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.

But there was that look on Ann’s face as she recalled the incident, that look of someone in full possession of a moment of her past, alive with the upwelling— clearly she remembered it too— and yet remembered something different than he had. One of them had to be wrong, didn’t they? Didn’t they?

“Could we really,” he said, and had to stop and try again. “Could we really have been two such maladroit people as to both go out— intending to— to reveal ourselves—”

Ann laughed. “And both go away feeling rebuffed by the other?” She laughed again. “Why sure.”

He laughed as well. They turned their faces to the sky and laughed.

But then Sax shook his head, rueful to the point of agony. Whatever had happened— well. No way of knowing, now. Even with his memory upwelling like an artesian fountain, like one of the cataclysmic outbreak floods themselves, there was still no way to be sure what had really happened.