Far below in the hills, astray and maddened after his first exposure to the Ghost Wind, coming back to sanity to discover the tent carefully set up and their packs and scientific equipment neatly piled inside. Camilla thought he had done it. He had thought she had done it.

Someone's been watching us. Guarding us.

Judy was telling the truth.

For an instant a calm beautiful face, neither male nor female, swam in his mind. "Yes. We know you are here. We mean you no harm, but our ways lie apart. Nevertheless we will help you as we can, even though we can only reach you a little, through the closed doors of your minds. It is better if we do not come too close; but sleep tonight in safety and depart in peace..."

In his mind there was a light around the beautiful features, the silver eyes, and neither then nor ever did MacAran ever know whether he had seen the eyes of the alien or the lighted features, or whether his mind had received them and formed a picture made up of childhood dreams of angels, of fairy-folk, of haloed saints. But to the sound of the faraway singing, and the lulling noise of the wind, he slept.

"…and that was really all there was to it. We stayed inside for about thirty-six hours, until the snow ended and the wind quieted,then we went away again. We never had a glimpse of whoever lived there; I suspect he carefully kept away until we were gone. It wasn't there that he took you, Judy?"

"Oh, no. Not so far. Not nearly. And it wasn't to any home of his own people. It was, I think, one of the cities of the little people, the men of the tree-roads, he called them, but I couldn't find the place again, I wouldn't want to," she said.

"But they have good will toward us, I'm sure of that," MacAran said, "I suppose--it wasn't the same one you knew?"

"How can I possibly know? But they're evidently a telepathic race; I suspect anything known to one of them is known to others--at least to his intimates, his family--if they have families."

MacAran said, "Perhaps, some day, they'll know we mean them no harm."

Judy smiled faintly and said, "I'm sure they know that you--and I--mean them no harm; but there are some of us they don't know, and I suspect that perhaps time doesn't matter to them as much as it does to us. That's not even so alien, except to us Western Europeans--Orientals even on Earth often made plans and thought in terms of generations instead of months or even years. Possibly he thinks there's time to get to know us any century now."

MacAran chuckled. "Well, we're not going anyplace. I guess there's time enough. Dr. Frazer is in seventh heaven, he's got anthropological notes enough to provide him with a spare-time job for three years. He must have written down everything he saw in the house--I hope they're not offended by his looking at everything. And of course he made notes of everything used as food--if we're anywhere near the same species, anything they can eat we can evidently eat," MacAran added. "We didn't touch his supplies, of course, but Frazer made notes of everything he had. I say he for convenience, Domenick was sure it was a woman who had led us there. Also the one piece of furniture--major furniture--was what looked like a loom, with a web strung on it. There were pods of some sort of vegetable fiber--it looked something like milkweed on Earth--soaking, evidently to prepare them for spinning into thread; we found some pods like it on the way back and turned them over to MacLeod on the farm, they seem to make a very fine cloth."

Judy said, as he rose to go, "You realize there are still plenty of people in the camp who don't even believe there are any alien peoples on this planet."

MacAran met her lost eyes and said very gently, "Does it matter, Judy? We know. Maybe we'll just have to wait, and start thinking in terms of generations, too. Maybe our children will all know."

On the world of the red sun, the summer moved on. The sun climbed daily a little higher in the sky, a solstice was passed, and it began to angle a little lower; Camilla, who had set herself a task of keeping calendar charts, noted that the daily changes in sun and sky indicated that the days, lengthening for their first four months on this world, were shortening again toward the unimaginable winter. The computer, given all the information they had, had predicted days of darkness, mean temperatures in the level of zero centigrade, and virtually constant glacial storms. But she reminded herself that this was only a mathematical projection of probabilities. It had nothing to do with actualities.

There were times, during that second third of her pregnancy, when she wondered at herself. Never before this had it occurred to her to doubt that the severe discipline of mathematics and science, her world since childhood, had any lacunae; or that she would ever come up against any problem, except for strictly personal ones, which these disciplines could not solve. As far as she could tell, the old disciplines still held good for her crewmates. Even the growing evidence of her own increasing ability to read the minds of others, and to look uncannily into the future and make unsettlingly accurate guesses based only on quick flashes of what she had to call "hunch"--even this was laughed at, shrugged aside. Yet she knew that some of the others experienced much the same thing.

It was Harry Leicester--she still secretly thought of him as Captain Leicester--who put it most clearly for her, and when she was with him she could see it almost as he did.

"Hold on to what you know, Camilla. That's all you can do; it's known as intellectual integrity. If a thing is impossible, it's impossible."

"And if the impossible happens? Like ESP?"

"Then," he said hardily, "you have somehow misinterpreted your facts, or are making guesses based on subliminal cues. Don't go overboard on this because of your will to believe. Wait for facts."

She asked him quietly, "Just what would you consider evidence?"

He shook his head. "Quite frankly, there is nothing I would consider evidence. If it happened to me, I should simply certify myself as insane and the experience of my senses therefore worthless."

She thought then, what about the will to disbelieve? And how can you have intellectual integrity when you throw out one whole set of facts as impossible before you even test them? But she loved the Captain and the old habits held. Some day, perhaps, there would be a showdown, but she hoped, with a quiet desperation, that it would not come soon.

The nightly rain continued, and there were no more of the frightening winds of madness, but the tragic statistics which Ewen Ross had foreseen went on, with a fearful inevitability. Of one hundred and fourteen women, some eighty or ninety should, within five months, have become pregnant; forty-eight actually did so, and of these, twenty-two miscarried within two months. Camilla knew she was going to be one of the lucky ones, and she was; her pregnancy went on so uneventfully that there were times when she completely forgot about it. Judy, too, had an uneventful pregnancy; but the girl from the Hebrides Commune, Alanna, went into labor in the sixth month and gave birth to premature twins who died within seconds of delivery. Camilla had little contact with the girls of the Commune--most of them were working at New Skye, except for the pregnant ones in the hospital but when she heard that, something went through her that was like pain, and she sought out MacAran that night and stayed with him a long time, clinging to him in a wordless agony she could neither explain nor understand.