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small repaired dome where the computer was housed,

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joining Harry Leicester inside. "I've been thinking. With what data we have about the length of the days,

the inclination of the sun, and so forth, couldn't we find out the exact length of this planet's year?"

"That's elementary enough," Leicester said. "Write up your program and feed it through. Might tell us

how long a summer to expect and how long a winter."

She moved to the console. Her pregnancy was beginning to show now, although she was still lightand graceful. He said, "I managed to salvage almost all of the information about the matter-anti-matterdrives. Some day--Moray told me the other day that from the steam engine to the stars is less than threehundred years. Some day our descendants will be able to return to Earth, Camilla."

She said, "That's assuming they'll want to," and sat down at her desk. He looked at her in mild

question. "Do you doubt it?"

"I'm not doubting anything, I'm just not presuming to know what my great-great-great-great--oh hell, what my ninth-generation grandsons will want to be doing. After all, Earthmen lived for generations without even wanting to invent things which could easily have been invented any time after the first smelting of iron was managed. Do you honestly think Earth would have gone into space without population pressure and pollution? There are so many social factors too."

"And if Moray has his way our descendants will all be barbarians," Leicester said, "but as long as we have the computer and it's preserved, the knowledge will be there. There for them to use, whenever they feel the need."

"
 
If
it's preserved," she said with a shrug. "After the last few months I'm not sure anything we brought

here is going to outlive this generation."

Consciously, with an effort, Leicester reminded himself,
 
she's pregnant and that's why theythought for years that women weren't fit to be scientists--pregnant women get notions
 
. Hewatched her making swift notations in the elaborate shorthand of the computer. "Why do you want toknow the length of the year?"

What a stupid question
, the girl thought, then remembered he was brought up on a space station,

weather is nothing to him. She doubted if he even realized the relationship of weather and climate to

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crops and survival.

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She said, explaining gently, "First, we want to estimate the growing season and find out when ourharvests can come in. It's simpler than trial and error, and if we'd colonized in the ordinary way, someonewould have observed this planet through several year cycles. Also, Fiona and Judy and--and the rest ofus would like to know when our children will be born and what the climate's likely to be like. I'm notmaking my own baby clothes, but someone's got to make them--and know how much chill to allow for!"

"You're planning already?" he asked, curiously. "The odds are only one in two that you'll carry it to

term and the same that it won't die."

"I don't know. Somehow I never doubted that mine would be one of the ones to live. Premonition, maybe; ESP," she said, thinking slowly as she spoke. "I had a feeling Ruth Fontana would miscarry, and she did."

He shuddered. "Not a pleasant gift to have."

"No, but I seem to be stuck with it," she said matter-of-factly, "and it seems to be helping Moray and the others with the crops. Not to mention the well Heather helped them dig. Evidently it's simply a revival of latent human potential and there's nothing weird about it. Anyhow, it seems we'll have to learn to live with it."

"When I was a student," Leicester said, "all the facts known positively about ESP were fed into a computer and the answer was that the probability was a thousand to one that there was no such thing… that the very few cases not totally and conclusively disproven were due to investigator error, not human ESP."

Camilla grinned and said, "That just goes to show you that a computer isn't God."

Captain Leicester watched the young woman stretch back and ease her cramped body. "Damnthese bridge seats, they were never meant for use in full gravity conditions. I hope comfortable furnituregets put on a fair priority; Junior here doesn't approve of my sitting on hard seats these days."

Lord, how I love that girl, who'd have believed it at my age!
To remind himself more forcefully

of the gap, Leicester said sharply, "Are you planning to marry MacAran, Camilla?"

"I don't think so," she said with the ghost of a smile. "We haven't been thinking in those terms. I love

him--we came so close during the first Wind,

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we've shared so much, we'll always be part of each other. I'm living with him, when he's here--which isn't very often--if that's what you really want to know. Mostly because he wants me so much, and when you've been that close to anyone, when you can--" she fumbled for words, "when you can feel how much he wants you, you can't turn your back on him, you can't leave him--hungry and unhappy. But whether or not we can make any kind of home together, whether we want to live together for the rest of our lives--I honestly don't know; I don't think so. We're too different." She gave him a straightforward smile that made the man's heart turn over and said, "I'd really be happier with you, on a long-term basis. We're so much more alike. Rafe's so gentle, so sweet, but you understand me better."

"You're carrying his child, and you can say this to me, Camilla ?"

"Does it shock you?" she asked, grieved, "I'm sorry, I wouldn't upset you for the world.
 
Yes
 
, it's Rafe's baby, and I'm glad, in a funny way.
 
He
wants it, and one parent ought to want a child; for me--I can't help it, I was brainwashed--it's still an accident of biology. If it was yours, for instance--and it could have been, the same kind of accident, just as Fiona's having your child and you hardly know her by sight--you'd have hated it, you'd have wanted me to fight against having it."

"I'm not so sure. Maybe not. Not now, anyhow," Harry Leicester said in a low voice. "Saying these

things still upsets me, though. Shocks me. I'm too old, maybe."

She shook her head. "We've got to learn not to hide from each other. In a society where ourchildren will grow up knowing that what they feel is an open book, what good is it going to be to keepsets of masks to wear from each other?"

"Frightening."

"A little. But they'll probably take it for granted." She leaned a little against him, easing her back against his chest. She reached back and took his fingers in hers. She said slowly, "Don't be shocked at this. But-if I live-if we both live-I'd like my next child to be yours."

He bent and kissed her on the forehead. He was almost too much moved to speak. She tightened

her hand on his, then drew it away.

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"I told MacAran this," she said matter-of-factly. "For genetic reasons, it's going to be a good thing for women to have children by different fathers. But--as I said--my reasons aren't quite as cold and unemotional as all that."

Her face took on a distant look--for a moment it seemed to Leicester that she was looking atsomething invisible through a veil--and for a moment contracted in pain; but to his quick, concernedquestion, she summoned a smile.

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"No, I'm all right. Let's see what we can do about this year-length thing. Who knows, it might turn

out to be our first National Holiday!"

The windmills were visible several miles from the Base Camp now, huge wooden-sailed constructswhich supplied power for grinding flour and grain (nuts, harvested in the forest, made a fine slightly-sweetflour which would serve until the first crops of rye and oats were harvested) and also brought smalltrickles of electric power into the camp. But such power would always be in short supply on this world,and it was carefully rationed; for lights in the hospital, to operate essential machinery in the small metalshops and the new glass-house. Beyond the camp, with its own firebreak, was what they had begun tocall New Camp, although the Hebrides Commune people who worked there called it New Skye; anexperimental farm where Lewis MacLeod, and a group of assistants, were checking possiblydomesticable animals.

Rafe MacAran, with his own small crew of assistants, paused to look back from the peak of thenearest hill before setting off into the forest The two camps could both clearly be seen, from here, andaround them both was swarming activity, but there was some indefinable difference from any camp hehad seen on Earth, and for a moment he could not put his finger on it. Then he knew what it was; it wasthe quiet. Or was it? There was really plenty of sound. The great windmills creaked and heaved in thestrong wind. There were crisp distant sounds of hammering and sawing where the building crews wereconstructing winter buildings. The farm had its noises, including the noisy sounds of animals, thebellowings of the antlered mammals, the curious grunts, chirps, squeaks of unfamiliar life forms. Andfinally Rafe put his finger on it. There were no sounds which were not of natural origin.

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No traffic. No machinery, except the softly whirring potter's wheels and the clinkings of tools. Each oneof these sounds had some immediate human deliberation behind it. There were almost no impersonalsounds. Every sound seemed to have a purpose, and it seemed strange and lonesome to Rafe. All his lifehe had lived in the great cities of Earth, where even in the mountains, the sounds of all-terrain vehicles,motorized transit, high-tension power lines, and jet planes overhead, provided a comforting background. Here it was quiet, frighteningly quiet because whenever a sound broke the stillness of wind, there wassome immediate meaning to the sound. You couldn't tune it out. Whenever there was a sound, you
 
had
to listen to it. There were no sounds which could be carelessly disregarded because, like jets passingoverhead or the drive of the starship, you knew they had nothing to do with you. Every sound in thelandscape had some immediate application to the listener, and Rafe felt tense most of the time, listening.

Oh well. He supposed he'd get used to it.

He started instructing his group. "We'll work along the lower rock-ridges today, and especially in thestreambeds. We want samples of every new-looking kind of earth--oh hell--
 
soil
. Every time the color ofthe clay or loam changes, take a sample of it, and locate it on the map--you're doing the mapping, Janice?" he asked the girl, and she nodded. "I'm working on grid paper. We'll get a location for everychange of terrain."

The morning's work was relatively uneventful, except for one discovery near a stream-bed, which

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Rafe mentioned when they gathered to kindle a fire and make their noonday meal--nut-flour rolls to betoasted and "tea" of a local leaf which had a pleasant, sweet taste like sassafras. The fire was kindled in aquickly-piled rock fireplace--the colony's strongest law was never to build a fire on the ground withoutfirebreaks or rock enclosures--and as the quick resinous wood began to burm down to coals, a secondsmall party came down the slope toward them: three men, two women.

"Hello, can we join you for dinner? It'll save building another fire," Judy Lovat greeted them.

"Glad to have you," MacAran agreed, "but what are you doing in the woods, Judy? I thought you

were exempt from manual work now."

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The woman gestured. "As a matter of fact, I'm being treated like surplus luggage;" she said. "I'm notallowed to lift a finger, or do any real climbing, but it minimizes bringing samples back to camp if I can dopreliminary field-testing on various plants. That's how we discovered the ropeweed. Ewen says theexercise will do me good, if I'm careful not to get overtired or chilled." She brought her tea and sat downbeside him. "Any luck today?"

He nodded. "About time. For the last three weeks, every day, everything I brought in was just one

more version of quartzite or calcite," he said. "Our last strike was graphite."

"Graphite? What good is that?"

"Well, among other things, it's the lead in a pencil," MacAran said, "and we have plenty of wood for pencils, which will help when supplies run low of other writing instruments. It can also be used to lubricate machinery, which will conserve supplies of animal and vegetable fats for food purposes."

"It's funny, you never think of things like that," Judy said. "The millions of little things you need that

you always took for granted."

"Yes," said one of MacAran's crew. "I always thought of cosmetics as something extra--something people could do without in an emergency. Marcia Cameron told me the other day that she was working on a high-priority program for face cream, and when I asked why, she reminded me that in a planet with all this much snow and ice, it was an urgent necessity to keep the skin soft and prevent chapping and infections."

Judy laughed. "Yes, and right now we're going mad trying to find a substitute for cornstarch to makebaby powder with. Adults can use talc, and there's plenty of that around, but if babies breathe the stuffthey can get lung troubles. All the local grains and nuts won't grind fine enough; the flour is fine to eat butnot absorbent enough for delicate little baby bottoms. "