But to Ann he needed to apologize. For the years of missionary fervor, the pressure applied to make her agree, the hunt for the wild beast of her refusal, to kill it dead. Sorry for that, so sorry— his face wet with tears, and she stared at him so— just precisely as she had on that cold rock in Antarctica, in that first refusal— which had all come back and rested inside him now. His past.

“Do you remember?” he said to her curiously, shunted onto that new train of thought. “We walked out to Lookout Point together— I mean one after the next— but to meet, to talk in private? We went out separately, I mean— you know how it was then— that Russian couple had fought and been sent home— we all hid everything we could from the selection people!” He laughed, choking somewhat, at the image of their deeply irrational beginnings. So apt! And everything since played out so in keeping with such a beginning! They had come out to Mars and replayed everything just as it had always been played before, it was nothing but trait recurrence, pattern repetition. “We sat there and I thought we were getting on and I took your hand but you pulled it away, you didn’t like it. I felt, I felt bad. We went back separately and didn’t talk again like that, in that way, not ever. And then I hounded you through all this, I guess, and I thought it was because of the, the . . .” He waved at the blue sky.

“I remember,” she said.

She was looking cross-eyed at him. He felt the shock of it; one didn’t get to do this, one never got to say to the lost love of one’s youth I remember, it still hurts. And yet there she stood, looking at his face amazed.

“Yes,” she said. “But that wasn’t what happened,” she said, frowning. “It was me. I mean, I put my hand on your shoulder, I liked you, it seemed like we might become . . . but you jumped! Ha, you jumped like I had shocked you with a cattle prod! Static electricity was bad down there, but still”— sharp laugh—”no. It was you. You didn’t— it wasn’t your kind of thing, I figured. And it wasn’t mine either! In a way it should have worked, just because of that. But it didn’t. And then I forgot about it.”

“No,” Sax said.

He shook his head, in a primitive attempt to recast his thought, to re-remember. He could still see in his mental theater that awkward instant at Lookout Point, the whole thing clear almost word for word, move for move, it’s a net gain in order, he had said, trying to explain the purpose of science; and she had said, for that you would destroy the entire face of a planet. He remembered it.