She heard one of the men shout. It sounded like Sam. Had he hurt himself with the axe, gashed his leg or something? She'd always been afraid of that axe! She'd told them and told them to be careful!
She pulled herself up from her knees there at the stove where she had been blowing on the coals. She must get out there, help him! That terrible buzzing in her head, that ringing in her ears. No matter, she must get out there to help him.
She threw open the door and saw Sam running toward the lifeship. Had he lost his mind? The bandages were here. She had them here! She saw Lt. Harper come to the door of the bunkhouse. He was still pulling on his pants. He started running toward the lifeship, too, cinching his belt as he ran.
Then she realized that at least part of the ringing in her ears came from the lifeship. At first it had no meaning for her, then she remembered them talking about fixing up some kind of alarm, so that if they got a signal through....
She started running toward the lifeship. She stumbled, fell, got up, felt as light as a feather, as heavy as mercury. She crawled up the steps of the lifeship, she clutched at the door. She heard Sam speaking very slowly, carefully.
"Do you read me?Is this Earth?"
She saw his face. She knew the answer.
And that was the last she knew.
Consciousness came back in little dribbles like a montage—half reality and half nightmare of the insomniac. Lt. Harper's voice shouting at her with a roar like a waterfall, "My God, Miss Kitty, are you sick?" Blackness. More shouting, Sam calling the lieutenant, something about a red flare in the sky. A lucid moment, when Sam was explaining to her that Earth had been given the warp coordinates, and had sent a red flare to see if they could get through. Then another gap. A heavy trampling of feet, a great many feet. Some kind of memory of a woman in white, sticking a thermometer in her mouth. The prick of a needle in her arm. The sense of being carried. A memory of knowing she was in a ship. A flash that was more felt than seen.
Nightmares! All nightmares! She would wake up in a moment. She would get up, dress, go out and start a fire to heat water on the cookstove. She had planned to have coffee, a special treat from their almost exhausted store. She would have coffee. The men would come in sheepish, evading her glance.
Very well, she would simply tell them that she had misunderstood, save them the embarrassment of telling her. She would not be the woman scorned.
She moved her hands to throw back her blankets, and froze. Her fingers had not touched blankets, they had touched cool, slick sheets! Her eyes popped open.
It had not been a nightmare, a wish fulfillment of escape. She was in a hospital room. A nurse was standing beside her bed, looking down at her. A comfortably motherly-looking sort of woman was speaking to her.
"Well, now, Miss Kittredge, that's much better!" the woman said. "So you will go gather wild rice in the swamp and get your bloodstream full of bugs!" But it was a professional kind of chiding, the same way she had talked to her kindergarten children when they'd got themselves into trouble.
"Still," the nurse chatted, "it's made our pathologists mighty happy. They've been having themselves a ball analyzing the bugs you three managed to pick up. You got something close to malaria. The two men, healthy oxen, didn't get anything at all. We had to let 'em out of quarantine in three days."
Miss Kitty just looked at her in a sort of unthinking lassitude. She was still trying to make the reality seem real. The nurse helped a little. She turned to her cart and produced a white enamel, flat container. She slid it under the top sheet.
"Upsy-daisy now, Miss Kittredge," she said firmly. "It's time you started cooperating a little."
Yes, that brought her back to reality. But she still didn't say anything.
"Although we might as well not have let 'em out of quarantine," the nurse grumbled. "They've just been living out there in the waiting room for a solid week, buttonholing everybody from doctors down to orderlies asking about you."
She gave a soft wolf whistle.
"Whew, imagine having not just one guy but two of 'em, absolutely crazy about you. Just begging to see you, hold your hand a little. Two beautiful men like that! You ready to see them soon?"
Miss Kitty felt a rush of shame again. In the cabin she would have been forced to face them, but not now.
"No," she said firmly. "Ineverwant to see them again."
"Well, now, let me tell you something, Miss Kittredge," the nurse said, and this time there was a note of seriousness. "One of the symptoms of this sickness you picked up is that it makes you talk. Gal, you have talked a blue streak for the last week. We know everything, everything that happened, everything you thought about. The doctor understood how you might feel about things. So he told the lieutenant and Mr. Eade that you had got bitten about the time you were up in the rice swamp, and that you hadn't been responsible for anything you'd said for the last three days back there on New Earth."
Miss Kitty felt a flood of relief.
"Did they believe the doctor?" she asked hesitantly.
"Sure they believed him," the nurse answered. "Sure they did. But you wanna know something? I've talked to those two men. And I've just got myself an idea that it wouldn't have made a particle of difference in the way they feel about you even if they didn't believe it. You're tops with those two guys, lady. Absolutely tip-top tops. The way you pitched in there, carried your share of things...."
She slipped the pan out from under the sheets, and put it into a compartment of the cart.
"You wanna know something else? I don't think you were out of your head at all when you propositioned those two guys. I think you were showing some good female sense, maybe for the first time in your life. And I think they know you were.
"You think it over, Miss Kittredge. If I know you—and I ought to after listening to you rave day after day—you've got what it takes. You want my advice? You go right on being a normal female. Don't you be silly enough to get back into that warped, twisted, frustrated kind of a man-hater you always thought you were.
"I gotta go now. You think it over. But not too long. Those two guys are going to be mighty, mighty hurt if they find out you're conscious and won't see them."
She went out the door, pushing her cart in front of her.
Miss Kitty relaxed her neck, willed the tenseness out of her body, and just lay for a while thinking of nothing. A gust, a rattle of raindrops, called her attention to the window. They had put her on the ground floor. She was able to see through the window to the street outside. The rain was pelting down, like that first rain they'd had there on New Earth. How chagrined the boys had looked when the roof started leaking in a dozen places!
She felt a warm sense of relief, of gratitude, that she could remember them without shame. The nurse had been right, of course. Probably the doctors had planted that particular nurse in her room, anticipating her return to consciousness, anticipating the necessity for a little mental therapy.
Good female sense.With such a semantic difference from good male sense! The mind of a man and a woman was not the same. She knew that now. And she realized that deeply, hidden from her own admittance, she had always known it. And the nurse's good earthy expression—"propositioning those two guys"—approval that it had been natural and right. And another expression, "the way you pitched in there, carried your share of things."
Carried your share of things! That meant more than just cooking, mending, cleaning. More than just seeing that the race continued, too; although it somehow tied in with all these things.
She lay in her bed, watching the rain through the window, getting comfort from the soft, drumming sound. Along the street she could see people sloshing through the film of water underfoot. She watched the scene of turned-up collars, pulled-down hatbrims, bobbing umbrellas, as if it were something apart from her, and yet a part of her. She began to get a sense of rare vision, an understanding which she knew was more complete than any intellectual abstraction she had ever managed. She began to get a woman's sense of purpose, completely distinct from that of a man.
She recalled once reading of an incident where an Oklahoma oil millionaire had built a huge mansion; then, because his squaw did not know how to make a home within it, they pitched their tepee in the front grounds, to live there, unable to feel at home in anything else.
Yes, too often the mansions of science came in for a similar treatment. The vast rooms of ideas, the great halls of expansion, the limitless ceilings of challenge, the wide expanses of speculation; all these things which would exalt Man into a truly great existence were denied, put to no use beyond mere gadgetry. And the mass of human beings still huddled in their cramped and grimy little tepees of ancient syndromes, only there feeling at home.
It was the fault of the women. They had not kept up with the men. Those who attempted it tried to be men, to prove themselves as good a man as any man, the way she had done.
They had missed the real point entirely, every single bit of it.
The male was still functioning in the way males always had. There was no essential difference between the cave man who climbed a new mountain and explored a new valley and brought back a speared deer to throw down at the entrance of his home cave; no difference between him and the modern explorer of science who, under similar hardships, brought back a bright and rich new knowledge.
But the ancient cave woman had not failed. She had known what to do with the deer to strengthen and secure the future of the race.
And what about New Earth?
Lt. Harper and Sam had talked about the possibility of millions of Earths, each infinitesimally removed from the other, and if they could bridge the gap to one, they might bridge it to an uncountable number. Perhaps there were millions of others, but for her there was only one New Earth.
Would the processions of colonists going there spoil it? Would the women going there see in it a great mansion? Or, instead, would they simply go there to escape here—escape from exhaustion, failure, anguish, bitterness—and, as always, take these things along with them? Would they still live in grimy little syndromes of endless antagonism, bickering in their foolish frustrations, because they had no wisdom about what to do with this newly speared deer?
Oh, not on New Earth!
Suddenly Miss Kitty knew what she must do. If that one particular mansion needed someone to make it into a home, why not herself? And who had a better right?
Somewhere, there, perhaps that very one striding along under the eaves of that building across the street, with his hatbrim pulled down, leaning against the rain, somewhere, close, there must be a man who could share her resolution and her dream. A man of the same breed as the lieutenant and Sam, a man who carried his head high, his shoulders back, who had keen, intelligent eyes, and laughter.
Yes, now she wanted to see the two men after all, and meet their lucky wives, and see their children, the kind of children she might have had.
Mightyethave!
At a flash of memory, she smiled a little ruefully, and yet with an inner peace.
"I am not so old," she repeated in a whisper. "I still have time for at least a half dozen sons and daughters before—before my barren years."