"Ah ... This eleven-year-old gookum claims to be coffee. Can we make a fire? Looks like dead wood over there."
The branches burned aromatically; the morning was growing into deep warmth, but still with freshness. Wright said, "Coffee my shirt."
Dorothy tasted it. "Brr...! I was about to say when I interrupted myself, it so happens I'm six or seven weeks pregnant, I think."
"Six——" Wright set his aluminum cup carefully upside down. Paul mumbled, "That's what's been on your mind."
Behind her eyes he glimpsed the primitive thing, deeper than thought, not like a part of her but a force that sustained her, himself, all others: the three billion of Earth, the small grieving spirit now flown away into the trees. "Yes, Adam. I would have told you sooner, but we all had a lot on our minds."
"Even before we got in orbit, you saw us settling—staying——"
Dorothy grinned then. "No-o, Paul. I just wanted the baby. Could have been born on the ship. The Federation said no, but...."
Gradually Paul began to realize it. "But you said yes."
She leaned to him, no longer smiling. "I said yes...."
The forest floor hushed footsteps; some coolness lingered. Paul walked in front, then Dorothy, and Wright marked blazes on the tree trunks. Paul glanced backward often, to capture the receding patterns. At the third such pause the lifeboat was no longer visible—only a sameness of trees and sparse young life groping through shadow for the food of the sun. In this depth of forest there was no brush; the going was easy except for the nuisance of purple vines that sometimes looped from tree to tree. Paul searched for any change of light ahead.