She nodded, then remembered that she was facing the distant sun. Although it was not much more than a very bright star now, her visor might still have automatically dimmed and hidden the gesture.

“I’ll help any way I can,” she began. “But…”

—That’s great. ’Cause we’re getting concerned about the first Care Package from Earth. Don’t want anything to go wrong when it arrives.—

“What could go wrong?”

—How — bout it fallin’ into the wrong hands?—Carroll suggested.

Carl shrugged.

—Quiverian denies responsibility for that attack down at the equator. Says they were renegades, acting without sanction. Still, I see your point. I don’t think we want the Care Package coming down at the south pole by mistake. It may be better to have a mech go out and escort the cargo vessel in.—

Virginia understood. It wouldn’t do to have the rescue package hijacked. Then the Arcists would have a total lock. They’d be in complete control.

“Fine. I’ll start working with Jeffers on the details,” she said. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, though.”

—Sure. What is it?—When she shook her head and remained silent, he turned to the others.

—Be right back. guys. See if you can tune this antenna better, will you? I want a good fix on that thing as it gets nearer.—

—Right, Carl.—

He led her over behind a great pile of mine tailings. Making sure she could see him do it, he reached up and switched off his transmitter. Nodding, she did the same. He bent over to touch helmets.

“What’s bothering you, Virginia? You seem so… subdued. Is it Saul? I’d heard—”

“No,” she cut in hurriedly. His face was so close. The double layer of separating crystal seemed to pass a warm breath. “No, that’s not it, Carl.”

At least it’s not the reason why I came up here.

“But there is something the matter, between you two,” he insisted.

She nodded, a quick, short jerk. “Nothing, really. Just, well, one of those things. Time.”

“Time changes all of us, Virginia. I never did apologize to both of you for the way I behaved, so many years ago. I was an idiot.” There was an earnestness in his eyes.

“You were young, Carl. We were all younger.”

Except for Saul. With the perfect immune system, won’t he live forever? Is that, maybe, a source of friction between us?

Carl looked down for a moment, then met her eyes. “That doesn’t mean my basic feelings have altered, Virginia. If you’re ready for a change…” Carl let his sentence hang, and Virginia suddenly could see something deeper than earnestness, deeper even than the sternness of command. Her gloved hand came up, touched glass.

“Oh, Carl. You’ve hurt so much.”

He shrugged, caught between conflicting feelings.” You came up to see me because—” There was hope in his voice.

Virginia shook her head, blinking aside the weakness that threatened her determination. “Carl…” She swallowed. “Carl, I want to know why you are planning to kill us all.”

“Uh.” He stared. “How… What do you mean?”

Her hand dropped. “Oh, you were always a lousy liar, Carl. At least to me you were. The others seem to have swallowed your Judas goat act, thinking Earth really plans a rescue, all that crap about a tight flick past Mars, then on to Jupiter and Venus, then back to Mars and quarantine…”

“What are you.”

“Come to think of it, though, Jeffers and his bunch would back you even if they knew the truth, wouldn’t they?”

Carl broke contact, stepping back before she had even finished. His lips were drawn tight. When he spoke, the movements of his mouth seemed to convey a pungent if silent, bitterness. Virginia gestured at her ears. With an impatient shake of his head he brought their helmets back together jarringly.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

At least Carl did not insult her intelligence with further pretense. He knew she would have run simulations a dozen different ways before ever accusing him like this.

“What am I going to do?” Virginia asked. “First off, I’m giving you a chance to explain. I want to know why you’re fronting for this trick of Earth Control’s, sending us on a direct collision course with Mars!”

Carl’s eyes closed briefly. “There are factions back home, too. There were… tradeoffs. We had to make agreements in order to get the Care Packages.”

“So that we can smash into planet in forty years?” Virginia couldn’t help laughing bitterly.

“Forty long years, Virginia. Even with Saul’s serums, we’ll have to keep so many people awake that we’ll all be old by that time.’

“There are children, Carl.”

“Those poor babies the Orthos have been having? They hardly even merit calling human, Virginia. You know that. Anyway, they and all of us will live better and more comfortably with the goods we’ll be getting in these rockets from Earth.”

“Comfort!”

“Yes, that counts for something. But there’s a more important reason.”

“What’s that?”

“Honestly, Virginia, can’t you see that this is the only way anything good can emerge out of this entire fiasco?”

She shook her head. “What good will come of all of us dying?”

“Well, from Earth’s point of view, the end of a threat. And in that I can see the Arcists’ point of view.”

“You can?”

“Yes. Of course. They’ll do anything to protect the homeworld from Halleyforms, and you can’t blame them for that.”

“And from our point of view?”

He shrugged. “We spark life anew on a dead world, perhaps. With our deaths we can begin the long process of bringing Mars alive.”

Virginia couldn’t help sneering. “You’re beginning to sound like Jeffers.”

“Maybe I am at that.” He looked away. His voice dropped. “I might have tried to think of something else, no matter how unlikely, if…” His voice trailed off.

“If what, Carl?”

“Never mind. It’s not important.”

“Carl! You have to talk to me.”

He shook his head. “Saul told me, a while back, that he was working on a cloning system. In ten years or so, we might be able to produce a generation of healthy children, slightly modified to be healthy and breed true in low gravity. There may actually be something to that idea some Sergeov’s Ubers talk about, of telling Earth to go to hell and trying to colonize Triton.”

Virginia blinked, realizing what might bring him over to accepting such a plan. “You mean… me, in particular, don’t you?”

“Yes. You, me, the children only you and I could have together. I…I might be persuaded to see another point of view, if that seemed possible.”

Inside Virginia’s mind and heart, winter blew. It was a numb incapacity, n unwillingness to understand this. Dimly, she knew that this was Carl’s own unique version of the neuroses they all had, by now— no worse than normal, but highly unusual. It was a curse of hypertrophied romanticism. The wistful teenager in him had, in one respect, been frozen in time.

She knew that a simple confession might solve this… a frank admission that, no matter how great the technical miracles science made available, she would never have children by any man. The universe had decided that long ago.

The numbness was too great, though, Too much like a weight of ice she could not lift, even to be kind to a dear friend.

“I won’t tell anybody about Mars, Carl.”

“You won’t?” He blinked. “But I.”

“You’ve convinced me that you’re right. It will be better this way… to die bringing life to a dead world. Better than a pointless extinction, the way we’re headed.”

She backed away and turned her transmitter back on. “Tell me when and where you want to meet the first Care Package, and give me a support team. I’ll begin running simulations for a rendezvous right away.

“I’ll be seeing you, Carl.”

She tried not to look at his eyes as she turned away, but she felt his gaze on her back as she picked a narrow, solitary path back down into her crypt, far below the cold stars.