“You'll live,” grunted Terl indifferently. “How long will it take you to get well?”

Jonnie said nothing. He just looked up at Terl.

“You're stupid,” said Terl. “You don't know anything about remote controls.”

“And what could I have done, tied to the seat?” said Jonnie.

"Zzt, the bastard, put a remote control under the hood. And a firebomb.”

“How was I supposed to see that?”

“You could have inspected.”

Jonnie smiled thinly. “Tied to the cab?”

“You know now. When we do it again

I’ll-"

“There won't be any 'again,' " said Jonnie.

Terl loomed over him, looking down.

“Not under these conditions,” said Jonnie.

“Shut up, animal!”

“Take off this collar. My neck is burned.”

Terl looked at the frayed flexirope. He went out of the cage and came back with a small welding unit and a new coil of rope. It wasn't flexirope. It was thinner and metallic. He burned off the old rope and welded the new one on, ignoring Jonnie's effort to twist away from the flame. He fixed the far end of the new rope into a loop and dropped it over a high cage bar out of reach.

With Jonnie's eyes burning holes in his back, Terl went out of the cage and locked the door.

Jonnie wrapped himself in the dirty fur of a robe and lay in sodden misery beneath the newly fallen snow.

It had been a very bad winter in the mountains; snowslides had early blocked the passes into the high meadow.

Chrissie sat quietly and forlornly in front of the council in the courthouse. The wind whined and moaned through the gaps in the walls, and the fire that had been built in the center of the room sent harried palls of smoke into the faces of the council.

Parson Staffor lay very ill in a nearby hut. The winter had sapped what little vitality he had and his place was taken by the older Jimson man they were now calling parson. Jimson was flanked by an elder named Clay and by Brown Limper Staffor, who seemed to be acting as a council member even though he was far too young and clubfooted-he had begun to sit in for Parson Staffor when he became ill and had just stayed on, grown into a council member now. The three men sat on an old bench.

Chrissie, across the fire from them, was not paying much attention. She had had a horrible nightmare two nights ago– a nightmare that had yanked her, sweating, out of sleep and left her trembling ever since. She had dreamed that Jonnie had been consumed in fire. He had been calling her name and it still sounded in her ears.

“It’s just plain foolishness,” Parson Jimson was saying to her. “There are three young men who want to marry you and you have no right whatever to refuse them. They village population is dwindling in size; only thirty have survived the winter. This is not a time to be thinking only of yourself.”

Chrissie numbly realized he was talking to her. She made an effort to gather the words in: something about population. Two babies had been born that winter and two babies had died. The young men had not driven many cattle up from the plains before the pass closed and the village was half-starved. If Jonnie had been here...

“When spring comes,” said Chrissie, "I’m going down on the plains to find Jonnie.”

This was no shock to the council. They had heard her say it several times since Jonnie left.

Brown Limper looked through the smoke at her. He had a faint sneer on his thin lips. The council tolerated him because he didn't ever say much and because he brought them water and food when meetings were too long. But he couldn't resist. “We all know Jonnie must be dead. The monsters must have got him.”

Jimson and Clay frowned at him. He had been the one who brought to their attention the fact that Chrissie refused to marry any of the young men. Clay wondered whether Brown Limper didn't have a personal stake in this.

Chrissie rallied from her misery. “His horses didn't come home.”

“Maybe the monsters got them, too,” said Brown Limper.

"Jonnie did not believe there were any monsters,” said Chrissie. “He went to find the Great Village of the legend.”

“Oh, there are monsters, all right,” said Jimson. “It is blasphemy to doubt the legends.”

“Then,” said Chrissie, “why don't they come here?”

“The mountains are holy,” said Jimson.

“The snow,” said Brown Limper, “closed the passes before the horses could come home. That is, if the monsters didn't get them, too.”

The older men looked at him, frowning him to silence.

"Chrissie," said Parson Jimson, “you are to put aside this foolishness and permit the young men to court you. It is quite obvious that Jonnie Goodboy Tyler is gone.”

“When the year has gone by,” said Chrissie, “I shall go down to the plains.”

"Chrissie," said Clay, “this is simply a suicidal idea.”

Chrissie looked into the fire. Jonnie's scream echoed in her ears from the nightmare. It was completely true, what they said: she did not want to live if Jonnie was dead. And then the sound of the scream died away and she seemed to hear him whisper her name. She looked up with a trace of defiance.

“He is not dead,” said Chrissie.

The three council members looked at each other. They had not prevailed. They would try again some other day.

They ignored her and fell to discussing the fact that Parson Staffor wanted a funeral when he died. There wouldn't be much in the way of food and there were problems of digging in the frozen ground. Of course he was entitled to a funeral, for he had been parson and maybe even mayor for many years. But there were problems.

Chrissie realized she was dismissed, and she got up, eyes red with more than smoke, and walked to the courthouse door.

She wrapped the bearskin more tightly about her and looked up at the wintry sky. When the constellation was in that same place in spring she would go. The wind was cutting keen and she pulled the bearskin even tighter. Jonnie had given her the bearskin and she fingered it. She would get busy and make him some new buckskin clothes. She would prepare packs. She would not let them eat the last two horses.

When the time came she would be all ready to go. And she would go.

A blast of wind from Highpeak chilled her, mocked her. Nevertheless, when the time came she would go.

Terl was in a furious burst of activity. He hardly slept. He left the kerbango alone. The doom of years of exile on this cursed planet haunted him; each time he slowed his pace he collided with the horrible thought and it jabbed him into even greater efforts.

Leverage, leverage! He conceived himself to be a pauper in leverage.

He had a few things on employees here and there, but they were minor things: peccadillos with some of the Psychlo female clerks, drunkenness on the job leading to breakage, tapes of mutterings about foremen, personal letters smuggled into the teleportation of ore, but nothing big. This was not the kind of thing personal fortunes were easily built from. Yet here were thousands of Psychlos, and his experience as a security officer told him the odds in favor of finding blackmail material were large. The company did not hire angels. It hired miners and mining administrators and it hired them tough; in some cases, particularly on a planet like this– no favored spot– the company even winked at taking on ex-criminals. It was a criticism of himself, no less, that he could not get more blackmail than he had.

This Numph. Now there was one. He had potential leverage on Numph but

Terl did not know what it was. He knew it had something to do with the nephew Nipe in home office accounting. But Terl could not dig out what it really was. And so he dared not push it. The risk lay in pretending to be wise to it and then, by some slip, revealing he didn't have the data. The leverage would go up in smoke, for Numph would know Terl had nothing. So he had to use it so sparingly that it was almost no use at all. Blast!