“What are you babbling about?” Reymont lounged back against the rough, sweet-scented bole and rumpled her hair, which was bright beneath the young sun. After dark there would be three moons to shine upon her, and more stars in the sky than men had known before.

“You,” she said. “They look to you, the man who saved them, the man who dared survive, they look to you for—”

He interrupted her in the most enjoyable way.

“Carl!” she protested.

“Do you mind?”

“No. Certainly not. On the contrary. But— I mean, your work—”

“My work,” he said, “is my share of the community’s job. No more and no less. As for any other position: They had a proverb in America which went, ‘If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.’ ”

She looked at him with a kind of terror. “Carl! You can’t mean that!”

“I sure as hell can,” he answered. For a moment he turned serious again. “Once a crisis is past, once people can manage for themselves… what better can a king do for them than take off his crown?”

Then he laughed, and made her laugh with him, and they were merely human.