He sat disconsolately down on the ground several feet from one of the landing jacks. Sonya sat down beside him. "We won't be able to go back at all now," she said. "Neither your ship nor mine can carry us both, and there's no way we can occupy more than one of them at a time."
Gordon sighed. "I suppose we could radio for help," he said presently. "But if we did we'd have to tell them everything that happened. I'm afraid they'd be sort of skeptical about the rain. Of course, we could leave that part out—but I'm afraid they'd be skeptical about the collars too. In fact, I don't think they'd even believe us. They'd simply jump to the conclusion that we've fal—that we don't want to return and would order us back on the double the minute maximum juxtaposition occurred. No, if we radio for help, we've got to have a good concrete reason for doing so—one that they'll be able to understand and believe."
Sonya managed a wan smile. "I—I can just see myself standing before the Council of Ministers, blaming what happened on the rain," she said.
Gordon laughed, "And I can just see myself standing before a congressional investigating committee, explaining about the collars." He began to feel better. A situation that could lend itself to humor could not be wholly hopeless. "Here's what we'll do for now," he went on. "We'll radio back the report we agreed upon, and then we'll go on with our work as though nothing is wrong. Sometimes problems solve themselves; but just in case this one shouldn't, and we can't go back, we'll build a cabin so we'll have some place to live."
Sonya's eyes sparked like a little girl's. "Let's build it by that little brook," she said. "Where—where we first met."
"Fine," Gordon said.
During the ensuing weeks, they spent their mornings gathering data and their afternoons working on the cabin. They took time out to analyze a sample of rain water, but it evinced no unusual qualities. Gordon was not surprised. Shortly after landing, he had tested a sample of Venusian water for drinking purposes, and with the same result. Clearly, the quality that had undermined their inhibitions originated in the cloud-cover, and evaporated soon after it reached the ground.
After the cabin was finished, they began going on afternoon-hikes into the hills, tramping through idyllic woods, talking and laughing, exclaiming now and then at unexpected patterns of flowers, starting at sudden rainbow-flights of birds. They saw but few Venusians, and the few they did see ignored them. One afternoon they found a fern-bordered pool beneath a white-skirted waterfall, and after that they came there every day to swim. Sonya's skin darkened to a deep gold, and looking at her, Gordon sometimes found it hard to breathe. Every so often the sky darkened, and rain fell; but the rain was superfluous now. And as for the invisible magnetic chain that bound them together, that had been supplanted by another invisible chain that was ten times as strong.