“I’d like you to understand how I feel about Christine’s education these next two years, Bridie. I’m not planning to change her. I want her to grow. I want her to emerge free just as I want to see Alaska emerge free. I’m afraid Czar thinks of her as being expendable just as Alaska is expendable to him. Do you see what I mean? He gave Alaska movies and shops and newspapers and high buildings, all with his name on them. His brand. So he’ll give her clothes, Outside travel, parties, piano, television, Husacks, Caswells, luxury. To use her as he uses the lobbies in Washington.”

“Now, Thor, fair’s fair. Czar loves Chris as much as you do. He’s loaded with money. It’s only natural he wants to give her pretty things, a young girl, his only grandchild.”

“Bridie, Bridie, that isn’t what I mean!”

Alaska, too, went blithely about its business of life, now surrounded in the air, on the ground, under the ground, on the sea, under the sea, and on the mountaintops by the most modern and appalling machinery of war, against war, and for war. Armies, planes, radar, directed missiles, rays, spotters. Alaska lived like a prankish boy smoking a cigarette in an arsenal.

Christine’s childhood years of close association with the three who were thrice her age had established a fundamental pattern of thinking and doing. She took part in the social life of the college and the town, but there was some complaint among the more amorous young men and the frivolous young women.

“Chris is fun,” they said, the one to the other. “She can do anything. But then she sounds off about politics and territorial rights and absentee owners and stuff. I’m interested in all that gunk too, of course. Who isn’t! But does she get steamed up about it! You’d think she was addressing Congress or something.”

In her spare hours Chris was likely to be seen drifting in and out of the Daily Lode city room, or happily ensconced at a desk in the Northern Light office, reading proof or typing a column of college news. Best of all, she liked the evenings spent at the Barnetts’.

Housing shortage—that condition which, since the end of World War II, had taken on the proportions of an epidemic—was an old story in Baranof. Since the early Nineties, when the first tent of the first prospectors was tipsily pitched on the beach, Baranof had outgrown its shelter. Construction workers poured in; government workers, civil, professional, business. They sent for wives and children and these swarmed off the planes and adapted themselves, cheerfully or complainingly, to a fantastic new way of life. The DEW Line—the magic Distant Early Warning of a sinister something that might any moment come through the air—began to weave its web across a frozen waste that never before had known the foot of man. Robots in heavy boots and wool-lined jackets and carrying metal boxes of their precious tools clumped down the plane stairs. “Five hundred a week, and grub,” they had argued with their protesting wives back home. “Five hundred a week for Cri’s sake, for six months! And when I get back we can build us a house right here and live in it the rest of our lives, and a yard for the kids. It’s only six months. A year at the most. Suppose it was a war! You’d get along without me. You’d have to.”