She shook her head. "We've got to learn not to hide from each other. In a society where our children will grow up knowing that what they feel is an open book, what good is it going to be to keep sets 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.

"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 at something invisible through a veil--and for a moment contracted in pain; but to his quick, concerned question, she summoned a smile.

"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 constructs which supplied power for grinding flour and grain (nuts, harvested in the forest, made a fine slightly-sweet flour which would serve until the first crops of rye and oats were harvested) and also brought small trickles 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 metal shops and the new glass-house. Beyond the camp, with its own firebreak, was what they had begun to call New Camp, although the Hebrides Commune people who worked there called it New Skye; an experimental farm where Lewis MacLeod, and a group of assistants, were checking possibly domesticable animals.

Rafe MacAran, with his own small crew of assistants, paused to look back from the peak of the nearest hill before setting off into the forest The two camps could both clearly be seen, from here, and around them both was swarming activity, but there was some indefinable difference from any camp he had seen on Earth, and for a moment he could not put his finger on it. Then he knew what it was; it was the quiet. Or was it? There was really plenty of sound. The great windmills creaked and heaved in the strong wind. There were crisp distant sounds of hammering and sawing where the building crews were constructing winter buildings. The farm had its noises, including the noisy sounds of animals, the bellowings of the antlered mammals, the curious grunts, chirps, squeaks of unfamiliar life forms. And finally Rafe put his finger on it. There were no sounds which were not of natural origin. No traffic. No machinery, except the softly whirring potter's wheels and the clinkings of tools. Each one of these sounds had some immediate human deliberation behind it. There were almost no impersonal sounds. Every sound seemed to have a purpose, and it seemed strange and lonesome to Rafe. All his life he 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 was some 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 passing overhead or the drive of the starship, you knew they had nothing to do with you. Every sound in the landscape 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 the streambeds. We want samples of every new-looking kind of earth--oh hell--soil. Every time the color of the 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 every change of terrain."

The morning's work was relatively uneventful, except for one discovery near a stream-bed, which Rafe mentioned when they gathered to kindle a fire and make their noonday meal--nut-flour rolls to be toasted and "tea" of a local leaf which had a pleasant, sweet taste like sassafras. The fire was kindled in a quickly-piled rock fireplace--the colony's strongest law was never to build a fire on the ground without firebreaks or rock enclosures--and as the quick resinous wood began to burm down to coals, a second small 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."

The woman gestured. "As a matter of fact, I'm being treated like surplus luggage;" she said. "I'm not allowed to lift a finger, or do any real climbing, but it minimizes bringing samples back to camp if I can do preliminary field-testing on various plants. That's how we discovered the ropeweed. Ewen says the exercise will do me good, if I'm careful not to get overtired or chilled." She brought her tea and sat down beside 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 make baby powder with. Adults can use talc, and there's plenty of that around, but if babies breathe the stuff they can get lung troubles. All the local grains and nuts won't grind fine enough; the flour is fine to eat but not absorbent enough for delicate little baby bottoms. "

MacAran asked, "Just how urgent is that now, Judy?"

Judy shrugged. "On Earth, I'd have about two-and-a half months to go. Camilla and I, and Alastair's girl Alanna, are running about neck-and-neck; the next batch is due about a month after that. Here--well, it's anybody's guess." She added, quietly, "We expect the winter will set

in before that. But you were going to tell me about what you found today."

"Fuller's earth," MacAran said, "or something so like it I can't tell the difference." At her blank look he elucidated, "It's used in making cloth. We get small supplies of animal fiber, something like wool, from the rabbit-horns, and they're plentiful and can be raised in quantity on the farm, but fuller's earth will make the cloth easier to handle and shrink."