She whispered bleakly: "I know. I liked you. I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner." She began to sob uncontrollably. "I'll never see anything again! Nobody'll ever be afraid of me again!" She buried her face against Charles' shoulder.
He smoothed her tangled hair mechanically and said to the watching, grinning circle: "Look, hasn't this gone far enough? Haven't you got what you wanted?"
The headman stretched and spat. "Guess so," he said. "Come on, girl." He yanked Martha from the seat and booted her toward the huts.
Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led back to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole.
"I was thinking about what you said the other day," Kennedy beamed, rasping a file over an arrowhead. "When I said that to change one molecule in the past you'd have to change every molecule in the past, and you said, 'Maybe so.' I've figured that what you were driving at was—"
"Kennedy," Charles said, "please shut up just this once. I've got to think."
"In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you're a rational animal and therefore that your being rather than essense is—"
"Shut up or I'll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!" Charles roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his head in his hands.
I have been listening to you.
Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines. Drives that never succeeded.