“I could have married any man in Baranof or in Alaska, for that matter, fifty years ago, you included, if I’d put my mind to it.”

“Perhaps it would have been better if you had, Bridie. For me, at least.” But then he looked down at Christine’s hand on his arm, he reached over and placed his free hand on hers. “No, I’ll have to take that back. Because then there would have been no Christine.”

The waitress placed on the counter near them a vast and improbable cake covered with bright green icing, a fearsome sight. Calm, kind, childlike, she smiled at the three. “I saved this one for you, Mr. Storm, the minute I heard you were in town. Nobody’s going to get a crumb of it till I’ve cut you the first slice. Now. What do you and the ladies want? I’ve got caribou stew and liver and onions and steak—–”

“Steak,” said Thor.

All about the counter the Eskimo Dew Line workers and their wives and children were eating up the Saturday night’s pay. Pork chops and steak, hamburgers and lemon pie, cake and liver and bacon—quietly and neatly they ate away until the pay envelope had vanished. In their faces shone a gustatory delight, like that reflected by the gourmets and gourmands stuffing themselves ecstatically at the Pavilion in New York, Maxim’s in Paris, Claridge’s in London. Here was a world they never had known or dreamed of. Philosophically, they took it as it came, a gift from the spirits of good. If, tomorrow, all this should vanish—the strange sensitive scientific machines, the airplanes, the powerful vehicles, the monsters that spanned the frozen tundra in the winter, the antennae that so mysteriously received warnings the white man’s ear did not detect—all these were real today. They accepted them without question, like children. Their friendly amiable faces reflected their satisfaction in the Distant Early Warning, in radar and four-engine planes, and four-layer cakes, and electricity and beefsteaks. If, tomorrow, all these enchanting things should go as mysteriously as they had come, there, still, was the Arctic Ocean with its riches of whale and seal and polar bear and fish; the tundra with its caribou for meat, its furred creatures for clothing, the dogs for travel. They had been there for thousands of years, they would be there for thousands more.

Thor explained this to the two women, quietly, as they sat perched on the counter stools eating the nourishing meal, the great nickel coffee urn in the corner and the baking loaves in the oven sending forth their aroma; the ice pack on the Arctic shore just outside the door grinding and groaning and crashing in a titanic obbligato.

He was, in a way, talking aloud to himself as he now so often did; a musing audible soliloquy. “It may kill them off, in time. Maybe that’s what we want, unconsciously. Perhaps if they can eat enough butter and meat and milk and vegetables it will take the place of the seal oil and the muktuk. But that takes money, a great deal of money, and all this bustle and scramble of building will be finished one day. Of course the tuberculosis rate is higher than ever. The girls go with the workers, Scandinavian, Irish, American, Italian, German-background men. Lonely men, like that poor lad at the Rest House.”