We stumbled through, into a typical Sibyllan home. One room served for cooking, eating, sleeping, handcrafting, everything. Screens offered some pretense of privacy, but here they stood unused against the sooty, unornamented walls. A brick oven gave reasonable warmth, but the single lantern was guttering and demon-shaped shadows moved in every corner.

A man and his wife sat on a bench by a cradle that he must have made himself. She had her face against his breast, her arms around his neck, and wept, not loudly, only with a despair so complete that she had no strength left to curse God. He held her, murmuring, sometimes stroking her faded hair. With one foot he rocked the cradle.

They didn’t notice us for a moment. Then he let her go and climbed erect, a burly man, his beard flecked with gray, his clothes clean but often patched. She remained seated, staring at us, trying to stop her tears and comprehend what we were.

Wind, rain, thunder invaded the stout walls. I heard the man say, slowly, “You’re from Earth.”

“Yes.” I introduced us. He shook hands in an absentminded fashion and mumbled his own name too low for me to catch.

“You can stay here, sure,” he added. “We got food in the cupboard till the storm passes. Afterward, Jimstown’s walking distance.”

“We can do better than that,” I said, commanding a smile forth, trying to ignore our drowned-rat condition, for they needed whatever comfort was to be gotten. “We have a car.”

Laurie went to the woman. “Don’t cry, please, my dear,” she murmured; somehow I heard her through the noise, and her head shone in the murk. “I know your farm’s wiped out. But you’re leaving soon anyway, and we’ll see you’re taken care of, you and your whole fam—Oh!” She stopped. Her teeth gleamed, catching at her lip.

The woman was not pregnant. But, craning my neck, I too saw that the cradle stood empty.

“I buried her around sundown,” the man said, looking past me. His tone was flat and his face was stiff, but the scarred hands kept twisting together. “A little girl. She lived several weeks. We hoped—And now the rain must’ve washed her out. I did think Sibylla might have let her sleep. We wrapped her up snug, and gave her a doll I’d made, so she wouldn’t be too lonesome after we were gone. But everything’s scattered now, I reckon.”

‘‘I’m sorry,” I groped. “Maybe…later—” Barely in time, I saw Laurie’s furious headshake. “What a terrible thing.”

Laurie sat down by the wife and whispered to her.

Once, on our way home, she told me what had been confided that night, hoping it would influence my report. This was the one child they had had, after five miscarriages. The birth was difficult and the doctor did not think any more were possible.

I told her it was no surprise. Standing by that cradle, I had recalled the few children elsewhere and the many graves. And at once, like a blow to the guts, wildly swearing to myself I must be wrong, I saw the face of the alien enemy.