Very probably she did not answer at first. But she might listen. And 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. And 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, if two persons 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 but 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 wide 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. And 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 belief than that the days before death, while they were together, were 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 in far spaceports and invests an outer-planet girl with glamour. 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 his or her own life and happiness is put into its place of proper insignificance in the cosmos. It may begin in instinct, but it becomes an achievement only humans can encompass.
Hunt knew it—the stocky, deep-voiced despairing figure who stared 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 swept 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.
And then the young man desperately raised a knife. It glittered in the light of the ribbon in the sky. And—