Mijok was rumbling in misery and fright. Dorothy came over holding a locket. "This—you remember, Doc—a matron at the Orphanage gave it to me. I used to imagine it could be a portrait of my mother—"
"But my dear—"
The brown girl shook her head. "This ship-metal wedding ring Paul hammered out for me—that's the only Earth jewelry I want to keep. This face that might be like my mother's—Oh, Doc, I'm getting to be a big girl now. Besides, Lucifer will have plenty of pretties for us later on. And Doc—let me do this, will you? They've got a woman leading 'em, so—wouldn't she be less afraid of another woman? I'll uncover, so she—" Dorothy shrugged out of her jacket. "Please, Doc? I'm scared, but—"
Wright glanced helplessly at Paul. "We—"
Dorothy said quickly, "My decision." Holding the locket up for the sun to gleam on it, she walked into the meadow and waited in the brightness. Paul's hand sweated on the rifle stock. He saw Wright patting Mijok's arm, heard his restraining murmur: "Quiet, Mijok—keep your shirt on, Mijok, old man—man...." Mijok searched the face of his god with a mute desperation and remained as he was.
The pygmy woman halted fifty feet away in still-faced musing. As Paul had seen through the binoculars, she was elaborately tattooed and young. The pause was long. Dorothy stepped nearer to the place where Wright had left the bones, displaying the locket, her open left hand waving down at her body to demonstrate that she carried no weapons. For the first time Paul realized she had left her holster belt behind.
The blue-skirted woman shrilled a word; her two followers fell back. She thrust the blunt end of her spear in the ground and came forward steadily until she was only a few feet from the woman of the twenty-first century; mask-faced, she met Dorothy's smile with a long scrutiny. Now and then the green eyes shifted to study the clearing, the lifeboat, the quiet shapes of Paul and Wright. And Mijok. Perhaps she stared longest at Mijok, but by some heavy discipline her face refused to tell of anything but dignity and caution.
She spoke at last. It was complex, in a tone like the piping of a tree frog. There were pauses, studied inflections, no gestures: her seven-fingered hands hung limp against the blue grass skirt. The closing words seemed to have a note of questioning and of sternness; she waited.
Dorothy's contralto was startlingly deep in contrast: "Darling, I would like to know where you picked up that perfectly adorable wrap-around, only I don't think it would suit me. I'm, to put it frankly, a shade too hippy for such. In case you're wondering, I'm a female sample of man"—she touched herself and pointed to the pygmy lady—"man—"
"Oh!" Wright whispered. "Good girl, good—"