There was a long silence. Hopelessness. Futility.
"I've been thinking, Kim," Dona said softly, at last. "There are three hundred million inhabited planets. There are trillions and quintillions of people in the Galaxy. If they knew about us, some of them at least would want to help us. There are some, probably, who'd hope we could help them. If we were to think of a new approach to the problem we face, and reach the people who would want to help us, it might mean eventual rescue."
"Signals travel at the speed of light," Kim said. "We'd be dead long before even a tight-beam signal could reach another star-cluster, if there were anybody there to receive or act on it. But there aren't any space-ships except the Starshine. It was the last ship used in the Galaxy."
Dona said stoutly:
"We've been regarding our predicament as if it were unique, as if nobody else in the Universe wanted to be free. As if there was only one problem—ours! I heard a story once, Kim. It was about a man who had to carry a certain particular grain of dust to another place. A silly story, of course. But this was the top grain in a dust-pile. The man tried to find something that would pick up the one grain of dust, and something that would hold it quite safe. But he couldn't solve the problem. There wasn't any box that would hold a single grain of dust. He couldn't even pick up a solitary dust-grain. And how could he carry it if he couldn't pick it up?"
"That's a fable," Kim said, harshly. "There's a moral?"
Dona smiled. "Yes," she said. "There is. He picked up the dust-grain. With a shovel. He picked up a lot of others, too, but that didn't matter. And he could find a box to hold a hundred thousand dust-grains, when he couldn't find a box to hold one."
Kim was silent. Dona nodded and smiled at him.
"If you want a new way to think, how about thinking not just of us and our problem, but the problem of all the people like us who have gone into revolt?" she said. "How about all the people who've been sent to Ades? How about all those who will go in years to come? I don't know the answer, Kim, but it's another way to think. Since we've failed to solve a little problem by itself, suppose we look at it as part of a big one? It's a new approach, anyhow."
There was silence. The bright, many-colored stars overhead moved perceptibly toward what would be called the west by age-old custom. Weird shapes of frozen rock loomed above the space-ship, and the starlight glimmered up on thin hoarfrost which settled everywhere upon this small planet in the dark hours.