It had been a long time, but she remembered every detail. Pampered Georgetown University freshman dating the reporter from the Washington Post. They’d planned it, a weekend together in her parents’ Appalachian cabin. It had been summer, and no one was using the place. The weather in the mountains had been perfect. There’d been a delicious thrill of anticipation as they drove up the twisting highway. She hadn’t had that feeling since.

Edmund was different. Edmund was older too, and more glamorous. Fighter pilot. Astronaut. Everything a hero should be. Everything but a great lover… That’s not fair, not fair at all.

There’d been anticipation when she met Edmund. It lasted all during their courtship — and died on their wedding night.

I’d forgotten all this, but I feel it now. Just as I did then. But — the coffee machine was set up and there wasn’t any reason to watch it any longer. She turned. Roger was standing very close to her. She didn’t have to move very far to be in his arms.

The lush tropical growth of the Kona Coast ended abruptly. Suddenly the passionflower vines and palm trees were gone, and Jenny was driving through barren lava fields. “It looks like the back side of the Moon,” she said.

Her companion nodded and pointed toward the slopes off to their right. “Mauna Loa . They say it’s terrible luck to take any of the lava home.”

“Who says?”

“The Old Hawaiians, of course. But a surprising number of tourists, too. They take the stuff home, and later they mail it back.” He shrugged. “Bad luck or no, so far as anyone knows, she — Mauna Loa is always she to the Old Ones — she’s never taken a life.”

Captain Jeanette Crichton expertly downshifted the borrowed TR-7 as the road began another steep ascent. The terrain was deceptive. From the beach the mountains looked like gentle slopes until you tried climbing them. Then you realized just how big the twin volcanoes were. Mauna Kea rose nearly 14,000 feet above the sea — and plunged 20,000 feet downward to the sea bottom, making it a bigger mountain than Everest.

“You’ll turn left at the next actual road,” Richard Owen said. “It’ll be a way. Mind if I doze off? I had a late night.”

“All right by me,” she said. She drove on.

Not very flattering, she thought. Picks me up in Kona, gets me to drive him up the side of a volcano, and goes to sleep. Romantic.

She ran her fingers along her shoulder-length hair. It was dark brown with a trace of red, and at the moment it couldn’t be very attractive since it was still damp from her morning swim. She hadn’t much of a tan, either. Sometimes her freckles ran together to give the illusion of a tan, but it was too early in the spring for that. Damp hair, no tan. Not really the popular image of a California girl.

Her figure was all right, if a bit athletic; the Army encouraged officers to run four miles a day, and she did that although she could get out of the requirement if she really wanted to. The medium-length skirt and T-shirt showed her off pretty well. Still, it couldn’t be looks that attracted this astronomer to her, any more than she was overwhelmed by his appearance. All the same, there’d been some electricity earlier. Now it was nearly gone.

He was up all night, she thought. And will be again tonight. Let him sleep. That should liven him up. God knows what I’d be like if I had to live on a vampire’s schedule.

They drove through alternate strips of pasture and lava fields. At irregular intervals someone had made crude stacks of lava rocks. Three or four rocks, each smaller than the one below, the bottom one perhaps two feet across, piled in a stack; she’d been told they were religious offerings made by the Old Hawaiians. If so, they couldn’t be very old; Mauna Loa erupted pretty often, and certainly this field had been overflowed several times during the twentieth century.

She turned left at the intersection, and the way became even steeper. The TR-7 labored through the climb. There were fewer fresh lava fields here; now they were on the side of Mauna Kea . “She” was supposed to be pretty thoroughly dormant. They drove through endless miles of ranchlands given by King Kamehameha to a British sailor who’d become the king’s friend.

Richard Owen woke just as they reached the “temporary” wooden astronomy base station. “We stop here,” he said. “Have some lunch.”

There wasn’t much there. Long one-story wooden barracks in a sea of lava and mud, with a few straggly trees trying to live in the lava field. She pulled in alongside several GMC Jimmy fourwheel-drive vehicles. “We could go on up,” she said. “I don’t really need lunch.”

“Regulations. Acclimatization. It’s nearly fourteen thousand feet at the top. Pretty thin air. Thin enough here at ten thousand It’s not easy to do anything, even walk, until you get used to it.”

By the time they reached the clapboard barracks buildings she was ready to agree.

There were half a dozen observatories on the lip of the volcano. Richard parked the Jimmy in front of the NASA building. It looked like an observatory in a Bugs Bunny cartoon: a square concrete building under a shiny metal dome.

“Do I get to look through the telescope?” she asked.

He didn’t laugh. Maybe he had answered that one too often. “No one looks through telescopes anymore. We just take pictures.” He led the way inside, through bare-walled corridors and down an iron stairway to a lounge furnished with chrome-steel office tables and chairs.

There was a woman in the lounge. She was about Jeanette’s age, and she would have been pretty if she’d washed her face and put on some lipstick. She was frowning heavily as she drank coffee.

“Mary Alice,” Owen said, “this is Jeanette Crichton. Captain Crichton, Army Intelligence. Not a spook, she does photo reconnaissance and that sort of thing. Dr. Mary Alice Mouton. She’s an asteroid specialist.”

“Hi,” Mary Alice said. She went on frowning.

“Problem?” Owen asked.

“Sort of.” She didn’t seem to notice Jeanette at all. “Rick, I wish you’d come look at this.”

“Sure.”

Dr. Mouton led the way and Rick Owen followed. Jeanette shook her head and tagged after them, through another corridor and up some stairs, past an untidy computer room. All mad, she thought. But what did I expect?

She hadn’t known what to expect at all. This was her first trip to Hawaii , courtesy of an engineering association meeting that invited her to speak on satellite observation. That conference was over and she was taking a couple of days leave, swimming the Big Island’s reefs and enjoying the sun. She didn’t know anyone in Hawaii , and it had been pretty dull. Jeanette began to make plans to visit Linda and Edmund before going back to Fort Bragg .

Then Richard Owen had met her at the reef. They’d had breakfast after their swim, and he’d invited her to come up to see the observatory. She’d brought a sleeping bag; she didn’t know whether Owen expected to share it with her, but from little things he’d said at lunch and on the drive up after lunch she was pretty sure he’d make the offer. She’d been trying to decide what to do when he did.

Now it was as if she weren’t there at all.

She followed them into a small, cluttered room. There was a big viewscreen in one corner. Dr. Mouton did things to the controls and a field of stars showed on the screen. She did something else, and the star field blinked on and off; as it did, one star seemed to jump back and forth.