A girl in heavy, clumsy garments had mounted guard in a Two City sentry post above a snow-filled mountain valley. There were long and bitter cold hours of watching, in which nothing whatever happened. Eternal snows seemed eternally the same, and there was little in life but monotony. She'd known that across the valley there was another lonely watcher from an alien city, the touch of whose hand or even whose breath would meant sickness and death. She'd have mused upon the strangeness that protected her in this loneliness, because her touch or her breath would be contagion to him, too. She'd have begun by feeling a vague dread of the other sentry. But presently, perhaps, there came a furtive call on the talkie frequency used by sentries for communication with their own cities.
Very probably she did not answer at first, but she might listen. She would hear a young man's voice, filled with curiosity about the sentry who watched as he did.
There'd come a day when she'd answer shyly. There would be relief and a certain fascination in talking to someone so much like herself but so alien and so deadly! Of course, there could be no harm in talking to someone who would flee from actual face-to-face contact as desperately as herself. They might come to joke about their mutual dangerousness. They might find it amusing that cities which dared not meet should hate. Then there'd come a vast curiosity to see each other. They'd discuss that frankly, because what possible evil could come of two persons who were deadly to each other should they actually approach?
Then there'd come a time when they looked at each other breathlessly in vision screens they'd secretly stolen from their separate cities' stores. There could be no harm. They were only curious! But she would see someone at once infinitely strange, utterly dear, and he would see someone lovely beyond the girls of his own city. Then they would regret the alienness which made them perilous to each other. Then they would resent it fiercely. They'd end by denying it.
So across the valley of eternal snow there would travel whispers of desperate rebellion, and then firmly resolute murmurings, and then what seemed the most obvious of truths, that it would be much more satisfactory to die together than to live apart. Insane plannings would follow, arrangements by which two trembling young folk would meet secretly and flee. Toward the hotlands, to be sure, but without any other belief than that the days before death, while they were together, would be more precious than the lifetimes they would give up to secure them.
Calhoun could see all this very clearly, and he assured himself that he regarded it with ironic detachment. He asserted in his own mind that it was merely the manifestation of that blind impulse to exogamy which makes spacemen romantic to girls in far spaceports. But it was something more. It was also that strange and unreasonable and solely human trait which causes one to rejoice selflessly that someone else exists, so that human life and happiness is put into its place of proper insignificance in the cosmos. It might begin in instinct, but it becomes an achievement only humans can encompass.
Hunt knew it, the stocky, deep-voiced despairing figure who looked hungrily for the daughter who had defied him and for whom he was an exile from all food and warmth.
He flung out a mittened hand.
"There!" he cried joyously. "It's them!"
There was a dark speck in the blue-gold night-glow. As the sledge crept close, there were two small figures who stood close together. They defiantly faced the approaching sledge. As its drive-motor stopped and it merely glided on, its runners whispering on the snow, the girl snatched away the cold-mask which all the inhabitants of this planet wore out-of-doors. She raised her face to the man. They kissed.
Then the young man desperately raised a knife. It glittered in the light of the ribbon in the sky—and . . .
Calhoun's blaster made its inadequate rasping noise. The knife-blade turned incandescent for two-thirds of its length. The young man dropped the suddenly searing handle. The knife sank hissing into the snow.
"It's always thrilling to be dramatic," said Calhoun severely, "but I assure you it's much more satisfying to be sane. The young lady's name is Nym, I believe. I do not know the gentleman. Nym's father and myself have come to put the technical resources of two civilizations at your disposal as a first step toward treatment of the pandemic isolation syndrome on this planet, which with the complications that have developed amounts to a Crusoe health problem."
Murgatroyd tried feverishly to get his head out of Calhoun's parka past his chin. He'd heard a blaster. He sensed excitement. His nose emerged, whiffing frantically. Calhoun pushed it back.
"Tell them, Hunt," he said irritably. "Tell them what we're here for and what you've done already!"
The girl's father told her unsteadily—almost humbly, for some reason—that the jet-sledge had come to take her and her sweetheart to the hotlands where at least they would not die of cold. Calhoun added that he believed there would even be food there, because of the ribbon in the sky.
Trembling and abashed, the fugitives got on the sledge. Its motor roared. It surged toward the hotlands under the golden glow of that ribbon, which had no rational explanation.
IV
"An action is normally the result of a thought. Since we cannot retract an action, we tend to feel that we cannot retract the thought which produced it. In effect, we cling desperately to our mistakes. In order to change our views we have commonly to be forced to act upon new thoughts, so urgent and so necessary that without disowning our former, mistaken ideas, we can abandon them tactfully without saying anything to anybody, even ourselves."
The Practice of Thinking—Fitzgerald
Murgatroyd came down a tree with his cheek-pouches bulged with nuts. Calhoun inserted a finger, and Murgatroyd readily permitted him to remove and examine the results of his scramble aloft. Calhoun grunted. Murgatroyd did have other and more useful abilities in the service of public health, but right here and now his delicate digestion was extremely convenient. His stomach worked so much like a human's that anything Murgatroyd ate was safe for Calhoun to an incredible degree of probability, and Murgatroyd ate nothing that disagreed with him.
"Instead of 'physician, heal thyself,'" Calhoun observed, "it's amounted to 'physician, feed thyself' since we got past the frost line, Murgatroyd. I am gratified."
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd complacently.
"I expected," said Calhoun, "only to benefit by the charm of your society in what I thought would be a routine check-trip to Merida Two. Instead, some unknown fumble-finger punched a wrong button and we wound up here—not exactly here, but near enough. I brought you from the Med Ship because there was nobody to stay around and feed you, and now you feed us, at least by pointing out edible things we might otherwise miss."
"Chee!" said Murgatroyd. He strutted.
"I wish," protested Calhoun, annoyed, "that you wouldn't imitate that Pat character from Three City! As a brand-new husband he's entitled to strut a little, but I object to your imitating him! You haven't anybody acting like Nym, gazing at you raptly as if you'd invented not only marriage but romance itself, and all the other desirable things back to night and morning!"
Murgatroyd said, "Chee?" and turned to face away from Calhoun.
The two of them, just then, stood on a leaf-covered patch of ground which slanted down to the singularly smooth and reflective water of a tiny bay. Behind and above them reared gigantic mountains. There was snow in blinding-white sheets overhead, but the snow line itself was safely three thousand feet above them. Beyond the bay was a wide estuary, with more mountains behind it, with more snow fields on their flanks. A series of leaping cascades jumped downward from somewhere aloft where a glacier-foot melted in the sun's heat. Everywhere that snow was not, green stuff shone in the sunlight.