“Don’t be silly.”

“You are too. Come on, here’s another one. Just put your hand in and grab him from the top.”

Sam made a fed-up noise and dropped his arm into the water. When it came out, a red crab dangled from his fingers. “Dinner,” he said.

He dropped the crab in the can, and the pair of hermits scuttled over and under each other. Sam peered in, expression of wonder.

“I can’t believe you’ve never been crabbing,” said Irene.

“I grew up in Kansas, for God’s sake.”

“Still. You’ve lived in California for years.”

“Never went crabbing, though. You have to start young with these things. Your dad has to teach you.”

“Well, now I’m teaching you,” said Irene.

Sam looked up from the water can. The sun was heading down. Sam’s face, already deeply tanned, had turned to gold in the horizontal light. He was grinning. He grinned all the time now, like they were on some kind of exotic vacation instead of marooned together on a barren island, supplies running low. Irene smiled back, because you couldn’t help smiling back at a grin like that, Sam Mallory’s grin.

“You’re teaching me a lot of things, I guess,” he said.

That night they cooked the crabs in the small pit they’d excavated from an old guano mine, a scar left in the ground by the American Guano Company some fifty years before. Inside this pit, they made the tiny, efficient fires that distilled seawater into something potable, and now they boiled the crabs in the seawater—the fresh water was far too precious—and it turned out all right. For fuel they dried handfuls of tough sea grass and bound it into sticks. Irene could build a decent fire, too, but Sam seemed to have some elemental connection with the whole business, from first spark to dying flame to ember.

After dinner, they lay in the sand and stared at the stars, as they did most nights. There wasn’t anything else to do when the sun went down, nothing to see by, so they talked and watched the night sky. Sam was intimate with all the constellations, but Irene hadn’t paid much attention to the stars at all until she started learning the principles of celestial navigation.

“The same stars that guided Magellan,” Sam pointed out.

“We’re just a star ourselves, after all. Who knows, maybe we’re guiding some other traveler on some other world.”

“That’s blasphemy, Foster.”

“God’s infinite, after all. Why should He content Himself with one little earth?”

Sam didn’t reply. Irene listened to the rumble of Sandy’s purring from the patch of sand next to Sam’s ribs. After a while, she turned her head. The moon was a sliver of a thing now, setting already, but she could pick out just enough of Sam’s face to see that he was asleep.