked her, the more they obeyed, the more they talked of “when we get back,” the more frightened she would have to become.

“All right, come on,” she heard herself say.

“All right, come on.”

“Come on!”

Time after time after time.