“Coffee?” chirped the stewardess. “Snack? No, those are jelly and cream cheese. These are the meat sandwiches.”

They drank the hot beverage, they ate the cold food, they composed themselves again, they seemed, huddled in that bleak little cabin, to be somehow separate each from the other, busy with their own thoughts. Perhaps they felt their own powerlessness to fight Fate if she should feel the whim to turn adversely against this little bubble to which they had entrusted their lives. Boomboomboomboomboom went the engines. Sleepsleepsleepsleepsleep. But they could not in all that clear fine air and that brilliance. But perhaps they did, at least in the more active fibers of the senses. For Miss Larson was saying. “Fasten your seat belts please,” and the sign over the cockpit doorway was alight with its message.

Barrow. The Arctic Ocean. “We are coming down in Barrow. We will arrive there in ten minutes. Barrow is the northernmost town in Alaska, and the only sizable settlement between here and the North Pole. You will now notice the Arctic Ocean, the dark line you see is the Arctic ice pack piled up on the shore almost mountain high.”

“In July!” exclaimed Irma Polar.

“We have enjoyed having you on this trip,” Miss Larson went on, flawlessly, “and we hope you have enjoyed your flight with Arctic Circle Air Line, and that you will fly with us again. Please keep your seats until the plane …”

They stepped from the plane into a gray-and-black world whose only flash of color was the United States flag whipping aloft in the wind like a tongue of flame in a bed of ashes.

Bridie on one side, Thor on the other, Chris stood a moment, staring. “It’s Mars.”

Thor laughed in approval. “That’s a good observation, Christine.”

Bridie, absurdly inappropriate as to outer appearance, superbly equipped for hardship in spirit and body, hunched her shoulders against the wind. “You wanted to see Alaska.”

Christine surveyed the forest of empty oil drums stretching away to infinity, the ice pack stacked high on the Arctic shore, the huts, the weather-pocked frame houses, the Quonsets; the muffled figures clopping across the ankle-deep black fine dust of the road; the vast vehicles equipped with the wheels of airplanes. A town on Mars.

“I thought—I suppose—it would be a little like Oogruk and a little like Kotzebue and Nome and even Baranof. All those engineers and all those scientists and the Army, and the Air Force. What do they do here!”

“Protect you,” Thor said.

“I’d thank them to protect me this minute,” Bridie announced, “with a place where we can get warmed up and away from the wind. What’s that place over there? If it’s the airport let’s get to it. Where we going to stay tonight?”

“You’ll be surprised,” Thor assured her. “Comfortable and clean. Just wait.”

“Chris! Chris!”

She turned. Ross was running toward them across the chiaroscuro landscape.

“I’m going in,” Bridie announced, firmly. “Ross wants to talk to you let him come indoors.”