Nor did the child thrive as it should, and when the repaired Andromeda at last took off, it left them behind. Another ship was due in from Earth a few days later. Before it arrived, the doctor put the situation to Franklyn.
“I'm by no means happy about the child,” he told him. “She's not putting on weight as she should. She grows, but not enough. It's pretty obvious that the conditions here are not suiting her. She might survive, but I can't say with what effect on her constitution. She should have normal Earth conditions as soon as possible.”
Franklyn frowned.
“And her mother?” he asked.
“Mrs. Godalpin is in no condition to travel, I'm afraid.”
“It's out of the question. In her present state, and after so long in low gravitation, I doubt whether she could stand a G of acceleration.”
Franklyn looked bleakly unwilling to comprehend.
“You mean—?”
“In a nutshell, it's this. It would be fatal for your wife to attempt the journey. And it would probably be fatal for your child to remain here.”
There was only one way out of that. When the next ship, the Aurora, came in it was decided to delay no longer. A passage was arranged for Helen and the baby, and in the last week of 1994 they went on board.
Franklyn and Marilyn watched the Aurora leave. Marilyn's bed had been pushed close to the window, and he sat on it, holding her hand. Together they watched her shoot upwards on a narrow cone of flame and curve away until she was no more than a twinkle in the dark Martian sky. Marilyn's fingers held his tightly. He put his arm around her to support her, and kissed her.
“It'll be all right, darling. In a few months you'll be with her again,” he said.
Marilyn put her other hand against his cheek, but she said nothing.
Nearly seventeen years were to pass before anything more was heard of the Aurora, but Marilyn was not to know that. In less than two months she was resting for ever in the Martian sands with the tinkerbells chiming softly above her.
When Franklyn left Mars, Dr. Forbes was the only member of the original team still left there. They shook hands beside the ramp which led up to the latest thing in nuclear-powered ships. The doctor said:
“For five years I've watched you work, and overwork, Franklyn. You'd no business to survive. But you have. Now go home and live. You’ve earned it.”
Franklyn withdrew his gaze from the thriving Port Gillington which had grown, and was still growing out of the rough settlement of a few years ago.
“What about yourself? You've been here longer than I have.”
“But I've had a couple of vacations. They were long enough for me to look around at home and decide that what really interests me is here.” He might have added that the second had been long enough for him to find and marry a girl whom he had brought with him, but he just added: “Besides I've just been working, not overworking.”
Franklyn's gaze had wandered again, this time beyond the settlement, towards the fields which now fringed the waterway. Among them was a small plot marked with a single upright stone.
“You're still a young man. Life owes you something,” the doctor said. Franklyn seemed not to have heard, but he knew that he had. He went on: “And you owe something to life. You hurt only yourself by resisting it. We have to adapt to life.”
“I wonder—?” Franklyn began, but the doctor laid a hand on his arm.
“Not that way. You have worked hard to forget. Now you must make a new beginning.”
“No wreckage of the Aurora has ever been reported, you know,” Franklyn said.
The doctor sighed, quietly. The Ships that disappeared without trace considerably outnumbered those that left any.
“A new beginning,” he repeated, firmly.
The hailer began to call “All aboard.”
Dr. Forbes watched his friend into the entrance port. He was a little surprised to feel a touch on his arm, and find his wife beside him.
“Poor man,” she said, softly. “Maybe when he gets home—”
“Maybe,” said the doctor, doubtfully. He went on: “I’ve been cruel, meaning to be kind. I should have tried my best to crush that false hope and free him from it. But ... well, I couldn't do it.”
“No,” she agreed. “You'd nothing to give him to take the place of it. But somewhere at home there'll be someone who has — a woman. Let's hope he meets her soon.”
Jannessa turned her head from a thoughtful study of her own hand, and regarded the slaty-blue arm and fingers beside her.
“I'm so different,” she said, with a sigh. “So different from everybody. Why am I different, Telta?”
“Everybody's different,” Telta said. She looked up from her task of slicing a pale round fruit into a bowl. Their eyes met, Jannessa's china blue in their white setting looking questioningly in Telta's dark pupils which floated in clear topaz. A small crease appeared between the woman's delicate silvery brows as she studied the child. “I'm different. Toti's different. Melga's different. That's the way things are.”
“But I'm more different. Much more different.”
“I don't suppose you'd be so very different where you came from” Telta said, resuming her slicing.
“Was I different when I was a baby?”
“Yes, dear.”
Jannessa reflected.
“Where do babies come from, Telta?”
Telta explained. Jannessa said, scornfully:
“I don't mean like that. I mean babies like me. Different ones.”
“I don't know. Only that it must have been somewhere far, far away.”
“Somewhere outside; in the cold?”
“Yes, Telta.”
“Well, it must have been one of those twinkles that you came from. But nobody knows which one.”
“Truly, Telta?”
“Quite, truly.”
Jannessa sat still a moment, thinking of the infinite night sky with its myriads of stars.
“But why didn't I die in the cold ?”
“You very nearly did, dear. Toti found you just in time.”
“And was I all alone?”
“No, dear. Your mother was holding you. She had wrapped you round with everything she could to keep the cold away. But the cold was too much for her. When Toti found her she could only move a little. She pointed to you and said: ‘Jannessa! Jannessa!’ So we thought that must be your name.”
Telta paused, remembering how when Toti, her husband, had brought the baby down from the surface to the life-giving warmth it had been touch and go. A few more minutes outside would have been fatal. The cold was a dreadful thing. She shuddered, recalling Toti's account of it, and how it had turned the unfortunate mother black, but she did not tell that to the child.
Jannessa was frowning, puzzled.
“But how? Did I fall off the star?”
“No, dear. A ship brought you.”
But the word meant nothing to Jannessa.
It was difficult to explain to a child. Difficult, for that matter, for Telta herself to believe. Her experience included only the system she lived in. The surface was a grim, inhospitable place of jagged rocks and killing cold which she had seen only from the protected domes. The history books told her of other worlds where it was warm enough to live on the surface, and that her own people had come from such a world many generations ago. She believed that that was true, but it was nevertheless unreal. More than fifty ancestors stood between her and life on a planet's surface, and it is difficult for anything that far away to seem real. Nevertheless, she told Jannessa the story in the hope that it would give her some consolation.