"I think so." And Sears' plump daughter Teddy (Theodora-Pakriaa) would no doubt find herself too, sometime: there was no hurry. Even Christopher Wright no longer seemed to feel that time was hounding him, though his years by the Earth calendar were sixty-five, his hair and beard were white, his wiry thinness moved deliberately to save the strength he had once been able to spend like unconsidered gold.... "Look!"
Dorothy said carefully, "But that is impossible." A column of smoke on the flank of the coastal range, above one of the beaches where building stone was found. Blue-gray against the red and black, it rose straight in untroubled air. "They weren't taking Betsy out till we got back."
"Too high anyway," Dunin said. "No need to climb so high for the stone."
Dorothy whispered, "I have never quite believed that Ed and Ann——"
"Oh, Dorothy! Well, we——"
"Yes, I saw the lifeboat go down on the channel. It didn't sink." She shut her eyes. "It was a misty evening, lover, more ways than one. Remember, Dunin?"
"I'll always remember."
"Paul, I know that when the open-sea current below the island took the lifeboat it must have been smashed against the cliffs—oh, of course—and for nine years the sea spiders will have used the pieces of it for their little castles and hideaways. All the same—Ed and Ann could have managed to swim ashore. Cross the range somehow or go around it."
"Nothing to eat. Barren rock straight up from the beaches, where there are any beaches, for ninety miles south of the only place where they could have landed and for twenty miles north of it."
"But no kaksmas in the coast range either; no omasha, this side. There are beaches here and there. They might have found—shellfish—blue seaweed."