Addie crossed the room to throw her arms around the great shoulders, gaunt now rather than massive. “Any color is just right for you, you big beautiful Swensky you!”

Czar, learning of these changes, came by to see for himself, driving at his accustomed twenty-five miles an hour. He passed, staring; turned at the end of two or three digesting blocks, and came by again. The seaman’s keen blue eyes had seen him. Thor came to the door.

“Come in, old pardner, come in!”

“I hear you’re fixing to be married,” Czar called from the car window.

Chattily, Thor leaned against the doorjamb. “That’s interesting. Anyone we know?”

“Might be.” With apparent reluctance he left the car and walked leisurely up the path, surveying the house with the remote and casual glance of a stranger. “Could be. Bridie, say. She always was stuck on you.”

“I thought it was you, according to the old story.”

“Or maybe one of the girls along the Strip. Or maybe you’re bringing home an Eskimo bride—again.”

“Come in, come in. Have a look around at your old diggings.”

“Must be fixing it up for some woman. Look at it! Who’re you fooling? Not me. I’m smarter than you are, always was. Who’s the—girl?”

“Thanks for the compliment, Czar. I’m a little on the vintage side for marriage—you and I, both.”

“I don’t know about you,” Czar retorted, a little coarsely for him. “You being such a dreamer and all, all your life. But if I was so minded I could increase the population of the Territory pretty considerably. If I was so minded.”

“Perhaps,” Thor mused, rubbing rubbing with a slow rhythmical motion the curved surface of a wall log. “Perhaps it might have been better for the Territory—and for you—if you had done so. You’ve compensated, they call it in the new language—you’ve taken out your natural human urges in a passion for power. Power passion. Many men do that. It doesn’t always work out too well. Hitler—–”

“Why, you dirty old drooler, you comparing me to Hitler! You’re crazier than I thought, and everybody knows how crazy you are. Crazy as a coot!”

“Czar, Czar, I’m sorry. I was just thinking aloud, I sometimes do. We’ve known each other for fifty years. Cooped up together in this locked-in land. There aren’t, after all, many secrets we have from each other, are there?”

“It isn’t any secret that most of the time you don’t know what you’re talking about. Or doing, for that matter. This shack, for example.” His face, in its cold seething anger, was like the ice breaking up in the late spring, a crashing destructive jumble of fury. “You’re fixing this place up for somebody besides yourself.”

Thor went on with his polishing, methodically, lightly, the wood shone like pulled taffy. “To tell you the truth, Czar, I may do some traveling, later, Outside. Outside the Territory. I’ve been here a long, long time, it’s time I went away. In all these years I’ve scarcely been Outside. I could rent this place at a good profit now, in case I stayed away for quite some time.”