air with the relief of men suddenly awakened from nightmare. They went down to the water's edge with the feeling of destiny upon them.

In the boat, their first shock was the knowledge that they were not guests, but prisoners. The two women retreated warily to the stern, significantly holding the blast rifle ready. Geddes and Hovic rowed. Lowe tried patiently for conversation.

He learned little except the bare fact of their presence. The girl with the rifle was Myrna Connors, and her sister was named Glenna. Their mother and an older brother had been killed in the landing crash of the Terra II, and Sean Connors himself, a hopeless paraplegic from the same catastrophe, waited at the camp for his daughters to return. Both women were under thirty, handsome in an elemental fashion, patently hostile and utterly without feminine restraint of manner.

They listened without comment, either uninterested or uncaring, to Lowe's account of what had happened to Earth. Neither of them, Geddes thought, could have been more than seven or eight years old when the Terra II crashed. They had seen no human being except their father for eighteen years and they felt no compassion for a world they had all but forgotten.

They reached the Connors' camp in mid-afternoon, when the solar halo was just touching the western horizon. They were on the higher ground of the foothills now, where the air was cooler and the few open swales were carpeted with fragrant, butter-yellow little flowers. The camp itself was a primitive thing, a hundred-foot stockade of wooden stakes driven Kaffir-wise into the soft soil to enclose three flimsy, thatch-roofed huts.

Myrna Connors held them with her blast rifle outside the central hut while her sister went in. There was a brief murmur of voices, the girl's mingling with a man's hoarser muttering. When Glenna came out again her attitude had altered indefinably, and when she looked the three men over her eyes held an odd speculation.

"Father will see you now," she said. "Don't argue with him. He's very weak, and argument upsets him."

They found Sean Connors propped upon a ragged couch made from a salvaged acceleration chair, a frail and twisted old man with a bald, freckled scalp and a wild tangle of bristling red beard. The piercing blue stare he turned upon them had the unnatural heat of a mind brooding long past the point of safety.

"So they killed themselves off," he 

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