DAUGHTERS OF EARTH
 
I
 
MARTHA BEGAT JOAN, and Joan begat Ariadne. Ariadne lived and died at home on 
Pluto, but her daughter, Emma, took the long trip out to a distant planet of an 
alien sun.
Emma begat Leah, and Leah begat Carla, who was the first to make her bridal 
voyage through sub-space, a long journey faster than the speed of light itself.
Six women in direct descent—some brave, some beautiful, some brilliant: smug or 
simple, wilful or compliant, all different, all daughters of Earth, though half 
of them never set foot on the Old Planet.
This story could have started anywhere. It began with un­spoken prayer, before 
there were words, when an unnamed man and woman looked upward to a point of 
distant light, and won­dered. Started again with a pointing pyramid; once more 
with the naming of a constellation; and once again with the casting of a 
horoscope.
One of its beginnings was in the squalid centuries of churchly darkness, when 
Brahe and Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo ripped off the veils of godly 
ignorance so men could see the stars again. Then in another age of madness, a 
scant two centuries ago, it began with the pioneer cranks, Goddard and 
Tsiolkovsky, and the compulsive evangelism of Ley and Gernsback and Clarke. It 
is beginning again now, here on Uller. But in this narrative, it starts with 
Martha:
Martha was born on Earth, in the worst of the black decades of the 20th century, 
in the year 1941. She lived out her time, and died of miserable old age at less 
than eighty years at home on Earth. Once in her life, she went to the Moon.
She had two children. Her son, Richard, was a good and dutiful young man, a 
loving son, and a sober husband when he married. He watched his mother age and 
weaken with worry and fear after the Pluto expedition left, and could never 
bring himself to hurt her again as his sister had done.
Joan was the one who got away.
 
II
 
centure easegone manlookttuthe stahzanprade eeee maythem hizgozzenn izz 
gahandenno thawthen izzgole...
'It's—beautiful!'
Martha nodded automatically, but she heard the catch in the boy's voice, the 
sudden sharp inhalation of awe and envy, and she shivered and reached for his 
hand.
Beautiful, yes: beautiful, brazen, deadly, and triumphant. Martha stared at the 
wickedly gleaming flanks of the great rocket resting majestically on its bed of 
steel, and hated it with all the stored and unspent venom of her life.
She had not planned to come. She had produced a headache, claimed illness, 
ignored the amused understanding in her hus­band's eyes.
Even more, she dreaded having Richard go. But his father voiced one rarely-used 
impatient word, and she knew there was no arguing about the boy.
In the end she had to do it too: go and be witness at disaster for herself. The 
three of them took their places in the Moon rocket—suddenly safe-seeming and 
familiar—and now they stood together in the shadow of that rocket's monstrous 
spawn, under the clear plastic skin of Moondome.
 
rodwee havetrav uldsoslo lee beyewere eeyanway stfulmen
zzz...
 
The silvery span of runway that would send it off today stretched out of sight 
up the crater wall, the diminishing curve beyond the bloated belly already lost 
in the distance, it was made to mule. Cameras ground steadily; TV commentators, 
perched on platforms stilted high like lifeguard chairs, filled in a chattering 
counterpoint against the drone from the loudspeakers of the well-worn words that 
had launched the first Moondome expedition, how long back?
Sixteen years? Impossible. Much longer. How many children had painfully 
memorized those tired words since? But here was George, listening as though he'd 
never heard a word of it before, and Richard between them, his face shimmering 
with reflections of some private glory, and the adolescent fervour of his 
voice—"It's beautiful!"–drawing a baritone-to-tremolo screech across the 
hypnosoporific of the loudspeakers' drone.
She shivered. 'Yes, dear, it is,' and took his hand, held it too tightly and had 
to feel him pull away. A camera pointed at them and she tried to fix her face to 
look the way the commentator would be saying all these mothers here today were 
feeling.
She looked for the first time at the woman next to her and caught an echo of her 
own effort at transformation. All around her, she saw with gratitude and dismay, 
were the faint strained lines at lips and eyes, the same tensed fingers grasping 
for a hand, or just at air.
Back on Earth, perhaps among the millions crowded around TV sets, there could be 
honest pride and pleasure at this spec­tacle. But here—?
The cameras stopped roaming, and a man stood up on the raised central dais.
'The President of United Earth,' the speakers boomed sepulchrally.
An instant's hush, then:
'Today we are sending forth two hundred of our sons and daughters to the last 
outpost of the solar world—the far room from which we hope they may open an exit 
to the vistas of space itself. Before they go, it is proper that we pause ...'
She stopped listening. The words were different, but it was still the same. No 
doubt the children would have to memorize this one too.
Did they feel this way?
It was a frightening, and then a cooling thought. There was no other way they 
could have felt, the other mothers who watched that first Moondome rocket 
leaving Earth.
'... for their children's children, who will reach to the unknown stars.' 
Silence. That was the end, then.
The silence was broken by the rolling syllables of the two hundred names, as 
each straight neat white uniform went up to take the hand of the President, and 
complete the ritual. Then it was over and Joan was standing before her: her 
daughter, a stranger behind a mask of glory. Seven months ago—seven short and 
stormy months—a schoolgirl still. Now—what did the Presi­dent say?—an `emissary 
to the farthest new frontiers.'
Martha reached out a hand, but George was before her, folding the slender girl 
in a wide embrace, laughing proudly into her eyes, chucking her inanely under 
the chin. Then Richard, still too young not to spurn sentimentality, shaking 
Joan's hand, suffering her kiss on his forehead, saying thickly : `You show 'em, 
sis!'
It was her turn now. Martha leaned forward, coolly kissed the smiling face above 
the white jacket, and felt the untamed tears press up behind her eyes.
`Joan,' she cried wildly. 'Joan, baby, aren't you afraid?'
What a stupid thing to say! She wiped hastily at her eyes, and saw that the 
shine in Joan's eyes was moisture, too.
Joan took her mother's hands, and held them tight.
'I'm petrified,' she said, slowly, gravely, and very low. No one else heard it. 
Then she turned with her brave smile to Alex, standing at her side.
'Pluto or bust!' she giggled.
Martha kissed Alex, and George shook his hand. Then the two of them went off, in 
their white uniforms, to join the other couples, all in line.
Martha felt proud.
 
(Parenthesis to Carla : i)
 
Josetown, Uller, 3/9/52
 
Dear Carla...
Forgive me my somewhat dramatic opening. Both the sections that preceded this 
were written years ago, at rather widely separ­ated times and of course the one 
about Martha's farewell to Joan involved a good bit of imaginative 
assumption—though less of it than you may think at this point.
Frankly, I hesitated for some time before I decided it was proper to include 
such bits in what is primarily intended to be an informational account. But 
information is not to be confused with statistics, and when I found myself 
uncertain, later, whether it was all right to include these explanatory asides, 
I made up my mind that if I were to write the story at all, it would have to be 
done my own way, with whatever idiosyncratic eccentricities, or godlike 
presumptions of comprehension might be involved.
As you already know if you are reading this, I am putting this together for you 
as a sort of good-bye present for your trip. There is little you will be able to 
take with you, and when you leave, there will be no way to foresee the 
likelihood of our ever meeting again: even if your trip is entirely successful 
and you return from it safely, we both know how uncertain the 
time-trans­formation equations are. You may be back, twenty years older, five 
minutes after you leave; more probably, it may be many years after my own death 
that you return—perhaps only a year or two older than you are now.
But however we learn to juggle our bodies through space or time, we live our 
lives on a subjective time scale. Thus, though I was born in 2o26, and the 
Newhope landed on Uller in 2091,I was then, roughly, 27 years old—including two 
subjective years, overall, for the trip. And although the sixty-one years I have 
lived here would be counted as closer to sixty-seven on Earth, or on Pluto, I 
think that the body—and I know that the mind—pays more attention to the rhythm 
of planetary seasons, the alterna­tions of heat and cold and radiation 
intensities, than to the ticking of some cosmic metronome counting off whatever 
Abso­lute Time might be. So I call myself 88 years old—and I digress, but not as 
far as it may seem.
I said, for instance, that Martha died 'of miserable old age' at less than 
eighty, and this would seem to contradict my talk of seasons-and-subjectivity 
here. I am not exactly senile, and can look forward to another forty years, in 
all likelihood, of moderately useful life. We do learn something as we go along: 
a hundred years before Martha's time (indeed, even at her time, on some parts of 
Earth) few people lived to see sixty. (You, at twenty-eight, would have been 
entering middle-age.) Yet the essential rhythms of their lives were remarkably 
similar to our own. The advances of biophysics have enlarged our scope: we have 
more time for learning and living both; but we have correspondingly more to 
learn and live. We still progress through adolescence and education (which once 
ended at 14, then 18, 21, 25...) to youth, marriage, procreation, maturity, 
middle age, senescence and death. And in a similar way, I think, there are 
certain rhythms of human history which recur in (widening, perhaps enriched, but 
increasingly discernible) moderately predictable patterns of motion and emotion 
both.
A recognition of this sort of rhythm is implicit, I think, in the joke that 
would not go away, which finally made the official name of the—ship?—in which 
you will depart The Ark (for Archaic?). In any case, this story is, on its most 
basic levels, an exposition of such rhythms: among them is the curious business 
of the generations, and their alternations: at least it was that thought (or 
rationale) that finally permitted me to indulge myself with my dramatic opening.
On an equally important, though more superficial, level, my purpose in putting 
this together is to provide you with—this is embarrassing—a `heritage'. I had 
something of this sort from Joan Thurman, and found it valuable; whether this 
will be equally so for you, I do not know. I do know I have only two months left 
in which to put this together and that is little enough for an inexperienced 
storyteller like myself. (And glory-be! there is something I am inexperienced 
at. Many things, actually—but the writing of this is the first reminder I have 
had in a while. It feels good to be doing something new and difficult.)
My parenthesis seems to be full of parentheses. Well, I never was what you'd 
call a straight-line thinker: the side-trails are often more productive, anyhow 
...
And there I go again. What I set out to tell you here, Carla, is that this story 
was lived over many years, and written over a shorter period, but still a long 
one. There are the odd bits (like the one about Martha preceding this) which I 
did a long time ago, as a sort of `therapy-writing' and kept, till now, to 
myself. Other parts, like what follows here, are adapted from Joan Thurman's 
papers. Some parts are new. And then there is this matter of rhythms again
Some things in life remain vivid in minute detail till the day you die; others 
are of interest only as background. Some things are very personal and immediate, 
no matter how remote in time; others seem almost to be happening to another 
person, even as they occur. Thus, you will find this narrative full of sudden 
changes of pace and style. I find, for instance, that it is almost impossible in 
some sections to write about myself as `Emma' in the third person; and other 
places equally difficult to say 'I' and `me', but I do not think you will have 
too much trouble following.
 
III
 
I WAS BORN on Pluto, in the Earth-year 2026, and I grew up there. I was 
twenty-two years old when we boarded the Newhope to come to Uller. But that was 
such a long time ago, and so much has happened since, that the words themselves 
have lost all personal meaning to me. They are statistics. I am Emma Tarbell 
now, and have been for many years. My home is on Uller. A little girl named Emma 
Malook grew up on Pluto. Her mother's name was Ariadne, and her father's name 
was Bob. Her grandmother, Joan Thurman, was a famous pioneer, one of the 
first-ship colonists.
In the normal course of events, Joan would have taken her degree that spring, 
and gone to work as a biophysicist until she found a husband. The prospect 
appalled her. Nineteen months earlier she'd started the accelerated studies, 
without mentioning it at home; her mother thought she was busy with the usual 
run of extra-curricular self-expression at school. She'd had a year of avid 
learning before she passed the prelims, and was ready for advanced special 
training. That meant a different school, and the beginning of the psych 
conferences and background inquiries. She had to tell her family then.
The school was too near home for her to live in the already crowded dorms. She 
had to stick it out at home for six months of battle and persuasion, sleepless 
nights and stormy mornings. And all the time studying to be done.
She wasn't the only one. Even the dorm residents got it; letters and telegrams 
and phone calls, and frantic unannounced visita­tions. Two thousand of them 
entered final training together; less than seven hundred lasted the full six 
months, and most of those who left did so of their own accord.
Joan stuck it out, and she met Alex, and added to her fears and doubts: if one 
of them was chosen, and not the other...?
Cautiously, they held back from commitments till the end. And then, in spite of 
any heaven or earth Martha could move, the decision was made. Joan had her one 
last month on Earth of joy and triumph: graduation, marriage, four weeks of 
honeymoon and fame; the planning, the packing, the round of farewells.
Now with her hand in Alex's, she followed the others, all in their gleaming 
white uniforms, up the ramp to the airlock, and into the third of a waiting line 
of moon buggies. Ten buggies, ten passengers to each, two trips apiece, and the 
gaping hole in the side of the giant rocket had swallowed them all.
The rocket was not really large, not from the inside. So much fuel, so much 
freight, so many passengers; the proportions were flexible only within narrow 
limits. Each couple passed through the airlock hand in hand, and edged along the 
corridor, crabwise, to their own cubicle.
Inside, they stripped off the white snowy uniforms, folded them neatly, and 
piled them in the doorway for collection. Stripped to the skin, they checked 
their equipment for the last time, and settled themselves side by side, in the 
grooves and contours carefully moulded to their bodies.
In perfect drilled co-ordination, almost ritualistically, they closed down the 
compartmented upper sections, starting at the feet, and leaned across each other 
to latch the complex fasten­ings. When they were enclosed up to the armpits, 
they laid their heads into the fitted hollow facing each other at one-quarter 
­view, and strapped down the forehead bands and chin pads. Alex pushed the 
button that brought down the glassine air-dome over their upper bodies, and both 
of them set to work testing the supplier tubes and nozzles inside, making 
certain for one last extra time, that everything reached as far as it should. 
Then, in perfect unison, as if this too were part of the ritual they had 
learned, each one extended a hand for a last touch; grasped and held tight, and 
let loose in haste.
Someone came down the hall—they could still see through the open 
doorway—collecting the uniforms to be dumped before take-off.
They wriggled their arms down into the cushioned spaces along their sides; 
later, the arms could be freed again, to manipu­late the supplier tubes, but 
during acceleration, every part of the body was enwombed, protected from shock 
and pressure, cold and heat, nauseous fear and killing radiations.
A gong went off inside the head-dome; that meant they were sealed in now. The 
loudspeaker began to tick off seconds. Frantically, foolishly, Joan tried to 
move her hips, suddenly certain that a necessary opening in the nest had been 
misplaced. She never remembered to feel glorious. There was a rending blast of 
soundless vibration, and a pushing, squeezing pain within the flesh, and brief 
relief about the placing of the opening, before the blackout came.
 
IV
 
PLUTO, PLANET OF MYSTERY
 
.. frozen dark wastes, forever uninhabitable to man? Or will our pioneering sons 
and daughters find a new world to live upon? No one can foretell what they will 
find. Our best astronomers are in dispute. Our largest and most piercing 
telescopes give us daily—or nightly—new information, which only contradicts the 
hypotheses of the night before ...
`We literally do not know, even today—and it is now three quarters of a century 
since Clyde Tombaugh confirmed the existence of the planet—what the size, the 
mass, or the true temperature of Pluto are ... whether it has a frozen 
atmosphere or none ... what composes its dark surface ... or whether it is a 
native of our solar system at all!'
The newspapers and broadcasters of the time speculated loudly on the likelihood 
that the bright remote planet was a visitor from the stars, a wandering planet 
caught at the very fringe of the sun's gravitation, or even a watchful outpost 
of some alien race, a conscious visitant, swinging in distant orbit around this 
star against the day when men propelled themselves beyond the boundaries of 
their own system.
They even mentioned, but less often, the great likelihood that the confusing 
data on the planet merely meant it was composed entirely of very heavy metals. 
Uranium, for instance ...
But for the far-sighted, for the world planners, the politicians and promoters 
who had made the trip possible, the near-certainty of heavy metals was second 
only to one other goal: a starship.
The basic design of the Newhope was even then under government lock and key, a 
full forty years before the first step was taken in its construction. The fuel 
was in development. Astronomers, sociologists, metallurgists, psychologists, 
thousands of technicians and researchers on Earth and Mars and the Moon were 
tackling the thousand and one problems of development. And the entire line of 
work hinged on one combination: there had to be a source of heavy metals near 
the building site: and the building site had to be at the outer edges of the 
System.
But Pluto was on the way out: a step to the stars.
They lived in the rocket at first; it was specially designed for that. The fuel 
tanks had been built for conversion to living quarters, because nobody knew for 
sure when they set out whether they'd ever be able to live on the surface. So 
they swung the ship into a steady orbit around the planet, and got to work on 
conversion. The designs were good; it was only a short time before the living 
quarters were set up, and they could turn their attention to their new world.
What they found is by now so obvious and so familiar it is hard to conceive of 
the excitement of the discovery to them. But the simple discoveries of that 
first month could never have been made from Earth, or from Mars. For years 
astronomers had puzzled over the discrepancy between Pluto's reflective powers 
and its otherwise extrapolated size and mass. There had never been a valid 
planetary theory to account for its unique inclina­tion to the ecliptic or the 
eccentricities of its orbit. Two years of observation by the Ganymede Expedition 
had added barely enough to what was already known to weigh the balance in favour 
the completion of Project Pluto.
But from the vantage point of an orbit around the planet itself, the facts 
became self-evident. A whole new theory of planetary formation come into being 
almost overnight—and with it the final justification for the construction of the 
Newhope. There was no longer any doubt that other planetary systems existed; and 
in a surprisingly short time, the techniques for determining the nature of such 
planets were worked out as well.
Three months after arrival, the Pluto colonists began ferrying down the material 
for construction of a dome. Altogether, they lived in the rocket for thirteen 
Earth-months, before their surface settlement was habitable. But long before 
that, every one of them had at one time or another been down to the planet, and 
mining operations had begun.
Message rockets carried the progress reports back to Earth, and financial gears 
shifted everywhere. The government of the world poured all its power into the 
energizing of space-travel industries. A new ship was built in a tenth the time 
the first had taken, and a crew of three piloted urgently-needed supplies to the 
colonists.
Still, it was a one-way trip. Still, and for years to come, the supply rockets 
were designed for dismantling on arrival. Every part of a rocket-ship, after 
all, has an equivalent use on the ground; by building the ships themselves out 
of needed materials, the effective cargo space could be quadrupled.
From the beginning, every plan was made with one objective in view: the starhop. 
Nobody knew at first where the ship would go; no one understood why it had to 
go. But go it must, and Pluto was a waystation.
 
Joan Thurman died young; she was barely sixty-seven when the accumulated strains 
of the early Pluto years wore her out: at that, she outlasted all but three of 
her fellow-passengers on that first Pluto rocket; and she outlived her husband, 
Alex, by 28 years.
Alex Thurman died in '06 in the Dome Collapse at what was to have been 
Threetown. Joan had been working before that on the theory for open-air cities; 
but it was after the crash that she turned her whole being to a concentrated 
effort. The result was TAP: the Thurman Atmosphere Process. Or that was one of 
the results.
When Alex died, Joan had three small children: Ariadne was ten years old, one of 
the very first Pluto babies; just exactly old enough to be able to take on most 
of the care of Thomas and John who were four and three respectively.
Adne was born into pioneer hardship and pioneer cheerfulness. Then at the age of 
ten, the cheerfulness abruptly departed. Her father's seemingly indestructible 
strength betrayed her; her mother's watchful care was turned elsewhere. From the 
premature beginnings of her adolescence through its duration, she was 
effectively mother and housekeeper and wielder of authority to two growing 
vigorous boys.
When she was nineteen the first 'passenger ships' were established between Pluto 
and Earth—round-trip transports—and a new kind of colonist began to arrive. The 
Malooks, who landed in '17, were typical and Robert, their son-and-heir, was 
Ariadne's romantic ideal. When she was twenty they were married, despite 
everything that was done in either family to avert the expected disaster. For 
her, it was paradise ... for a while. She read Bob's Earth-microfilms, and 
learned to imitate his Earth-accent. She never had to do a day's hard work from 
that time on, and still she had the handling of a charming irresponsible 
boy-child—as well as his money—until he grew up.
Bob was a year younger, you see ... and till he did grow up, he loved having 
Adne's sweetly feminine domination exerted on his behalf. She showed him how to 
spend his money, how to live comfortably under dome conditions, how to adapt his 
Earth-education to Pluto's circumstances.
The disaster Joan and the Malooks had anticipated did not occur. Adne and Bob 
simply drifted apart, eventually after a few assertive acts on his part and 
several unpleasant quarrels. My birth may have precipitated things somewhat: 
they had managed well enough for ten years before colonial social pressures 
pushed Ariadne into pregnancy. Perhaps, once I was born, she found an infant 
daughter more interesting than a full-grown son. I don't know. I knew 
surprisingly little about either of them at the time; it is only in 
retrospect—in parallel perhaps I should say—that I understand Ariadne at all. 
(If there had been any relatives on hand when Leah was growing up, I expect 
they'd have said she `took after' her grandmother.)
As for Bob, I hardly knew him at all until after they separated, when I was five 
or six; after that, he took me out on holidays and excursions, and he was beyond 
a doubt the most charming, exciting, fascinating man who ever lived—until I got 
old enough to be awkward for him. I never knew for sure, but I think he was some 
sort of professional gambler, or high-class con man, later on.
One way and another, I can see why Joe Prell looked good to Ariadne after Bob. I 
was nine, then.
 
V
 
JOE PRELL WAS a brash newcomer, as social standing went on Pluto: a passenger, 
not a pioneer. But he was energetic and smart. Two years after he landed, he and 
Ariadne were married.
It made very little difference to Em at first. If anything she was happier after 
the divorce, because when she saw Bob, she had him all to herself. Anyhow, Joan 
was still alive then; her death, a year later, was a more serious matter.
By that time, though, Emma had begun to find a life of her own. She already knew 
that she wanted to be a doctor. She had learned chemistry and biology from her 
grandmother as easily and inevitably as she'd learned to eat with a spoon or 
later, to do a picture puzzle. She was still too young to start specializing in 
school, but she had Joan's library to work with. Joan's personal effects came to 
Emma, too, but the box of papers and letter-tapes didn't begin to interest her 
till much later. She spent most of her time, the next few years, bent over a 
micro-reader unrolling reel after reel of fascinating fact and speculation, 
absorbing all of it, and understanding little; just letting it accumulate in her 
mind for later use.
Adne disapproved. She thought Emma should play more, and spend more time with 
other children. But Adne was too busy to disapprove very forcibly. Joe Prell was 
not a tyrannical man; he was a demanding one. And somewhere in there the twins 
came along: two baby sisters called Teenie and Tess. Emma was briefly interested 
in the phenomena of birth and baby-care, but her 'coldblooded' and 'unnatural' 
experimental attitudes succeeded in horrifying Ariadne so thoroughly that she 
returned without much regret, and no further restraint, to the library.
By that time, too, Pluto was becoming a pleasant place to live. The first 
open-air city, built on the TAP principles, was com­pleted when Emma was 
fourteen. Of course, only the richest people could afford it. The Prells could. 
Joe was a man who knew how to make the most out of a growing planet.
His financial operations were typical of his personality: he had a finger in 
real estate, and a finger in transport, but of course the big thing on Pluto was 
mining, and he had the other eight fingers firmly clamped into that.
Until they started building the Newhope. Or really, when they started talking 
seriously about it. Prell wised up fast. He let the real estate go and cut down 
on mining, and wound up with Pluto Transport neatly tied up in a bundle just 
right for his left hand. From that time on, Prell's right hand sold his left 
everything that was needed to build the starship Prell was publicly promoting.
It was a really big deal to him. To Emma it was a dream, a goal, the meaning of 
everything. Joe didn't understand any part of the significance of that ship ... 
but with his uncanny feel for such things, he was right in the middle of all the 
important pro­jects. He was in on the actual construction job; he knew about the 
new designs, and the fuel specs ... knew at least as much as Emma did, or most 
of the others actually in the expedition. But he and Emma had very different 
notions of what that fuel meant, and they argued about it right up to the last 
minute.
Or, rather, she argued. Joe Prell never argued with anybody. If he couldn't find 
a basis for agreement, he just turned the discus­sion into a joke.
Nothing could have been better calculated to infuriate Emma. She was twenty-four 
then, and very intense. Life was exciting, but more than that, life was terribly 
important. (As indeed it is, Carla; though I think you now see—or feel—the 
importance more clearly than I.) Prell wouldn't—couldn't—understand that; he 
never understood why anyone was willing to make the trip at all ... to take a 
dangerous voyage to a distant unknown star!
Oh, he could see part of it: the challenge, the adventure. These are common 
enough stimuli, and the response to them not so different in nature from his own 
kind of adventurousness. It wasn't just wealth and power Joe was after; it was 
the getting of them, and he played the game as an artist. Patiently, over and 
over again (quite clearly feeling his responsibility in loco) he ex­plained to 
Emma, and later to Ken, how little chance there was that the ship would ever 
reach Uller ... how the voyagers were almost certainly doomed from the start ... 
and how many other ways there were for restless, bright young people to satisfy 
their craving for excitement.
Emma sputtered and stammered trying to make him understand, but she succeeded 
only in making herself ludicrous. Actu­ally, she didn't believe any more than he 
did that the ship had much chance of getting here. There were so many hazards, 
so many unknown factors; it was almost certain that somewhere in the plans some 
vital defence, some basic need, had been overlooked.
But the Project itself was important, whatever happened to those who were 
engaged in it. Just building the starship was what mattered: new problems to 
conquer, new knowledge to gain, new skills to acquire. And beyond that, the 
dream itself : 'Centuries gone, man looked to the stars and prayed ... He made 
them his gods, then his garden of thought, then his goals ...'
Emma quoted the speech of a long-dead man, and thought Joe Prell would 
understand. She even brought him, hesitantly, Joan Thurman's diary to read; 
that, if anything, should have made him understand.
Prell was amazed, but unconvinced. He expressed at some length, and with 
considerable wit, his astonishment that the girl who wrote that diary could 
later have done the painstaking prac­tical work that developed TAP. He couldn't 
see that all of it was part of the same dream.
He listened a little more respectfully when Ken tried to explain. Curiously 
enough, the two men got along. Prell liked Tarbell, and Ken at least could 
understand the other man. (I think, too, Joe was much impressed by Ken's 
audacity in marry­ing me; it had been firmly concluded at home some time before 
that I was doomed to single bliss. Too direct, too determined, too intellectual, 
too strong; no man would feel up to it, said Ariadne, and her husband agreed.) 
Ken spoke more calmly than Emma had, with fewer words, and much less argument, 
but what he said amounted to the same thing, and Joe Prell couldn't see it. He 
was too busy making money.
And he made it. He made enough, among other things, to fulfil Ariadne's greatest 
dream: before she died, she had her trip to Earth; she saw the sights and 
institutions and museums, made all the tourist stops, brought home souvenirs 
enough to keep her content for her remaining years.
But before that, she saw her daughter Emma off for Uller.
 
Ariadne was present when the tender took off from Pluto Port to deliver the 
lambs to the slaughter, carry them off to the starship that had hovered for 
months like a giant moon around the planet.
'It's ... beautiful,' someone standing beside her said, looking up, and Ariadne 
nodded automatically. It was beautiful; the most beautiful, most dangerous, most 
triumphant enemy she'd ever known, and she hated it with all the stored-up 
passion of her life.
'Emma!' she cried involuntarily in her farewell, 'Emmy, aren't you afraid?'
I tried to look at her, to let her look into me, but there was as unexpected 
veil of moisture on my eyes.
'I'm scared stiff,' I said, and it was true, and then I smiled to let her know 
it didn't matter.
Then Ken had come up from somewhere, and was right beside me: He hadn't heard; 
at least I hoped he hadn't. I flashed the same smile up at him, and looked away 
quickly, blinking the tear-mist out of my eyes, and trying to send a wordless 
warning to my mother. If she said anything now ...
She didn't have a chance.
'Come on, kid,' Ken said. 'They're waiting.' He took my hand in one of his while 
he was still shaking hands with Joe Prell, and I blew a last kiss each to Tess 
and Teenie; then we turned and ran to the tender. I can remember being very 
conscious of our importance at the moment, how we must look to all the people 
there: two tall slim citizens of the universe, shining symbols of glamour and 
excitement.
Then we were in the tender, the whole bunch of us on our way up to the giant 
ship. All the familiar faces looked just a bit more formal and self-conscious 
than usual, in spite of being jammed into the inadequate space, and doubled up 
on the seats.
Somewhere in a corner, a group started singing, but no one else took it up, and 
it faded out. There wasn't much talk. We just sat there two by two ... men and 
women, boys and girls really—and tried to visualize what lay ahead.
Somewhere out there, beyond the spatial comprehension of a system-bound being, 
was a star. They called it Beta Hydri; and a group of strange men in a learned 
university said it had a planet. They called the planet Uller, and credited it 
with mass and gravity and atmosphere tolerable to humans.
They could be wrong, of course. In thirty years of star-search­ing from the 
Pluto Observatory, it was the only one so credited. The professors weren't sure, 
but...
But someone had to go find out, and we were lucky. Out of the thousands upon 
thousands who applied for the privilege, we had been chosen. And even before we 
knew we were both to go, we'd found and chosen each other. We weren't cautious 
and careful the way Joan and Alex had been ... the way most of the others in 
training were. The first time we met, we knew how it had to be for us. And 
though we worried, sometimes, that one of us would be picked, and the other left 
behind, it never seemed very likely; it just wouldn't happen that way.
But now we had chosen and been chosen in turn, and we had come to the end of the 
choosing.
When we left the tender, we knew what to do. We'd all done it dozens of times 
before in practice drill. We filed behind the couple in front to the ice trays, 
and took our places, lying down. We got our shots. When the crane lowered us 
into the hold, we still had our hands firmly intertwined. I know I shivered 
once, and thought I felt a tremor in Ken's hand and ...
 
VI
 
AND WOKE UP slowly, still shivering, tingling in her toes and fingertips and 
nose and ears, as her body warmed. Her hand was still in Ken's, and he was 
grinning at her.
'We made it, kid.'
'So far,' she said.
Somebody handed her a bowl of soup. That seemed outlandish, for some reason, and 
then she realized why. They weren't back on Pluto now; they were in space ... 
far out ... how far? Her hand shook, and the spoon with it, spilling hot soup on 
her leg, and there was no reason after all why they shouldn't have soup on a 
spaceship. How far?
She managed to get a spoonful to her mouth, and became curious. Somebody had 
given it to her; who? She looked up.
Thad Levine was leaning over her, slipping a tray under the bowl for balance. He 
looked anxious. Em remembered him, and now consciously remembered everything.
'Where's Sally?' she asked, and found her voice sounded nor­mal.
'Instrument check,' Thad said. The phrase was meaningful within seconds after 
she heard it, and then, as if a key had been turned in her mind, a whole set of 
meaning and concepts fell into place, and she was oriented.
Thad was looking down at her, smiling. 'Feels funny, doesn't it?' he said. 
'Coming out, I mean.' Of course; he'd been through it all already.
'A lot better than it felt going down!' Ken said explosively.
Em nodded. 'Only I didn't really feel anything then,' she said, 'Did you? I was 
just...'
'Scared!' Ken picked up promptly on her hesitation. 'You and me, and all the 
rest of 'em too, baby.'
'The freeze is too fast for you to feel...' Thad started mechanically, and 
grinned and let it drop. They'd all heard it over and over, said it to each 
other again and again, during the months of training. They'd had their 
practice-freeze periods, and come out to reassure each other once more. 'It's 
too fast to feel anything.' The phrase was drummed into all of them before they 
went aboard for the last time. They all knew it.
But cold was not the only way it might make you feel; they all knew that by now. 
Scared was a feeling, too.
In training, you went into a room, and lay down in the tray, and you came to 
again in the same room, with the same people stand­ing around, just a few hours, 
or even minutes, later. This time .. .
This time, they'd all gone under not knowing: not knowing whether they'd ever 
come out of it alive ... whether their bodies could withstand year after year of 
frozen suspension, instead of the brief testing period ... whether they'd wake 
up in the ship, or wind up as floating particles in space, or smashed on the 
surface of some unknown planet.
The Tarbells, Em and Ken, were just about half-way down the list, their shift of 
duty was timed for the twenty-fourth year of the voyage. And no one knew for 
sure that day they left whether the ship would really still be on its way in a 
quarter of a century.
Sally came in, bustling a little, as always. She was so familiar, she made Em 
realize for the first time how long it was. On Pluto we'd be past forty now!
'Em!' Sally rushed over to kiss her, and Ken must have realized at the same time 
Emma did that they'd hardly touched each other.
'Hey, she's mine,' he said. And with his arms around her, everything was 
perfectly normal again.
 
(Parenthesis to Carla: ii)
 
27/9/52 It is a curious phenomenon of the human mind—or at least of mine—that 
past pain is painless in recall, but pleasure past and lost is excruciating to 
remember. I have found that for the purposes of telling this story I can readily 
undergo Recall Process for almost any desired period. The `Pluto Planet of 
Mystery' article came up intact from a batch of Joan Thurman's papers that I 
looked at more than a hundred years ago. And I went back to remember what Joe 
Prell looked like, and how he laughed at me. That didn't hurt in memory: it made 
me angry, both at his stupidity and at his unkindness, but it didn't hurt.
Carla, I tried to do Recall on the eighteen months I spent in space with Ken, 
and with the four other couples who at one time or other were shift-partners. I 
know it was the happiest time I ever spent, but the one little part I remembered 
in detail, the section you have already read, was so packed with poignant 
pleasure that it almost stopped this work entirely.
I shall not attempt again to recall my days and nights with Ken. As much as I 
remember, through a rosy blur, is all I feel competent to talk of. It took years 
after his death to adjust to the loss. I do not know that I could make that 
adjustment again, and will not subject myself to it.
As for the details of the trip ... they are interesting, but I'm afraid they're 
all laid over with the sentimental mist that eman­ates from my happiness. It 
must have been vastly uncomfortable in the tiny cubicle we had as home. 
Certainly, we fought claus­trophobia every minute of the time. We worked very 
hard, I know, and we were never quite without fear.
 
The starship Newhope had accommodation for five hundred passengers in the deep 
freeze, but only six in the living quarters. Three tiny cubicles surrounded 
three beds, and the walls were lined with overarm storage space.
The ship had been carefully designed to be run in routine circumstances by a 
crew of six, and a cautious and foresighted psychologist had arranged for 
overlapping shifts. When we woke up, the Levines were ending their shift: it was 
their last night out. We shared the first six months with Ray and Veda Toglio, 
and the Gorevitches. Six months later, another couple replaced the Toelios and 
six months after that it rotated again. Shift-change nights were big events. 
Later, the new couple would read the Log, and catch up on everything, but that 
first night everything would come out in a jumble of incident and anecdote, 
gossip and laughter: the no-doubt grossly exaggerated story of the error Jommy 
Bacon made three shifts back, before the Levines came out ... a joke written 
into the log by Tom Kielty, fourteen years ago, but still fresh and funny ... 
the harrowing account of a meeting with a comet in the third year out.
It is difficult to picture the situation. Next month you are going to a planet 
infinitely farther away than Uller was from Earth, and yet you know with great 
exactness what you will find there. We had no such instruments in our day as now 
exist. All we knew when we set out was that this star appeared to have planets 
composed of terrestrial elements in quantities and proportions similar to those 
of the habitable solar planets.
We did not know whether we would find a place with breathable atmosphere, or 
bearable gravity, or water, or ... or whether we'd find a planet at all. When 
our shift ended, and we went back into the freeze, it would be with almost as 
much uncer­tainty as the first time.
There was nothing to be certain of except the difficulties we had yet to face: 
if everything else worked out, if we completed the trip, and found a suitable 
planet, we would still be presented with almost insuperable obstacles. It was 
atomic fuel, after all, that made the starhop possible; it also made unthinkable 
any such doubling in space as had been designed for the Pluto ship. Our fuel 
tanks would be too hot for human habitation twenty years after we landed.
We weren't going to be able to live in an orbit; we were going to have to land 
and establish ourselves—wherever we were going —as quickly as we could.
 
VII
 
I DIDN'T GET out of the ship at all in the first thirty-six hours. There were 
twelve of us medics specially trained for the job of defrosting, and we had 
equipment to do only three couples at a time. Three medics to a unit, we worked 
over the humming machinery and the still bodies, testing, checking, adjusting, 
and checking again. You don't save seconds when the use of a limb or the 
functioning of an organ is involved.
Every delicate part of the human beings we worked over had to receive the same 
minute attentions: quick-thaw, circulator, oiler, hydrator ... and then, when 
they began to come out of it, some familiar face to watch over them, to say the 
right things, to bring food at the right time.
But that part wasn't our job. Jose Cabrini was in charge in the awakening room. 
They came into our section frozen and motionless; they went out thawed, still 
motionless. It was weird and unreal and disheartening. We kept doing it because 
it was the thing to do, six hours on, three hours off to catnap in one of the 
cubicles, and back again to the waxen-stiff shapes of human bodies.
 
Ken was outside all that time. He was in the first batch of defrosts: a 
construction expert, he was also a third-generation Marsman. He was born in 
Taptown on Mars—the first TAP settlement—and had grown up under primitive 
open-air frontier conditions: a big-chested hawk-nosed man, wiry-muscled, 
steel-boned and almost literally leather-skinned. All the Marsmen we had were 
sent out in the first groups.
There were fifteen men altogether in his construction gang. In haste and 
near-total silence, still orienting to consciousness, they ate their bowls of 
fortified soup, drew their tools from Supply, and filed into the air space 
between the flimsy backwall of the tanks and the alumalloy sheets of the inner 
hull.
There was just space enough to stand and work while they pried the first plates 
loose. After that, they had more space: another twelve inches to the mid-plates.
Here they could begin to see space damage, the dents and warps of imploding 
matter from outside—even an occasional rent in the metal fabric.
Five of the big plates to make a shelter. Each one went a little
more quickly. In twenty minutes they were ready to go Outside.
They knew it was safe. Other people were Out there already.
But each of them had lived through eighteen months of that voyage, consciously: 
eighteen months of smooth plates under-foot and glowing indirect lighting, of 
cramped quarters enclosed by walls, and cutting corners to save space—eighteen 
months closed in from Space ...
They stood in the lock, and hesitated. Eyes met, and looked away.
Then somebody said:
`What the hell are we waiting for?'
`Sure, let's go out and take a walk.'
`Come on out, the air is fine,' someone else said shrilly.
Ken was Mars-born, and tough; he couldn't remember ever feeling this way before. 
He noticed it was an Earther who finally laid hand on the lever to open the 
door.
They left the plates in the lock while they got their footing on the terrain, 
and blinked back the light of the sun.
Some of the others were cold, but Ken had chased sand devils on Mars at to 
below. He let the strange sun hit his head, drew the strange breath into his 
lungs, and exultation exploded inside him.
He wanted to shout; he wanted to run; he wanted to kiss the ground beneath his 
feet, embrace the man next to him. He wanted to get Emma and pull her out of the 
ship. He turned to the others.
`Come on!' he shouted. `Let's go!'
They dragged the heavy plates over the ground to a spot already marked out, and 
started building.
It was almost too easy.
Everything went according to schedule. The plans for re-use of the inner plates 
turned out to be sound. The temporary shelters were up and ready for use before 
the sun went down, and by the next day they were even moderately comfortable 
inside. Every bit of material that had gone into the construction of the 
starship, save the fuel areas and the outer hull, had been designed to serve a 
double purpose, and almost every design was satisfactory and practicable.
Oh, it wasn't easy in terms of work. Every man and woman of the five hundred 
worked till they dropped, those first two days. It wasn't just construction and 
renovation. There was an infinite amount of testing and retesting to be done, 
checking and rechecking. Round-the-clock shifts were stationed in the labs and 
at the instruments, for the accumulation of data about the new planet, its star 
and system, its chemistry and geology and biology.
And through all the furious activity, data continued to accumulate. 
Almost-continuous broadcasts over the loudspeaker system relayed information to 
workers in and out of ship.
We heard the story of the landing: how the crew had tested the planets, one by 
one, with routine spectroscopy and boomer-rocket samplers: the tenth at a 
distance vastly greater than Pluto's from the sun; the eighth, fifth, fourth 
(the missing ones were on the other side of the sun); and each time found 
rock-ribbed wastes, without air, without warmth, without hope of hospitality.
The third could have been made habitable, if necessary. To create an atmosphere 
is possible, when you have a base from which to work. But to have moved out of 
our ship into domes would have been difficult. We didn't have to. The second 
planet was Uller.
To those of us who were still in ship, the reports were probably more impressive 
than to those outside. If you could see the earth and feel it underfoot, if you 
were actually breathing the air, and lifting and carrying against the pull of 
gravity, the facts and figures wouldn't mean so much.
To me, each new item of information was overwhelming. Atmosphere almost 
Earth-normal (closer than Mars'; as good as the best open-air city on Pluto).
Gravity almost Earth-normal (closer than any other solar planet).
Temperature outside, 8 degrees C. at the equator, where we'd landed. (Warmer 
than Mars; infinitely warmer than Pluto. Liveable!)
First chemical analyses showed a scarcity of calcium, a scarcity of chlorine, an 
abundance of silicon.
Water: drinkable!
That floored me completely. To travel across the void, to an unknown planet, and 
find good drinking water! Well, not really good: the water here is actually a 
dilute solution of what we used to call 'water glass' back on Pluto. It didn't 
taste right, but it wasn't harmful. (And in the early days in Josetown I got 
used to the taste, too. We didn't take the trouble to Precipitate it half the 
time.)
Uller was simply, unbelievably, Earthlike. With the single exception of the 
silicon change in chemistry, it might almost have been Earth.
These things are easy to remember and record. Speeches and announcements, and 
the impact of thoughts and words ... but I find it almost impossible to 
visualize again the way Uller looked to me when I first saw it. It all seems 
natural and familiar now; I know how strange and beautiful and frightening it 
was then, but I cannot quite place what was strange, or what was terrifying, or 
what seemed so lovely. What was a foreign place has become home.
And if I could remember clearly, how could I describe it to people who have 
grown here?
I can only describe it as it looked to Emma, who grew up on Pluto, when it was 
her turn at last to stand with a group of medics in the airlock, and hesitate.
 
Sound, sight, smell, sensation ... a whole new world, a strange world, a 
fairyland fantasy world of gem-encrusted trees and opalescent plants, of 
granular smooth ground laid out in shim­mering changeable striae of colour ...
And all of it the stranger for the incredibly Earth-like sunset. She'd seen that 
sunset thirty times on Earth, and marvelled every time. Here it was again, the 
same in every way, except for the sparkling reflections it struck from the 
impossible tree-trunks and flowers.
Around it all the smell of growing things, subtly familiar, tangy, hard to 
identify, but undeniably the scent of life.
The double row of alumalloy structures looked dull and ugly in this 
stage-setting of iridescence.
And it was cool ... cold even, but that didn't matter.
Where's Ken?
For thirty-six hours she had been awake, and she had not yet touched him or 
talked with him.
She stood there, feeling the gritty granular earth beneath her feet, through her 
boots, not really looking at things not trying to see or hear or taste or smell, 
but letting everything impinge on her, soak in as it would, while her eyes moved 
urgently, seeking one person in the weaving patterns around the street of 
houses, listening for just one voice in the murmuring welter of sound. 
Thirty-six hours one way, but literally years, in another sense ...
'Em!'
He charged across the open space, big and bony and beautiful, grimy, unshaven, 
hollow-eyed, his coveralls flapping around his legs, his arms reaching out for 
her long before he got there.
'Em!'
His arms went around her, pulling her against him, lifting her clear off the 
ground. The bristly hair on his face scratched her cheek and the dirt of the new 
planet rubbed off his coveralls on to her spotless white jacket, and she smiled 
and opened her lips to his.
`You're cold,' he said, after a while.
'Cold?' They found each other again, with hands, with eyes, with lips, and they 
stood close in a warmth of their own while the wind went around them.
Cold?
She laughed against his shoulder, opened her eyes sidewise to a flash of 
brilliant colour, and backed off to look at him instead. 'Break it u-u-p!'
Someone was shouting at them, teasing, and someone else took her arm, and there 
was a whole crowd of people talking at once; she never remembered who they were, 
but friends, all of them, familiar faces. Hands to shake and cheeks to kiss, and 
excited words and gestures. And then more work to do.
Ten couples to a household; that was the plan for the tem­porary settlement. The 
outer walls and roofs were finished, but inside partitioning was still going on. 
Everyone helped; they all wanted their own rooms finished for the night.
Someone came around distributing mattress sacks, and Ken went off with Thad 
Levine to find an air pump. There was wild hilarity and a strange admixture of 
hysteria with relief, as one couple after another finished off their partitions, 
and joined the others in the central hall.
Ken and Em stood a little apart from the others, watching, very much aware of 
the special and extraordinary quality of their own happiness.
Out of a picked group of five hundred healthy eager young men and women, it is 
not difficult to select two hundred and fifty well-matched couples. Yet, when it 
is necessary to couple off, and all five hundred know it, a true marriage is the 
exception. Ken and Em were lucky, and they knew it. Em, watching the others, 
with Ken's arm around her, wanted somehow to share with all of them the flood of 
emotion in which she herself was caught up. They were all so impoverished by 
comparison ...
The one unbearable thought ran fleeting across her mind, and left with it a 
chill track of envy for those other poor ones: If anything happens to him...
Her hand tightened on his, and he looked down to her, not smiling, knowing what 
she felt. Together, they moved away from the group. They went into their empty 
room, and closed the new-hung door behind them.
 
A body is a solitary thing. You live with it, live in it, use its parts as best 
you can. But always it is alone, a thing apart, your own unique and individual 
portion of space.
It stands alone while the mind flicks out to make contact with the surrounding 
world; while the brain receives images from the eyes, the nose, the ears; while 
the mouth tastes and the fingers touch: and even while food is swallowed and 
ingested. All this time the body, as a whole, is lonely.
At points in time, infinitely far apart from the viewpoint of the 
cell-components of this body, two people may find unity, com­plete and perfect, 
with each other. In the act of procreation confluence occurs—or more often in 
the mimicry of the act.
Many bodies never know anything but solitude. The motions of procreation are 
gone through again and yet again, without awareness. But Kenneth and Emma 
Tarbell were fortunate in their bodies. Loneliness called to desperate 
isolation, and they came together from the first with ease and understanding.
They kissed. That was all, for the time being: mouth to mouth, sealed together, 
while the breath sweetened between them, his hand on her shoulder, hers against 
his back, merged to a single entity. They kissed, endlessly, and without 
reserve.
Then they lay back on the floor together, close and content, relaxed and 
knowledgeable in their unity with each other.
After a while Ken moved. He lifted himself on an elbow, looked down on her 
peaceful face, and traced her smile with a fingertip. Her eyes opened, welcoming 
his touch, and she stretched luxuriously, with great contentment, then turned to 
meet his hunger with her own.
When Sally came banging on the door, yelling about dinner, they realized they 
were both starved. They went out and sat in a circle with the others, in the 
central hall, eating the landing meal of roast beef and corn and fruit that had 
left with them, and travelled with them in the freezer across the years. And 
with it they drank, most ceremoniously, coffee made from Uller-water. The 
vinegar-precipitation gave it an odd taste, but from that day on the taste of 
vinegar was good to all of them.
Little by little, the realization was sinking in. They were, thus, easily, and 
without obstacles, established on a planet twenty-one light years from home!
None of them stayed long after dinner. Two by two, they went off to their small 
separate cubicles, dragging their mattresses with them.
Leah Tarbell was not the only baby conceived that night.
 
VIII
 
THEY WOKE up to brilliant sunlight, chill still air, and a hubbub of human 
activity. The big project now was exploration. The ob­servations made by the 
landing crew indicated that the near-equatorial spot where they had landed was 
probably the most favourable location for a settlement. But we wanted closer 
ground observation before any further effort was made to estab­lish the colony 
on a permanent basis.
Conditions over the surface of the planet varied widely—wildly would be a better 
word, from the point of view of a solar meteorologist. This was the first human 
contact with a planet whose axis of rotation lay in the plane of its orbit of 
revolution. All the solar planets have axes more or less perpendicular to their 
orbits. On Earth, for instance, there is a short winter-night and corresponding 
summer-day at either pole : but only at the poles. It took a good deal of 
readjustment in thinking habits to calcu­late Uller conditions with any degree 
of realistic accuracy.
The most obvious activity that day was the beginning of the construction of 
light aircraft for exploratory trips. Ken, of course, stayed on construction 
work, salvaging parts from the bowels of the big ship to build the smaller ones.
Meantime, scouting parties were being briefed and trained for their work, 
absorbing new information about what they were likely to find just as fast as it 
came out of the labs, still operating in ship around the clock. And everyone not 
directly concerned with the big project, or working in the labs, was assigned to 
one of the local scouting groups or specimen-collecting squads. Em found herself 
safety-monitoring a batch of wide-eyed collectors under the direction of a 
botanist, Eric Karga.
There were seven of them in the party, the others loaded down with sample cases 
and preservatives, Emma with a battery of micro-instruments strapped about her 
waist, a radiphone sus­pended in front of her face; and a kit of testing tongs 
and chemical reactors flapping against her leg. Nothing was to be touched 
bare-handed, smelled, or sampled, until the monitor's instruments had analysed 
it, and a verbal report on procedure had been made to the ship. With these 
provisions, it became evident almost as soon as they entered the forest that 
there were too many collectors, and not enough instruments. Karga himself would 
have thrown all discretion to the winds ... if there had been any wind, that is.
That was the first thing Emma became aware of, when they were out of range of 
the bustling activity of the settlement: the literally unearthly silence. Emma 
had grown up in this kind of background-silence, under domes. Later, she'd lived 
in a TAP open-air city filled with `natural' noises: leaves rustling in a 
made-breeze; birds singing; small animals squeaking and creeping; an 
uninterrupted and infinitely inventive symphony of sound, behind and around the 
machines and voices and activities of men.
Here, in a natural open-air world, there was nothing to hear but the excited 
busy-ness of the small group of people: Karga rushing recklessly from 
horny-tipped plants to opalescent trees; the monitor-instruments clicking off 
their messages; the steady murmur of my own voice into the radiphone; and the 
awed exclamation of the collectors as novelty after unexpected novelty was 
uncovered in the fairyland fantasy of a forest.
The first two-hour period went by almost before they realized it. None of them 
wanted to go back, and the prearranged return for a complete checkup in 
medicentre seemed foolish even to Em, considering how careful on-the-spot 
precautions had been. But they really needed another monitor, or at least, 
another phone. And even more to the point: the rule had been established; 
therefore it must be obeyed. Regularity and conformity are the materials of 
which caution is formed, and caution was the order of the day.
Five hundred people seemed like a lot when they were all crowded into the tender 
that took them up to the Newhope orbit around Pluto; or when they were being 
processed through defrost, the first two days on Uller; or when shelter had to 
be provided, and fast, for all of them. Now, looking outward from a double row 
of thin metal-walled huts at an unknown planet, five hundred humans seemed very 
few indeed. One death would leave a hole that could not be filled.
They griped about unnecessary precautions all the way back but back they went, 
and through the careful psychophysical that Jose Cabrini and Basil Dooley had 
worked out together.
Over a quick cup of coffee, they picked up some fresh data on the morning's 
discoveries. Evidence so far showed no signs of a dominant civilized, or even 
intelligent, natural species. Some small carapaced insect-like creatures had 
been found, one or two varieties in abundance. And the river from which they had 
drawn and purified their water was teeming with microscopic life. But nothing 
larger than a healthy Earth-type cockroach had turned up yet, and nothing any 
more dangerous either.
The small fauna, like the plant life, appeared to be almost entirely constructed 
along the lines of the silicate exoskeleton, cat-bon metabolism variety. Some of 
the smallest amoebae lacked the skeleton, but everything larger had it, and it 
seemed doubt­ful, therefore, that any larger form of mobile life would exist. 
The beautiful brittle tree-trunks had rigidity against the weather, but little 
flexibility. The arrangement would hardly be suitable for a large-size animal of 
any kind. Jose still seemed to be deter­minedly hopeful of finding intelligent 
life—but in the total absence of any such indications emphasis was being placed 
tem­porarily on the investigation of plant life.
When they came back from the second shift, they found tables and benches set up 
in the street between the huts, with a defrost­ing selector at one end. Emma 
hurried through her checkup, and went out to look for Ken. He wasn't at any of 
the tables, or anywhere in sight. Finally she picked out a lunch, and walked 
down the row of tables to where a group of medics were gathered. Most of them 
had been out on monitor duty that morning; all of them were engaged in eager 
debate; and Cabrini and Dooley seemed to be the opposing centres.
Jose was talking as she sat down. 'Lab says all the fauna so far are vulnerable 
to vibration. Those quartz shells are brittle,' he expounded earnestly. 'So 
suppose there was an intelligent species? Wouldn't it stay the hell away from a 
spot where a rocket came down?'
'And then all the building and tramping around,' someone else put in 
thoughtfully.
It fitted with the silence of the forest. 'It's hard to imagine a civilization 
without any noise,' she put in. 'I know it could happen, but it just doesn't fit 
my conditioning about what constitutes intelligence.' She grinned, and waved an 
arm pointedly around the table. 'What good is it if you can't have three people 
talking at once?'
'They're too small, anyhow,' Basil Dooley insisted. 'They'd shake themselves to 
pieces if they got big enough to do anything.'
'You can have intelligence without artifacts,' Jo said stub­bornly, 'and without 
noise, too. Even without vocal noise.' He gulped at some coffee, and went on 
before anyone else could get fairly started: 'Or suppose they're so small we 
just haven't noticed? Why do they have to be big? Maybe something we think is a 
plant is really a termite-tower, like the ones on Earth? Or a hill out there 
somewhere is full of things the size of ants that are just smart enough not to 
want to show their faces? On a planet this size, a small species could have a 
completely material civilization, if that's what you're looking for—they could 
even make noise, by their own standards—and we'd have a hell of a time finding 
out about it.'
'Well, they'd have some kind of effect on the ecology of the planet, wouldn't 
they?'
'We wouldn't know that yet, either,' Emma said slowly. She was excited now, 
turning over the possibilities Jo was suggesting, but she knew better than to 
display her excitement in the discussion. People always seemed to mistrust 
enthusiasm. 'TAP is honest ecology,' she pointed out. 'An alien coming to Pluto 
would have a rough time finding out that the open-air cities are all 
artificial.'
Intelligent life! Non-human, non-solar intelligent life! And it was possible! 
This world had every prerequisite for it.
'Well, if they're that small, you're going to have some trouble talking to 
them.'
'Might never find out,' someone else suggested, 'if they didn't find some way to 
communicate with humans. That's your real problem, Jo. Suppose you find these 
critters? How are you going to talk to them? And turn it around: if they live in 
what looks like natural circumstances to us, how will we know which ones to try 
and talk to?'
'Which sums up neatly,' Jo answered him, 'the problems to which I shall probably 
devote the rest of my life.'
There was an intensity in his tone that silenced the table for a moment.
'Then whatever they are, let's hope you don't find 'em. We can't afford to lose 
your services, Jo.' It was Ken. He slid his long legs over the bench next to 
Emma, and squeezed her hand. 'What goes on?'
Everybody began talking at once again; everyone except Emma, who was surprised 
at the irritation she felt. He had no business stepping on Jo that way, she 
thought; and she didn't want to talk about it any more. 'Aren't you eating?' she 
asked.
'Ate before; they said you were getting a checkup, so I had lunch and left my 
coffee to have with you.'
He smiled at her, and reached for her hand again, and the irritation vanished. 
Even when the argument resumed, and she found that the two of them were tending 
to opposite extremes of attitude, she wasn't annoyed any more. They didn't have 
to agree about everything, after all. They had disagreed before. But this was 
such an important thing—the way you'd feel about an alien creature.
Still, she could understand it better in Ken than in Basil. Ken was a 
constructions man. His work was in materials; in parts and pieces to fit 
together. He didn't think in terms of the living organism, or the subtle and 
marvellous interplay of functions between organs, organism, individuals, 
species. Basil was a medic, and a good one; he should have understood.
Karga was at her shoulder, politely restraining himself from urging her, but too 
anxious to keep himself from a silent display of impatience. She stood up, and 
threw off the whole foolish mood. Ken would understand when they had more time 
to talk. And there would be plenty of time later...
 
IX
 
IT MIGHT HAVE been a segment of petrified log. But it had legs, and the tapered 
bulbous end was a head. It might have been a cross between a pig and a 
dachshund, painted in streaky silver, and speckled with sequins. But it had six 
legs, and the head was too shapeless; there was no visible mouth and there were 
no ears at all.
And when you looked more closely, it wasn't actually walking. It was skating; 
six-legged tandem skating, with the sharp-run­nered feet never lifting out of 
the ground, leaving an even double row of lines incised in the granular ground 
behind it. And the squat barrel body glided forward with unexpected grace.
It moved into the street of huts, its head set rigidly right in front of its 
body, while the bulging dull black eyes darted and danced in all directions.
The first man who saw it shouted, and it froze in mid-glide. Then the man's 
comrade silenced him, and the creature started forward again. A crowd began to 
gather and after the manner of a crowd, a murmuring noise grew from it. The 
creature froze once more, and veered off in another direction.
Someone in the crowd had a gun. He raised it, and took care­ful aim, but someone 
else reached out to lower the barrel before the fool could shoot.
'It hasn't hurt anything!'
'Why wait till it does?'
'How do you know...?'
'Here's Jose.'
'Hey, Jo, here's your native. Look smart to you?'
Laughter. Comments and wonder and more and more un­controllable laughter, while 
the creature skated directly away from the crowd and edged up against an 
alumalloy hut.
'Think we can catch it?'
'The projector ... are they getting it?'
Jose sent a whisper running back, and it only increased the volume of the sound. 
Better one noise than the hubbub, he thought, and spoke sharply above the crowd.
'Quiet!' Then in the momentary silence spoke more softly. 'I don't think it 
likes noise.'
After that, he left the group, and stepped forward steadily, slowly, towards the 
shadow of the hut where the creature stood.
He tried to curb his own eagerness, and make his advance without hurry and 
without menace. He tried, too, to ignore the slowly swelling hum of the crowd 
behind him. All his thoughts were on the animal, all his attention focused.
If it had intelligence, there had to be a way, some way, to make contact with 
it.
He was close enough now to touch it if he would, but he held back. It was 
looking at him, and from that moment on, he never once doubted that the animal 
was rational, impressionable, capable of communication. It was there in the 
eyes, in the way the eyes studied him, in something he felt in his own mind, 
hazily and without comprehension, examination-and-greeting was exchanged between 
them.
The creature turned to the hut, and there was a questioning feeling in Jose's 
mind. He did not want to speak aloud. Telepathy? Something of the sort. He 
thought the idea of a dwelling place, a shelter; all animals understood the 
concept. He thought it hard as he could, and knew he had failed, because the 
animal's next act was one of deliberate destruction.
Jose was the only one close enough to see exactly what was happening, but by 
that time they had cameras running from three different angles. Everybody saw 
the details, blown up, later: the people in the crowd, and those who, like Ken, 
were in ship, or like Em, out of the settlement.
It glided forward smoothly once again, edging towards the house, and gradually 
its body tilted sideways at an angle to the ground, without bending except at a 
concealed joint between the barrel-trunk and the right-hand set of legs.
The left-hand set described a perfect clean curve up the side of the building 
and down to the ground again. Then it reversed, and moving backwards, once more 
standing upright, edged the left-hand front runner slightly sideways and sheared 
a neat chord out of the wall.
The crowd saw the piece of metal fall away, and gasped, in unison, and then, for 
the first time, fell completely silent. What had just happened was virtually 
impossible. Alumalloy was tough. An oxy torch would cut it ... in a matter of 
hours. This creature had sliced it like a piece of meat.
The man with the gun took aim again, and nobody stopped him, but he couldn't 
fire. Jose was too close to the beast.
'Jo!' he called, and then a woman's voice said loudly, 'Shhh!' as the animal 
froze again. Jose looked around and smiled and waved another silencing motion at 
them.
He looked back just in time to see the tuskongs coming out. Two parallel 
needle-edged blades, curved like a set of paren­theses, they descended slowly 
from underneath the head, and went through the metal like tongues of fire 
through straw. The creature glided forward, and a long thin strip was sliced 
from the centre of the chord. The blades were hinged, somehow, and they seemed 
to be sticky inside. The needle edges met under the strip of metal, and the 
strip was carried up inside the tusks—or tones—as they retracted slowly into 
whatever opening (a mouth?) they came from.
'Jo, get outa there! I'm gonna shoot!'
There was no doubting that tone of voice. Jose held up a plead­ing hand, and 
stepping softly, walked backwards towards the crowd. Until he turned around, he 
knew, the man would hold fire. He waited till he was too close for his turned 
back to matter any more, then asked quietly, with all the command he could put 
into a low tone. 'Wait.'
'Why?' The man whispered in reply; then he would wait to shoot.
'We might as well see what it's going to do.'
'Ruined a wall already. Why wait for more?'
The words were passed back through the crowd, and the murmuring swelled again. 
The creature seemed to have adjusted to the noise. Calmly, it sliced another 
strip of the virtually impregnable alloy, and drew the metal into its interior.
Then, while they watched, it turned again to the wall, and, folding its front 
legs under it, slanted forward to edge its snub-ended snout inside.
The gun came up once more, and Jose knew he couldn't stop it: the beast had 
poked its head inside a sacrosanct human habitation. But: 'Higher!' he whispered 
piercingly, 'Over its head!' The barrel jerked upward imperceptibly just as the 
gun fired.
It couldn't have hit; Jose was sure of that. But a sunburst of cracks appeared 
on the surface of the animal's hide, for all the world like the impact of a 
projectile on bullet-proof glass. And at the same instant a jagged 
lightning-streak arced from the centre of the 'wound' to the side of the hut.
The gunner drew his breath in sharply. 'It's a goddam walkin' dynamo!'
And the crowd-talk started up once more.
'Quartz ... crystals ... piezo-electric … generates!'
It's scared, Jose thought—but now the animal had shown what power it had, so was 
the man. The gun came up again.
'Stop!' Jose shouted. 'Can't you see it's scared?'
It worked: not on the man, but as Jose had hoped, on the beast, and the man 
hesitated. The creature backed away from the wall, and started forward past the 
hut, away from the crowd and the street. It was leaning to one side, the good 
side, and lurching a little, going very slowly. Now its trail was a deep 
indentation on one side, and a barely marked line on the other, and in between a 
greyish ooze of something that didn't seem to be coming from the injured side. 
Perhaps from the 'mouth' or whatever those tusks went into? It was hard to tell.
The gunner still stood with his weapon half-raised.
'The field projector,' Jose whispered to him, and the man handed his gun to his 
neighbour, and ran for the rocket.
The Ullern animal had progressed perhaps fifty metres when he came out of the 
airlock again, a dozen others tumbling after him, with bulky pieces of equipment 
that took rapid shape on the ground.
There was grim speed in the way they worked. Jose, watching them, understood 
their fear, and could not share it; felt the pain of the hurt animal and grieved 
for it; fervently hoped the creature's piezo-electric properties would not make 
it unduly vulnerable to the projector.
There was a crackling, blinding flash of electricity as the field hit it.
 
Ken Tarbell answered the alarm bell reflexively, absorbed the data, and fell 
into drilled pattern responses with the projector team, getting it out of the 
airlock, setting it up, aiming, firing.
It should have trapped the animal in an invisible miniature dome through which 
no physical object could pass. Instead there was a small-scale electric storm 
over the creature, and when the glare was gone, it was lurching along just as 
slowly as before, with an odd look of urgency, but apparently none the worse for 
wear.
There was total silence in the camp, and then a shot shattered the quiet. Ken 
saw it hit; he saw the bullet bounce off the creature's hide, and saw the ragged 
black cracks radiate from the point of impact on the glittering surface of the 
skin. And he saw the thing keep moving, a little slower maybe, but still making 
progress. It was heading out of the camp, in the direction Karga's team had 
taken. It was heading towards the forest where Emma was.
Had anyone warned them?
Em had a radiphone; Ken turned and raced back to the ship, fear moving his feet 
while completely separate thoughts went through his head. The thing could fight 
off an electromagnetic field, but it was vulnerable to shock; he knew how to 
stop it.
In ship, he clambered up the ladder to Supply, grabbed the two things he needed, 
and leaped down again ignoring the footholds. Outside, he realized the others 
were on the same track, but their weapon was not strong enough. The crowd had 
separated into three groups, surrounding the thing, and they were shouting at 
it, screaming, singing, yelling, stomping, first from one side, then the other.
Each time it responded more feebly than before, moving away from the new source 
of noise. Someone ran past Ken, headed for the ship, and he caught from 
somewhere else a few words of questioning conversation. They thought they could 
head it into a trap; but what kind of trap would hold it?
Ken had the phone ready at his mouth, and his weapon in his hand. His eyes were 
on the beast, and he saw that each time the direction of the noises changed, it 
seemed a little less frightened, a little less anxious to change its path. Any 
animal learns what to fear, and what is safe. The shouting wouldn't hold it 
long, he thought, and as he thought it, saw the creature head straight for the 
group that stood between it and the forest-edge, undeterred by stamping, 
screaming cacophony.
'Emma! Em!' He spoke urgently, low-voiced, into the phone. 'There's an animal 
here. Headed your way, Watch out!'
He didn't realize for the first instant what had happened. The Ullern wasn't 
limping out towards the forest any more. It was moving fast now, as if something 
had galvanized it into action, somehow summoned its last resources of strength 
and speed. It was gliding fast and smooth and with a purpose in its direction 
... back into camp, back towards the rocket, straight at Ken.
It was coming too fast to stop or fight or escape. There was only one thing to 
do, and Ken did it. He threw the hand grenade he'd brought from the ship.
 
Let me through now, everybody out of the way, I'm a doctor,let me get through. 
There's a man hurt in there, I'm a doctor. Ken, oh Ken ...
Come on now, everybody out of the way, this door is in the way. Oh, Ken!
 
'I'm sorry, Emma. You know we can't let you in. We're doing everything we can.
'Oh, Basil, don't be silly. I have a right to help.'
'Em, I think we can manage better than you could. He's ... he's pretty badly cut 
up. You'd be bound to ...'
'What do you think I am, Dooley? Somebody's snivelling wife? I'm a doctor!' 
 
And this is how they feel when we tell them they have to wait, now I'm not a 
doctor, he's right, I'm a snivelling wife, I'm even snivelling, I can hear it. 
But I'm a doctor, if I act like one they'll have to let me in ...
 
 'What ... what do you ... What are his chances, Doctor?'
'They'll be better if we let Basil get back in there, Em.'
 
'Oh, it's you, is it? The nice careful semantic psychologist, the happy little 
word-weigher, the fellow who wanted to see some native life!
 
"Leave me alone, Jose. Please, go away! Basil ...'
 
Basil is gone, he went back to Ken, you can't go to Ken, they won't let you, 
they're going to let him die, and they won't let you help, they've got the door 
locked too, you tried that before, and they're all in there and they'll let him 
die.
 
'Em...'
'I said go away. Leave me alone, won't you?'
'Em ... it's me, Thad.'
And she collapsed gratefully, childishly, in familiar, friendly arms, abandoning 
the effort to be calm, to be convincing, to be reasonable and professional. They 
weren't going to let her into that room, whatever she did, so she sobbed in 
Thad's arms, until he said:
'Go on, Emmy, cry all you want to.' And then she stopped.
The door opened and closed again, and she looked up at Thad, and saw the news 
there, and all the confused emotion was gone. Now she was calm enough, and 
tired.
'He's …
'Dead,' Thad said the word out loud; one of them had to. 'They never let me say 
good-bye.'
'He wasn't conscious, Em.' 
`He would have known!' 
Thad didn't try to answer.
 
X
 
TWO DAYS LATER, the entire settlement was fenced in with a vibration-field. No 
other animals showed up in the time it took to get the fence operating; and the 
occasional creature that came in sight afterwards turned quickly away. We knew, 
from that first experience, that vibration was not necessarily fatal to the 
beasts, but that they could be frightened and/or hurt by anything along the 
line, in or out of the human sonic range.
I think now that most of us rather overestimated, at the time, the danger that 
vibration represented to them; it was natural enough, because we were all 
attributing the creature's obvious difficulty when it left the hut to the cracks 
the first shot had left on its surface. Actually, it took a shock as severe as 
the bomb that was finally exploded almost underneath it, to damage the brittle 
armour enough to stop it in its tracks.
It was interesting, too, that when they tested the bullets in the ballistics 
lab, it turned out the first hadn't touched the animal, and the second had hit 
squarely, been flattened by the impact of the super-hard hide, and bounced off. 
Yet the cracks from the second had been hardly more severe than from the first. 
It was difficult to visualize a living creature, a mobile animal, going about 
with a skin as brittle as glass, as easily shattered by shock-waves and 
vibration as by actual impact; yet that was obviously the case.
The bullet cracks, we decided during the autopsy, were just about as serious, 
and as painful, as whip-welts might be to a human. That is, there was no loss of 
`blood' and no real impair­ment of function; there was, instead, a state of 
potential damage, in which any ill-considered motion might result in a serious 
tissue-break. However, if you cover a man's entire body with welts, no matter 
how carefully you place them so as not to break the skin, you can incapacitate 
him completely and possibly even kill him, by reducing skin-function. This was, 
apparently, the net effect of the bomb: simply to destroy the animal's exterior 
mechanism for reacting to stimulus.
There was some doubt, too, as to whether the bomb had actually killed the thing. 
Possibly it wasn't entirely dead at first, but just immobilized. We didn't get 
close enough the first few hours to know for sure whether it was still 
breathing. We did, with instruments, check on temperature and response to 
various stimuli, and all the results, in human terms, indicated an absence of 
life. But it appears that the creature may have continued to ooze out that 
curious gel for some time after it fell. At least, when it was moved, there was 
a largish puddle underneath it; this might, of course, have been ejected at the 
time of the fall.
It took several days of fine and fancy improvisation at dissec­tion (we had only 
the one sample, and we didn't want to spoil it) to find out just what that ooze 
was. Of course, we got a chemanalysis right away, but that only gave us an idea. 
The stuff was a mixture of alumalloy compounds and body fluids of a high Ph, 
containing shortchain silicones and some quartz. The analysis presented a 
variety of interesting possibilities, but it needed the completion of the 
dissection to be certain.
When we knew, it was funny, in a way. The visiting beastie had got itself a 
bellyache from eating our house. All we could figure was that it ordinarily 
subsisted on the native plant life, hard-shelled and soft-interiored, silicone 
outside the silicarb inside. It had identified, with whatever sense organs it 
used for the pur­pose, the discernible trace of silicate in the alumalloy, and 
the presence of carbon in the interior, and had mistaken the house for an 
extra-large new variety of plant life. The aluminium, in compound with more 
tidbits of this and that than I can now remember, had reacted to the additional 
jolt of silicones in the animal's stomach by turning into a mess of indigestible 
(even for it) gelatinous-metallic stuff. The oozing trail it left behind as it 
tried to leave the settlement was nothing more or less than the trickling 
regurgitation of an animal with an inflexible outer hide, and an extreme 
vulnerability to the shock of sudden motion.
This much we knew after we had traced the thing's alimentary canal, with an 
oxy-torch, a hacksaw, and (when we got inside) more ordinary surgical 
implements. The inner tissues were more familiar-looking than the outside, of 
about the same composition and consistency one would find in an earth-animal, 
differing only in the replacement of the carbon chain compounds by silicon 
chains. Perhaps the most curious and interesting phenomenon, from a medical 
viewpoint, was the way the soft inner tissues changed gradually to tough fibrous 
stuff, somewhat similar to silicon-rubber, and then, still gradually, so that it 
was almost impossible to determine at what point the actual `skin' began, to the 
pure amorphous quartz of the hide-armour. The vicious-looking tuskongs were a 
natural enough adaptation for a creature that had to chomp up horny-hard 
surfaces with a minimum of vibration.
All this, and a good deal more of no especial interest except to a medic, we 
learned in the dissecting room and in reports from the chem lab during the two 
days it took to get the fence operat­ing. Meantime, all exploration was stopped; 
a guard was main­tained around the camp at all times until the field was in 
force, and a smaller lookout-guard afterwards. Work on the light aircraft went 
on, and construction of freight transport planes began immediately. We had 
already determined that we would move the settlement, if any habitable part of 
the planet could be found where these creatures did not exist. And all further 
in­vestigation, as well as transport, would proceed by air.
 
The move was made exactly forty days after the Ullern came into the camp. If 
you've read the old Bible, there's a certain quaint symbolism in that figure. 
The date, of course, was 12/7—Firstown Day. And it is curious to note, in 
passing the odd senti­mentalities that were applied to this business of dates 
and calen­dars.
One of the most impressive similarities between Earth and Uller was in the 
matter of time. An Earth-hour is a few minutes shorter than an hour here; the 
Uller-day, according to the Earth-setting of the chronos when we arrived, was 
about 26 hours long. And the year on Earth—the actual period of revolution 
around the sun—is slightly more than 365 days, instead of our 400.
Logically, when we arrived, we should have established a new metrical calendar 
and time-scale. Ten months of forty days, or forty weeks of ten days each—either 
one—would have been simple and efficient. A day divided into ten or twenty hours 
would have been sensible. But either one would have had the same effect: to make 
us stop and think when we spoke of time.
Humans—set apart from all other indigenous species of Earth by their ability to 
think—have a long-bred habit of avoiding mental strain. And the similarities to 
Earth-time were too notice-able and too tempting. We simply fixed our clocks and 
chronos to run slower and so saved ourselves from adjustment to the difference. 
The day here is still twenty-four hours, and the year has twelve months still. 
It didn't bother us to have 36 days each month; that part of the calendar had 
always been flexible. And the interim Fourday at year's end was an old Earth 
custom, too, I've since found out. Our only real departure was the six-day week.
 
(Parenthesis to Carla: iii)
2/10/52
 
I'M AFRAID I have been, in these last pages, rather drily concerned with facts 
as familiar to you as to anyone who has grown up side by side with the Ullerns. 
This was partly in an effort to get across to you some of the feeling we had 
then: how new all this information was to us and how difficult to assimilate. 
Also, the jump out of emotion into preoccupation with data was typical of my own 
reactions at the time.
I had one emotion that I was willing to identify, and that was hate. I worked in 
the dissection lab whenever I was awake, and took my meals there too, watching 
the work as it proceeded, and enjoying every slice and sliver that was carved 
out of that beast. That much I felt; for the rest I had ceased to be aware of 
any feelings at all. I had an overwhelming thirst for knowledge about the animal 
that had killed Ken; but Ken himself, and what his death meant to me ... this I 
refused to think about at all.
When I realized I was pregnant, I was still sleepwalking as the true love of a 
dead man. I was gloriously happy, and terribly depressed. Ken's baby would be 
Ken-continuing, and so not-quite-dead. But Ken was dead! I had no husband, and 
my child would have no father to grow up with.
Most of the time, the first few months, I just forgot I was pregnant. I meant 
that, literally. Someone would say something about it, and I'd have to collect 
my wits and remember, con­sciously, what they were talking about. Maybe I didn't 
want to have the baby, and was trying to lose it by behaving as if I weren't 
pregnant, working long hours at tough jobs ... but I don't think so. I think I 
was determined not to be happy about anything, and afraid of being depressed. I 
was, in short, determined not to feel anything.
You can't grow a child inside you without feeling it: feeling it physically, as 
your body changes, and feeling the subtle complex of emotions that accompanies 
the changes. But I tried, and for a short time I succeeded.
I remember that Jose fell into step with me one time, as I was going from my 
room to the lab, and tried to talk to me; it didn't occur to me that he was 
taking a professional interest. I thought I had myself completely under control, 
and was rather proud of the way I was behaving. I didn't even listen to what he 
said, but took for granted that he still considered me his ally in the stupid 
argument of the first day of exploration.
`How are you feeling, Emma?' I guess he said ... some such thing, because it 
gave me an opening to turn on him and demand:
`How do you feel? Now you've got your intelligent life, how do you like it?'
I can remember thinking I'd said something witty as I stalked away. The 
unforgivable thing that Jose had done to me, you see, was not that he had 
convinced me of an erroneous attitude, but that he had convinced me of something 
about which I argued with Ken the last time I saw him ... and that I had 
continued to question Ken, and to cling to Jo's attitude, right up to the moment 
Ken proved his point with his own death.
I do not now apologize for these reactions, or even comment on them, but simply 
state them here as honestly as possible. Perhaps it was healthy, after all, that 
I reacted as I did. Hate kept me going where grief would have, literally, 
prostrated me. And I did not mourn Ken, then; I just hated: everything and 
everyone that contributed in any way to his death.
It occurs to me only now that perhaps that curious business of our 
time-reckoning system, as well as many other apparently irrational things we 
did, were done in part to save our faculties of adaptation for necessities. I 
still don't know whether it was inherent weakness or instinctive wisdom. It 
doesn't matter, really, and I see I'm digressing again. I am getting older. But 
I can still remember being very scornful of the same sentimental clinging to a 
calendar, when I was a child on Pluto—and there they'd had more excuse. Pluto 
doesn't rotate at all; it has no natural day. And its year is hundreds of 
Earth-years long. So for a system of time-reckoning that applied to human 
values, the old one was as good as any other there, except in terms of 
arithmetical efficiency.
Here it was another matter altogether: we forced an old system to fit new 
circumstance; why? Because we were human, and each of us had grown up somewhere. 
Because we had been children back there, and some part of each of us was still a 
child there, and needed a safe familiar handle of some sort to cling to. In 
space, we were completely set apart from `home'. Time was our handle.
 
XI
 
THE NIGHTS WERE already long when the colony moved south. Firstown was located 
just below the 17th parallel, close enough to the pole so that few of the Ullern 
animals cared to brave the scorching summers, or freezing winters; still far 
enough so that humans could hope to survive them.
They had just about nine weeks of steadily shortening days in which to prepare 
for the winter-night; and at that latitude, it would be fourteen weeks after the 
last sunset before it would rise again for a few minutes of semi-daylight. The 
temperature, in Fourmouth, was already below freezing, and Meteorology 
pre­dicted cheerfully that the winter-night low would be somewhere about —50 
deg.
To some of the others, the long stretch of cold and darkness was frightening. To 
the Plutonians and Marsmen the cold meant nothing, and for the former, 
artificial light was as natural as sun. Emma, had she stopped to think about it, 
would have been grate­ful for even the few months each year of Earth-normal 
temperate weather and sunlight.
She didn't think about it. She worked, with grim preoccupa­tion, all through 
those early months. When she no longer had the body of the beast to cut up, she 
threw herself into the conquest of the planet that had killed Ken ... which was, 
too, the fulfilment of their joint dream. She was alone now, but somehow if she 
worked twice as hard, she could still make the dream come true for both of them.
She was lucky, too, because throughout that fall and winter there was always 
more work to be done than there were hands to do it. When her own shift at 
Medicentre was done each day, she went out and found more work; filled in on the 
auxiliary power-plant construction when people were sick; helped build the 
nursery and furnish it; spent long hours in the library, as she had done in her 
youth. Now she was studying chemistry, silicon chemistry. Organic silicon 
chemistry, working it out where it didn't exist, from what little the films 
recorded of solar knowledge.
She worked alongside other people, but made little contact with any of them, and 
she was happiest in the hours she spent alone, studying. She did not join the 
others in the big social hall, when they met on I8/5 to spend the last full hour 
of sunlight under the U.V. glass dome; she barely noticed when the long night 
set in. Almost, she might have been Emma Malook again, living under the Pluto 
dome, moving through artificial light and air, such as she'd known since birth, 
between Joan Thurman's library and Joe Prell's home, living all the time, 
wherever she was, in a fantasy of being grown-up, and a doctor. Only now she was 
a doctor, and the fantasy was being Emma Malook. She was Emma Tarbell, and she 
was going to have a baby, by which she knew indisput­ably that she was full 
grown now.
The days went by, one like the last, and all of them almost painless. In her 
sleep, she would reach out across the bed to emptiness, and withdraw her hand 
before she woke to know her own loneliness. But once awake, she followed the 
pattern of work and study rigorously, tended her body and the new body growing 
inside it, and when she was tired enough not to lie awake, went back to bed 
again.
The single event that stirred her immediate interest that winter was the Ullern 
they caught. One of the regular weekly scouting parties brought it back, along 
with their charts and statistics on conditions outside. They'd thought it was 
dead at first, then they discovered it was living, but too weak to resist 
capture. In the lab, they found out quickly enough that the animal was simply 
half starved. They fed it on specimens of local flora, and it flourished.
Then why, outside, surrounded by the same plants in abun­dance, had it almost 
died of starvation? That took a little longer to find out. Cabrini tried a 
specimen from outside on it when the next scouting squad returned and found it 
refused the frozen food. After that, they tried a range of temperatures, and 
dis­covered it would eat nothing below the freezing point of carbon dioxide. 
That made sense, too, when you thought about the prob­lem of eliminating solid 
CO2.
Jo was tremendously excited. 'If they had fire, they could use the whole 
planet!' he pointed out, and met a circle of questioning eyes.
Planning to teach this one?' Basil asked, too quietly. Jose joined the general 
laughter, and let the matter slide. It was encouraging to know that at least 
half the year the colony was completely safe from the beasts ... and to have 
some kind of clue to a method of attack.
They kept the animal in a sort of one-man zoo, an island of Uller-earth and 
Uller-plants surrounded by a five-foot moat of gluey fluid through which its 
runners could not penetrate. And Jo, apparently through sheer stubborn 
conviction that it was possible to do so, actually managed to make 'friends' 
with the creature, at least, he was the only one who could approach it when it 
regained its strength, without some display of hostility.
 
The first sun rose again on 6/8, and by the beginning of Nine-month, the days 
were already nine hours long. By then, too, Emma was far enough along to have to 
slow her pace; she had just twelve more weeks—two months—to term.
It was a sad and lovely springtime: In the last weeks of waiting, Emma gave up 
everything except her regular work at Medi­centre. Studying no longer interested 
her; instead she would go out and sit for hours in the crisp fresh air and 
Tenmonth sunshine, intensely conscious of the life within her, impatient for its 
birth, and yet somehow fearful of letting it loose. It would be a boy, of 
course, it had to be a boy, and she would name it Kenneth.
Leah was born on 36/0, right in the middle of Medicentre's first and biggest 
baby-room. There were twenty-three new infants in the colony in two weeks' time.
Inevitably, Emma spent much of her time the next month with the other young 
mothers, all of them learning and sharing the care of their babies. After the 
first—not disappointment, but surprise—she didn't mind Lee's being a girl; and 
she was sur­prised, too, to discover how much pleasure she could find in the 
simple routine of feeding and cleaning a tiny infant. Her own infant.
She was busy and useful again, because the other mothers came to her for advice 
and opinions at every turn. She was a medic, after all, and had some kind of 
previous experience with babies.
Under the best of circumstances, it is likely to be eight or ten weeks after 
birth before the mother is once again quite convinced of her own existence as a 
separate and individual person. Emma had little desire to return to that 
conviction. She was stirred by occasional questioning curiosities about the 
details of the re­frigerating system, as the heat outside mounted through the 
summer-day. She began to pick up some of the chemistry films a little more 
often, and went, from time to time, to the zoo-in-a-lab where the Ullern was 
still kept, to find out what they had learned about it. But on the whole, she 
was more than content with the narrow slice of reality in which she found 
herself. Even her work at Medicentre, as she resumed it, somehow concerned 
itself primarily with babies: those already born, and those that were still 
expected.
The first New Year's Eve on Uller came in midsummer, just long enough after 
Lee's birth for Em to have gone to the celebra­tion comfortably if she wished. 
She preferred to stay in the nursery, and let the other mothers go, with their 
husbands. Two months later, when the early fall nights were beginning to be long 
enough to cool the air a little, she found her first real pleasure in contact 
with the new environment.
In the hour before dawn, it was possible to go outside without frig-suits; and 
every day, from that time, Em adjusted her sleep­ing so that she would be awake 
at that time of day. First, when the nights were still short, she would leave 
the sleeping baby in the nursery; later, when dawn began to coincide with the 
chrono­morning, she would take Lee with her.
Alone, or with the baby at her side in a basket on the ground, she would sit by 
the edge of the dry river-bed, and watch the world wake up. The first sun's 
rays, felt before they were seen, brought a swarm of near microscopic life out 
of the moist earth of the river bed, and started an almost imperceptible 
stirring in the trees. Emma would sit and watch while the budded branches snaked 
up and out of the sparkling columns of their trunks, turned their tender new 
greenery up to the sun for a brief time, and then melted back into the safety of 
the cool trunk shells.
Day after day, she tried to remember why the flexible tree-trunks were so fondly 
familiar. It was silly, somehow; and then at last the memory came. A little ball 
of stuff that bounced, and broke off clean when you stretched it ... that 
moulded to any shape, and dropped back slowly to a formless mass again when you 
left it alone ... a childhood toy, that someone had called silly putty. Some 
kind of silicon compound, she supposed, and told little Lee, who did not 
understand: 'See? See the silly-putty trees?'
On another level of interest, the phenomenon of twice-yearly budding fascinated 
her, as well as the marvellous apparatus offered by the flexible branches to 
protect the leaves against too much sun as well as against the winter cold. Each 
day, too, as the sun rose farther in the north, the branches turned their budded 
sides to catch its rays aslant: like the sunflower on Earth, but these trees 
turned to face the source of life throughout the year, instead of by the day.
When the tree-trunks began to crawl back in their shells, it was time to go 
inside. Minutes later, the sun would be too hot to take. But for the hour before 
that, it was a cool and peaceful world on the river bank.
 
By the time Lee was six months old, the weather outside had passed its brief 
month of perfection, and was once again too cold for pleasure. By that time, 
too, the first epidemic of parenthood was dying down. Emma was back at general 
medic work; the world was achieving a sort of normalcy. She had her baby. She 
had her work. And she was beginning to be aware of the fact that she was 
terribly lonely.
By that time, too, there were some unattached men. A good many of those early 
marriages broke up in the first year. In spite of the growing emphasis on 
typically frontier-puritan monogam­ous family patterns, divorce was, of 
necessity, kept easy: simply a matter of mutual decision, and registration. For 
that matter, the morality in the early years was more that of the huddled 
commune than of the pioneer farmland.
Emma saw a lot of men that winter. Lee was a convenient age ... old enough not 
to need hovering attention, young enough still to be asleep a large part of the 
time. Emma was a romantic figure, too, by virtue of her widowhood; her long 
grief for Ken estab­lished her as a better marriage risk than those who had made 
an error the first time, and had had to admit it. The dawning recog­nition of 
these facts provided her at first with amusement, and later with a certain 
degree of satisfaction. She had been an intel­lectual adolescent, after all. 
Now, for the first time, she found out what it was like to be a popular girl. 
She discovered a new kind of pleasure in human relationships: the casual 
contact.
She found out that friends could be loved without being the beloved; that men 
could be friends without intensity; that affec­tion came in varying degrees, and 
that she could have many different kinds of affection from many different people 
... even though Ken was dead.
Yes, she found out too that Ken was dead. Perhaps it was fortunate that Lee was 
a girl; a boy named Kenneth might have helped her keep the truth from herself a 
while longer. And the inescapable violence of the seasonal changes made a 
difference. Life was determined to continue, and to do so it was constantly in a 
state of change. Even the silly-putty trees told her that much.
There was an impulse towards gaiety throughout the colony generally during the 
second winter-night. The first one had been too full of work and worry. Now, 
they felt established and moderately secure. They had survived a full year of 
what troubles the planet could offer, and Ken's death was still their only loss. 
A new science of chemistry and physics in the labs and a new technology was 
beginning to appear. Perhaps a new biology as well: Jo now had two Ullerns in 
his zoo, and there was some reason to believe that the creatures were capable of 
mating.
There was a warm sense of security in the colony, and when they had to take to 
the underground corridors again to keep their warmth, it added a womb-like 
complacency. It was a winter of parties and celebrations and increasing 
complexities of human relations. It merged into a springtime of renewed activity 
and interest for everyone, and most of all for Emma.
Now, when she went to the river-bank at dusk, instead of dawn, she had to watch 
the toddling one-year-old baby, and keep her from the rushing waters of the 
river. Everything, all around, was full of motion and excitement, even the 
intellectual life that was hesitantly picking up once more.
There was so much to learn: she started going to the library again, after Lee 
was in bed for the night, and scanning the recorded knowledge there for clues to 
the new facts of life. She spent hours, sometimes, in the zoo-lab, watching the 
two Ullerns, and in spite of her open amusement at Jo's undiminished belief in 
their intelligence as a species, she listened eagerly while he talked about 
their habits. He had been watching them for months. She did not have to accept 
his interpretation on the data he'd acquired, but the observations themselves 
were fascinating.
 
The zoo became something of a centre of debate throughout the colony. It was now 
firmly established that one of the creatures was, in human terms, female. 
Medicentre wanted the male for dissection now that a new generation was assured. 
Jose wouldn't hear of it. There was a good deal of humour at his expense, and an 
increasing amount of discussion and argument too, on both sides. Emma couldn't 
take it too seriously; the birth of her child had given her a new attitude 
towards time. There were years ahead of them. If Joe wanted his pet alive, why 
kill it? They'd catch more ...
 
The days were constantly longer and fuller. Now sunset came too late to take Lee 
with her when she went down to the river bank, and the water was beginning to 
move more thinly and slowly, low between the sides. The half-hour out there 
before bed was the only part of the day now that was quiet and unoccupied. It 
was a time for feeling, instead of thinking or doing, for a renewal of the 
loneliness she refused, quite, to surrender.
Refused, that is, until the evening Bart Heimrich met her there, and in the cool 
of twilight, just as the sun went down, took her in his arms. It shouldn't have 
made that much difference; they were two grown people, and one kiss by the side 
of the slow moving water could hardly have mattered so much.
Emma was frightened. For two weeks after that, she stayed away from the river, 
and she wouldn't see Ban either. She'd been in love once, and once was enough. 
There were plenty of men around. This kind of thing was more than she wanted. As 
she had done a year ago, she threw herself into study and work.
There was still plenty to do. As unofficial specialist in obstetrics, she had 
been somehow selected to watch over the Ullern creature's pregnancy. She spent 
more time at the zoo, now, trying to weed out the facts and theories Jo threw at 
her. He was so sure of his conclusions about the Ullerns that it was almost 
impossible for him to separate observations from hypotheses, and Emma was 
alternately amused and infuriated by the problem of working with him. He was a 
first-rate psychologist, after all, and a careful semanticist ... where other 
people's attitudes were concerned. Even about himself, she decided on 
reflection—except in this one area of most intense belief.
Was that true for everyone? Was there, for each person, a space where one's own 
judgment could not be trusted? How about herself, and Bart?
Jo was a good psychologist, almost all the time. They were talking for the 
thousandth time, about the fate of the male Ullern. Jo had achieved a reprieve 
for the beast, till after the young ones were born, with the argument that they 
should at least wait and make sure they had another male to replace it. Emma 
approved the argument; it suited her tendency to temporize.
'Emmy,' Jo asked in a sudden silence: 'Has it occurred to you yet that you have 
a long time to live too?'
Her first impulse was to laugh. 'Never thought about it much,' she said lightly.
'Well, why don't you?'
'I don't know.' She was decidedly uncomfortable. 'What's that got to do with the 
price of baby Ullerns?'
'Nothing at all. I was just wondering, most intrusively, about you and Bart.'
'Me and ... what are you talking about?'
'I told you I was being intrusive. It's none of my business. Would you rather 
not talk about it?'
'I'd much rather..? She changed her sentence half-way through; 'much rather talk 
about it, I guess.'
'All right then. What's the matter, Emmy? Don't you like him?'
`Like him? I ...' Then she saw he was smiling, and grinned ruefully herself. 
'All right, so I'm wild about him. But ...' There was no way to explain it.
'But what?'
'Well ... it's not the same. I can't feel the same way about him that I did 
about ... Ken. I don't think I'll ever feel that way about anybody again. It 
wouldn't be fair ...'
'Come off it, Emmy. What are you afraid of? If you're sure you'll never feel the 
same way, what's there to worry about?'
She looked up, startled, and waited a moment to answer, while she admitted to 
herself that it wasn't Bart she was afraid of hurt­ing at all.
'I don't know. Look, things are all right the way they are. I don't need him; he 
doesn't need me. Why should we get all tangled up so we do need each other? What 
for? Oh, Jo, don't you see I can't take a chance on anything like that again? I 
... this is a crazy thing to say, but I think if he was married, I'd be more 
willing to ... that's not very nice, is it?'
'Nice?' He shrugged. 'It's pretty normal. Understandable, anyhow. And just what 
was I talking about. You've got a long time to live yet, Emmy. You going to 
stick it out alone?'
She nodded slowly. 'Yes,' she said. 'I am.' And with the words spoken aloud, the 
impossible loneliness of the future struck her for the first time fully. She 
hadn't cried since the day Ken died; now a slow tear came to one eye, and she 
didn't try to stop it. There was another, and another, and she was sobbing, 
great gasp­ing sobs, against Jo's comforting shoulder.
He was a good psychologist. He didn't tell her it was all right to cry; he 
didn't tell her anything, except to murmur an occa­sional word of sympathy and 
affection. He stroked her hair and patted her shoulder, and waited till she was 
done. Then he grinned and said: 'You look like hell. Better wash up here before 
you go see him.'
 
For a year and more, Bart and Emma spent most of what free time they had 
together. They had fun, and they had tender happy moments. They understood and 
enjoyed each other. They might have married, but marriage was a sacred cow 
still; no matter how much she loved Bart, or liked being with him, Emma 
steadfastly refused to sign the vows. It wasn't the same as it had been with 
Ken; she was both relieved and disappointed to dis­cover that. But if she 
married him, it might get to be the same—or it might not. Which prospect was the 
worse she hardly knew.
When, occasionally, she still felt frightened about caring as much as she did, 
there was always Jose to talk it over with, and talking to him always made her 
feel better. She might have resolved the ambivalence entirely through therapy. 
Jose hinted at the notion from time to time, but she didn't want to, and he knew 
better than to push it.
More and more, too, Emma and Jo were working so closely together in the zoo-lab 
that a therapy relationship between them would have been hard to establish. And 
Jo was the only really qualified therapist in the colony. The techniques were 
familiar to all the people in Medicentre, but psychotherapy is not a skill to be 
acquired in rapid training. Jo had a natural aptitude for it, that was all.
Jo was good to work with as Bart was to love. The important factor in each case 
was enthusiasm, the ability to participate completely. Emma's interest in the 
Ullerns differed from Jo's in all respects but one, and that was intensity. She 
listened to his theories both patiently and painstakingly, believing little and 
using much to further her own knowledge of the weird biology of the creatures. 
She was quite content to discard the largest part of what he said, and select 
the most workable of his ideas for follow-up. By the end of that year, she had 
begun to recognize, re­luctantly, that she was getting good results surprisingly 
often when she worked along the lines suggested by his thinking. But it took a 
major incident to make her look back and count the trials and errors, before she 
would admit how consistent the pattern of predictability had been.
 
The Ullern babies had been born in the fall of '92. There were three of them, 
but it wasn't until early spring that it was possible to determine with any 
degree of certainty that two of them were female and one a male. Perhaps it 
could have been determined a little sooner; Jose had managed to get a 
postponement of the father-Ullern's death sentence once again, until the sex of 
the young ones was known, and there was some feeling that he, at least, knew for 
quite a while before he told anyone.
Once the announcement was made, however, there was no further question of 
delaying the opportunity for an autopsy. The only question now was whether it 
might not be best to take the older female, and gain some additional information 
about the reproductive system.
Discussion and debate went round and about for some ten days. It was terminated 
by the incredible information that the adult male had escaped.
The talk stopped then, because nobody wanted to say out loud what everybody was 
thinking. You see, it was simply not possible for the creature to make his way 
unaided through that gluey moat.
If there was any doubt at all in the public mind about what had happened, there 
was none in Emma's. She was shocked and angry and she saw to it that she had no 
further talks with Jo in which he might be tempted to confide anything she 
didn't want to know.
 
XII
 
THE ANNOUNCEMENT, POSTED two days after the Ullern's escape, said simply:
 
LECTURE
In the Small Hall, 19/5/93, at 20.00 hours.
A report by Jose Cabrini on
the possibilities for direct communication
with the native inhabitants of Uller.
 
I read it, and couldn't help feeling relieved on Jo's behalf. I might have known 
he wouldn't risk anything so unpopular as letting that animal get away unless he 
had something else up his sleeve. What it was, I didn't know; Jose had never 
discussed with me any clues he had to the problem of direct communication.
He should have known the Small Hall wouldn't hold the crowd that turned out. 
Maybe he did know; if so, it was effective stag­ing, when the early arrivals had 
to move to the Main Hall, and latecomers found a sign directing them there.
Jose began his speech very informally, joking about the size of his audience, 
with some hoary gags about being unaccustomed to such very public speaking. Then 
his tone changed.
'I'm afraid the news I have for you tonight is more dramatic than it is useful 
... so far. I think what has already been learned will eventually enable us to 
communicate directly with the natives of this planet, and perhaps—if my estimate 
of their capacities is accurate—to live on a co-operative basis with them. For 
the present time, however, my information does little more than answer a 
question that has baffled a good many of us.'
I had no idea what was coming.
'If you will all think back to our first contact with an Ullern,' he said slowly 
and distinctly, `You may recall that there was one particularly puzzling piece 
of behaviour on the part of the animal—one question that was never answered in 
the autopsy.'
Thinking back was still too vivid. I shuddered in the warm room, and missed the 
next few words.
'... attack Ken Tarbell? What gave it the renewed energy to make such a fierce 
charge, when it was already badly hurt, and was seeking nothing but escape? My 
own theory at the time was that the Ullern was reacting with what would be, in 
the human metabolism, an adrenal release, to the telepathically-received 
information that Tarbell had found a means of attacking it fatally.
`That theory was inadequate. If you think of telepathy as a mystic or 
metaphysical power, my analysis was entirely incorrect. But if you will try to 
think of it, for the moment as an emanation similar in nature to radio or 
electromagnetic waves, I was close to the truth.
'You are all familiar with the piezo-electric properties of the Ullern 
physiology. You can see it for yourselves in the zoo, even the babies react 
electrically to certain irritations. Analogizing pretty broadly, one might say 
that the electrical reaction to stimulus in an Ullern is similar to the adrenal 
reaction in humans: that is, it is produced by just such irritations as might 
reasonably be expected to provoke the emotion of fear or anger.
'Now: in a human, the application of such a stimulus can have differing results. 
An unkind word, the semi-serious threat of a blow, anything on that order, will 
produce enough of an adrenal release so that the person affected may express his 
reaction rapidly in expletive, or door-slamming, or some similarly mild 
expenditure of energy. A slightly greater threat will produce a cocked fist; a 
little more will make a man strike out. But a really strong stimulus, 
ordinarily, will not produce a direct counter-action. If a man threatens your 
life by holding a gun at your head ... or if you are knocked over by a blow to 
the belly ... you will conserve the extra energy of the resulting adrenal 
release for an all-out effort against the attacker.
'This is, essentially, what the Ullern did. The many irritations to which it was 
subjected produced a variety of reactions, most of them in the fear-spectrum. 
The first shot, which failed to hit it, but shattered a part of its armour with 
shock-vibrations, angered it only within the fast-reaction range, and it 
responded, without conscious "planning", by an emission of "lightning". 
Apparently it was unable to place the source of the shot, and believed the shock 
to have come from the building; so the electrical "punch" was aimed at the wall.
'Subsequent irritations made it aware of some consciousness on the part of large 
lumps of carbon which it had previously ignored as being, in all past 
experience, most likely inorganic, or at least inedible, entities. The idea was 
devastatingly new and at least as frightening as the actual vibrations the 
carbon creatures then commenced to "hit" it with..?
There was a murmur of noise through the hall; some laughter, some coughing, much 
shuffling.
'All right,' Jo said smiling, 'I'll get to the point now. So far it's all been 
theorizing and analogy. Briefly, my information is this: the Ullerns contain, in 
their quartz-hide armour, crystals capable of sending and receiving radio waves 
... by which I mean specifically that they can exchange information on the same 
frequency bands on which our radiphones operate.'
The sentence was delivered so quietly, it took a moment to penetrate. Then the 
hall was in an uproar. Jose couldn't go on with the speech until he had answered 
a hailstorm of questions from the audience.
'What's that got to do with Tarbell?' somebody wanted to know first.
'Emma,' Jo said from the stand, 'maybe you can explain that best?'
I was a little confused myself. I got to my feet, and said hesitantly, 'Ken 
tried to warn me ... he phoned me about the Ullern heading our way ... that's 
why we came back ...'
'I suppose the gooks understand English!' somebody roared from the back of the 
room, and someone else added:
'Suppose they did? Wouldn't even an Uller-beast give a man the right to warn his 
wife?'
Laughter, and foot-stamping, and gradual quiet as I continued to stand in my 
place. 'Maybe it's funny to the rest of you,' I said, 'but I'd like to know just 
what Jo meant. So far, what he's said has made sense. If anybody who isn't 
interested will leave, per­haps the rest of us can learn something.'
I was just angry enough, and just intense enough, I guess, to get an effect. 
There was prompt and total silence. Jo went on.
There is no point in reproducing the rest of the speech here. It was, like most 
important discoveries, only very briefly incredible. After even the smallest 
amount of reflection, we could all see how logical the explanation was. The 
wonder was that we hadn't thought of it before. The same explanation can be 
found, almost word for word, in the basic biology text on Ullerns. Cabrini said 
simply, that when Ken used the phone, on a frequency just a little off the 
personal-broadcast wave-length that particular Ullern was tuned to, the 
heterodyning effect was the equivalent to it, in pain, of the belly-punch he'd 
mentioned earlier. It was immobilized momentarily, and the next immediate 
reaction was to utilize the energy thus generated in a life-and-death charge at 
the source of the intolerable pain. This time it had no trouble locating the 
source; a radio beam is easier to track than a bullet, if your senses happen to 
include a direction-finder.
I didn't listen to most of the discussion that followed the speech. I was busy 
readjusting, or admitting to readjustments. I had stopped hating the Ullerns a 
long time back, and now at last I had a rationale on which to hang what had 
seemed like a betrayal.
The attack on Ken was not irrational or unprovoked. In Ullern terms, Ken had 
attacked first. A silly difference, a piece of nonsense, really, but important 
to me at the time. It was no longer necessary to keep hating, even on a 
conscious verbal level.
As soon as I got that much clear in my mind, I wanted to leave.
'You stay if you want to,' I told Bart. 'I just want to get out of here and do 
some thinking.'
'Would you rather be alone?' He was a very sweet guy. I knew he meant just that; 
he'd let me go alone if I preferred it, or come along if I wanted him to.
I shook my head. 'No, I wouldn't. If you don't mind missing this, I'd like to 
have someone to talk to, a little bit.'
He took my arm, and saw to it that we got out without interference; stopped 
people who wanted to question me, and pushed through the knots of 
conversationalists who were too absorbed or excited to notice us.
Outside, it was hot. So close to summer-time it was always hot, but the sun was 
down when we left the hall, and it was possible to stay outdoors.
We walked down to the river bank in silence, and stood there and I looked around 
me and let myself know, for the first time, fully, how much I loved this place. 
It was mine; I had paid for it with the greatest loss I was ever likely to know. 
And now the loss was complete, because I understood it.
Bart saw the tears in my eyes.
'That son-of-a-bitch!' he said. `Didn't he even warn you?'
 'Who?' I didn't know what he was talking about.
'Cabrini. He had no business ... look, darling, never mind about him. The big 
thing is, we've got the knowhow now. We've got a way to fight them! We can ...'
`What?' I was sure I still didn't understand. 'What are you talking about Bart?'
'Don't you see, dear? Naturally, Cabrini didn't put it that way, but this thing 
is a weapon ... a real weapon! We can live anyplace on the planet now. If radio 
waves hurt the things that much, they'll kill 'em too. We can ...'
'Bart,' I begged. 'Don't you understand? Can't you see what it means? They're 
intelligent! We can learn to talk to them. We can make friends with them.'
I searched his face for some signs of comprehension, and found only indulgence 
there. 'Emma, you are just too good to be true,' he said. 'And you need some 
sleep. Come on, I'll take you back now, and we can talk about it tomorrow.' He 
put his arm around me.
 
***Proofed to Here***
 
He meant well. I have no doubt at all that he meant well.
'Will you please get the hell out of here?' I said, as quietly as possible. I 
would have said much more but he went.
When he was gone, I lay down on the river bank and pressed my face against the 
dirt of my planet and cried. That was the third time I cried, and now it was for 
the loss of Bart as well as Ken.
 
(Parenthesis to Carla: iv)
 
Josetown, Uller, 1/1 
 
Dear Child:
I am, frankly, annoyed. This story was supposed to be about the generations of 
women who came before you, and about the early years on Uller. Looking back, I 
find it is almost entirely about one small portion of my own life.
I think I know what happened. Somewhat earlier in this narra­tive, I made a 
statement about the oddity of reversed pain and pleasure in Recall. I suspect 
that I enjoyed the reliving of those early months on Uller far more in the 
telling than I ever did in the experience. From the day Ken died till the day 
when I wept out my sorrows on the river bank, I was never entirely happy. There 
was much isolated pleasure during that period: delight in my baby, and fun with 
Bart, and satisfaction in my work ... and certainly much more pleasure in 
knowing Jose than I realized. But all through those two years, life had no 
meaning beyond the moment. I did not, would not, believe in any kind of future, 
without Ken.
In the years that followed, there were many hardships and moments of unhappiness 
and despair, but from that time on, I had a growing purpose in existence. 
Apparently, I have less need to re-experience the productive years than the 
others. And of course, there is really very little more that I can tell you. 
Thad Levine wrote the story of the bitter three years' quarrel in the colony, 
and wrote it far better than I could. You have heard from me, and probably from 
a dozen others too, the woe-filled history of the establishment of Josetown. Jo 
himself wrote a painstaking account of the tortuous methodology by which the 
Ullern code was worked out, and I know you have read that too.
(I am sternly repressing the inclination to excuse my many omissions by pointing 
to the date above, and referring to the page number. Time is short now, and the 
story too long. But neither of these is an honest reason for my failure to do 
what I planned ... no more than are my excuses in the paragraph immediately 
above.)
I had hoped, when I started this, to give you some clue to my own mistakes, so 
that you might avoid them. There are such striking similarities, Carla dear, 
between Joan Thurman and myself, between me and you! And on the other side, 
there is such a pattern of identity between Martha and Adne and Lee. It seems to 
me there should be some way of braking the pendulum swing ... of producing, 
sometime, a child who is neither rebelliously `idealistic' nor possessively 
demanding of security in its most obvious forms.
It was at least partly in the hope that the history of those who went before you 
might teach you how to achieve this goal of impossible perfection with your 
children, when you have them, that I undertook this journal. I hope I have 
managed to include more helpful information in it than it now seems to me I have 
done.
In any case, I see little purpose in carrying the story further. I have mulled 
over it for weeks now, and have written several chapters about what came after 
the day of Jo's lecture, and have decided, each time, to leave them out.
There are many things I wanted to say that I've left out ... little things, 
mostly, for which I could not find a proper spot in the narration. I could 
ramble on here, filling them in, but again there is no real purpose in it, 
except to satisfy myself.
But, reading what I have just written, I realize that there is still much 
unresolved conflict in my own attitudes. Yes (I tell myself), I should like to 
see you rear your children to be perfect little happy mediums—and yet I am so 
pleased, Carla, to see you play­ing out the role I know so well myself.
Perhaps the `others'—Leah and Ariadne and Martha—perhaps they knew some 
happiness I never understood; but I am certain that they never knew the kind of 
total purpose in living that has been my great joy. I had a dream ... I learned 
it from Joan Thurman. That dream is yours, too, and I'm quite irrationally 
pleased to think that you acquired it, in part, from me.
Tomorrow you will leave, Carla, and I will give you this film totake with you. 
When you leave, it will be as a part of the first great experiment with time ... 
and like the fuel for the Newhope, which has made over the whole life of man, 
the mastery of time has come as an adjunct to a commercial venture. Joe Prell, 
if he were here today, would laugh at the implications I see in your voyage ... 
but not at the possible profits. I ... I think it is more risk than merited to 
go to Nifleheim for new and more uranium. But to go in profitable comradeship 
with the Ullerns—this is the fulfilment of my own life's dream. And to go as the 
advance guard of a whole new science—this is the beginning of yours.
If it takes uranium to make the Prells pay for a time machine (did you know 
that's what you have?—at least the beginnings of one), why let us have enough of 
the stuff to blow us all sky-high!
 
(Epilogue)
 
I HAVE JUST come back from the ceremonies of the take-off, and I am more annoyed 
than ever. Now that I have handed over my imperfect gift, I have found out what 
it was lacking. There is no way of knowing, as I write, whether Carla has 
reached ... will reach ... her destination safely, or whether, if she does, she 
will arrive (has arrived?) there in a time-conjunction through which she can 
communicate with us. I can only wait, and hope there is some word.
But I shall assume, as I must, that she is safe, and that some time these words 
will reach her. The story is yet to be finished, and I found out today why I was 
unable to finish it before. (I suppose I thought I was too old and too objective 
to carry any more scars of hurt or hatred from Lee!)
Leah Tarbell was born on Uller, and grew up there. She was too young to 
understand the fury of the debate that preceded her mother's move from Firstown 
to Josetown; but she was not too young at all to resent the loss of her Uncle 
Bart's com­pany a scant few weeks after she had learned to pronounce his name.
Over the next three years, she understood well enough that her mother was 
somehow in disrepute with the parents of most of her playmates. And at five 
years of age, she was quite old enough to blame her mother for the almost 
complete loss of those play-mates. Only four other children accompanied the 
group of sixty-seven `Josites' when they betook themselves, their pet Ullerns, 
their special knowledge, and their apportioned share of the human colony's 
possessions to the new location on the loth parallel that became known as 
Josetown.
Only one of the other children was near her own age; that was Hannah Levine, and 
she was only four, really. The two little girls, of necessity, became friends. 
They played and ate and often slept together. At bedtime, they were lonely 
together too, while their parents went off to conferences and lab sessions. And 
late at night, sometimes, they would wake up and be frightened to­gether, 
remembering the stories they'd heard in the nursery at home about the Ullerns 
who lived at the foot of the hill.
She tried to cry about leaving her mother when she was sent back to Firstown a 
year and a half later, with Alice Cabrini and the two Cabrini children, to go to 
school. But she didn't really expect to miss Emma; Em was always working, 
anyhow. Back home, the grown-ups had more time to pay attention to kids.
From that time till she was fourteen, she lived with Alice in Firstown, and she 
was happy there. When Alice decided it was safe to rejoin Jose in the smaller 
settlement, Leah desperately did not want to go. She tried every device an 
adolescent mind could contrive to keep Alice at home. But when it came down to a 
choice of going with them, or being left behind, she couldn't quite face the 
desertion of the family she loved as her own.
She went along, and her adolescent imagination seized on a whisper here and a 
word there to find real cause to hate her mother. She was not blind, as the 
adults seemed to be, to the fact that Emma and Jo had worked together day after 
day through the years, while Alice endured long nights of loneliness for the 
sake of the three children who needed her care.
Lee watched the three grown-ups closely. She heard the in-flexion of every word 
they spoke to each other, and noticed each small gesture that passed between 
them. In the end, she satisfied herself that Emma and Jose were not lovers (as 
indeed we had not been since Alice's return). Then she felt something amount­ing 
almost to compassion for her mother. She had not failed to observe the flush of 
enthusiasm with which Emma listened to Jo's ideas, and poured out ideas of her 
own to command his attention. At the same time she saw how Alice, sitting 
quietly in the background, pretending interest in nothing but Jo himself, and 
his home and the children, succeeded in drawing his atten­tion.
She did not understand how her mother could be so stupid as to try to attract a 
man by being bright. She did not even begin to understand the further fact that 
she could not help observing: Emma seemed to be perfectly happy sharing Jo's 
work, and let­ting Alice share his home and his bed. As long as it was true, 
however, Lee was willing to let Emma go her own strange way.
 
She was less willing to accept any of the belated affection her mother tried to 
give her. And Emma's ludicrous attempts to convince her of the importance of the 
work they were doing in Josetown did not succeed even in antagonizing her. Lee 
had lived long enough in Firstown to know how little it mattered whether the 
code was ever completed. She knew the plans the other colony had already laid 
down for an equatorial settlement—a settlement which was to follow the 
extinction of the Ullerns. The agreement between the larger group and the small 
one had given Jose ten years to make a go of his project. Eight of those years 
had passed now, and he could hardly claim that making friends with a local group 
of Ullerns constituted proof of their intelli­gence. Any animal may be 
domesticated by one means or another.
All these things Lee knew, and she was not interested in learn­ing any part of 
the foolishness in which her mother was engaged. After a while, Emma stopped 
trying to interest her in the work at Josetown, and for a while they got along 
together.
Lee never thought of the Josetown period as anything more than an enforced 
hiatus in her life. If by some miracle the settlement continued after the ten 
years were up, she for one had no intention of remaining in it. When she was 
seventeen, she knew, she would have the right to live by herself if she chose 
and she had already chosen. She would live in Firstown, where her friends and 
loyalties were.
She stuck to her resolve, even after the message from Earth. Not even the 
dramatic opening of subspace communication be­tween Uller and the mother system 
disturbed her tight little plans. Nor did her private opinion of the foolishness 
of the Josetown project change when popular opinion shifted to favour it. 
Earth's problems were no concern of hers, and she saw no reason to give up her 
hopes or hatreds either one, just because Jose Cabrini had somehow turned out to 
be right.
Her strongest reaction to the news from Earth was irritation, because it meant 
that Josetown would continue beyond the ten-year period after all, and that she 
herself would have to spend a full year more there than she had expected.
She made use of the time. She started learning the code, and even studied a 
little Ullern biology. She helped Jo prepare his lab notes for printing in the 
form in which they are now available, and learned the history of the project 
while she did it. By the time she was old enough to go back to Firstown and take 
up residence in the single girls' dorm, she knew enough about the Josetown work 
to take a really intelligent part in discussions with the men back home.
 
As it turned out, Lee was our best ambassador. She had picked up, from Jo's 
notes, one item of information we had not intended to release just yet. 
Fortunately, as it turned out, she felt no ties of loyalty to us. That was how 
the news got out that Jose actually had taught Ullerns the use of fire, and it 
was that news that led to the Conference of 2108.
Fifteen of us went back to Firstown for the Conference, armed with notes and 
speeches and films to document our defence. We were somewhat taken aback to find 
that no defence was neces­sary; Firstown was way ahead of us in recognizing the 
implica­tions of the Ullerns' use of fire. I suppose we had grown so accustomed 
to defensiveness by then, we simply couldn't see beyond the necessity of 
protecting next year's work. The people at Firstown were used to thinking in 
terms of expansion and utilization of knowledge; they had the engineering minds 
to put our research to use.
Lee was only seventeen, but her greatest ability, even then, was the tactful 
manipulation of other people. It was her carefully developed friendship with 
Louis Dooley that made it possible for Basil and Jose to meet privately before 
the Conference started, and hash out their ideas. And it was in that private 
meeting that the mutual advantages of humans—Ullern co-operation in the 
Nifleheim venture were recognized.
When we went back to Josetown, it was with the long-range plan already worked 
out : the further development of the code to the point where we could 
communicate with Ullerns in the abstractions we were certain they were capable 
of understanding; they continued work on Ullern biochemistry to determine 
whether the quartz-to-teflon adaptation would actually take place, as we 
believed, in the atmosphere of Nifleheim; and the long, long process of 
persuading the Ullerns that other humans besides our own small group now wanted 
friendship with them.
That was our part of the job. Back in Firstown, they worked, in communication 
with Earth, on the other end of the problem : the improvement of sub-space 
transport to eliminate the mishaps, and make it safe for live freight.
 
(P.S. to Carla)
 
IT IS TWO weeks now since I went to the take-off of the Nifleheim Ark and stood 
beside my daughter Lee, watching the whole show through her eyes, and gaining 
some of the understanding that made it possible for me to finish this story.
We were all together, Lee and Louis and the three youngsters. Carla, of course, 
was participating in the ceremonies.
Johnny, my youngest grandson, looked at the domed building in the centre of the 
field, and was disappointed.
`Just like any other building,' he grumbled.
Lee nodded automatically. `Yes, dear, it is,' she said, but some-thing made her 
shiver as she said it. It was ordinary-looking, far more like a house than a 
spaceship. Nothing frightening at all ... to look at. Yet it stood there, 
triumphant and menacing, the most impregnable enemy she had ever met. She hadn't 
even been able to stay away from the take-off as she'd planned. She had to come: 
she was Louis Dooley's wife and Carla's mother, and Emma Tarbell's daughter, and 
they wouldn't let her stay home. She had to bring her other children, too, and 
any minute now, she'd have to watch the plain domed structure disappear.
`Centuries gone, man looked to the stars and prayed,' the worn tape intoned. `He 
made them his gods, then his garden....'
Leah shuddered, and reached for her young son's hand, but he never felt her 
touch. The magic of the old, old words was wrapping itself around him.
`... of thought, and at last his goal. We have not....'
Inside the dome was all the equipment for separating and storing the uranium 
that could be had, for the simple extraction, from the atmosphere of Nifleheim. 
Inside, too, were quarters for humans and Ullerns to live side by side together. 
Inside was Carla's bridal home, and beyond the wall that held her bed was the 
dread machinery of sub-space itself.
'... reached that goal. This is not a beginning nor an end; neither the first 
step nor the last....'
Lee looked around at all the others, the mothers who were supposed to be proud 
and pleased today, and saw the tense fists clenching, the tired eyes squinting, 
the hands reaching for a younger child's touch. She felt better then, knowing 
they shared the mockery of the moment.
She stood patiently, listening to Jo's speech, hearing him explain once more how 
Ullerns could venture forth on the surface of Nifleheim, and actually benefit by 
the change ... how chang­ing shifts of Ullern workers could spend an adaptation 
period on the alien planet, expose themselves to the fluorine that would change 
their brittle skins to flexible teflon hides, while human hands inside worked 
the machinery that would process the des­perately-needed uranium for transport 
back to Earth. Lee stood and listened to it all, but it meant no more than it 
had meant last year, or forty years before, when they started work on it.
Then at last, Carla was standing before her, with all the speeches and display 
finished, and nothing left to do but say good-bye. She reached out a hand, but 
Louis was there first, holding the slender girl in a wide embrace, laughing 
proudly into her eyes... . Then Johnny, and Avis and Tim, they all had to have 
their turns. And finally Carla turned to her.
Lee leaned forward, kissed the smooth young cheek, and said, before she knew 
herself what words were coming:
`Carla ... Carlie, darling, aren't you afraid?'
Carla took both her mother's hands and held them tight. I'm terrified!' she 
said. And turned and left.