"Yes."
"All right, I shall go straight up as long as the motors will push me, and then I shall circle around as a condor might do it, and I'll feel like a condor, too, a king of the skies—"
"I am going with you."
That sobered him up. And he took her hands: "There is a chance, always a chance, that the flying thing will fall. And the baby, Nedra, your child—our child?"
"The baby is the clan's. But I, O'Hara, am yours."
"But Nedra, if I—well, if I don't come back to these mountains—?"
"Ah." She smiled. "I knew!" And clenched the ceremonial warclub and advanced.
It was the Elder who managed things. At dawn they departed, the men and the younger women of the clan going swiftly upward through the heavy snowdrifts and O'Hara with Nedra trotting grimly among them until at last they reached that upland meadow where he had first set his craft down on the continent. The craft—and the jars of fuel—waited there.
Nedra got into the cockpit. Then O'Hara directed the task of clearing a runway through the snow. When they had finished, O'Hara climbed in, touched his instruments very carefully, then touched them in earnest and felt the living throb of motors. They coughed and then died.
"Once more," he whispered to himself.