Silence for a couple of minutes. I stand still. But it can't have gone away. What happens when the hopper comes? They will see whoever it is on the infrared vision screen. They won't come—
Footsteps again. Several.
Then the clouds part and one of those superfluous little moons shines straight through the gap.
The bay is not like the stereo the colonel showed because that was taken in winter; now the snow is melted, leaving bare shingle and mud and a tumble of rocks; more desolate than the snow. Fifty feet off is a man.
He is huddled up in a mass of garments but his head is bare, rising out of a hood which he has pushed back, maybe so as to listen better; he looks young, hardly older than me. He is holding a long thin object which I never saw before, but it must be a weapon of some sort.
This is the end of it. All the evidence of faking is destroyed; except M'Clare and me. Even if I use the Andite he has seen me—and that leaves M'Clare.
I am standing here on one foot like a dancer in a jammed movie, waiting for Time to start again or the world to end—
Like the little figure in the dance-instruction kit Dad got when I was seven, when you switched her off in the middle.