Wheaton thought about that for a long moment. “In that world, I wouldn’t raise her. I would hardly know her. I wasn’t really all that close to my brother, and Deborah’s mother never cared for me. Deborah would just be an annoying little kid that I avoided because I’d have no responsibility for her.” He grabbed his ears and squeezed hard against them, as if trying to crush his own head. “What kind of man am I? I don’t want to save Deborah, I want to save myself from losing her. And losing her by having her parents live, saving her eyesight—I hate that thought almost as much as losing her to an Erectid stone. I’m a monster.”

“For what it’s worth,” said Noxon, “it’s not a bad thing, to find out a few of the monsters living inside us. Because you know you won’t act on that preference.”

“Well, one thing’s certain,” said Wheaton. “If we save Deborah’s parents and preserve her sight, she would certainly not be with us on this expedition. She’d be at home with her family. Or away at school. And probably not even interested in anthropology, because that would just be something her eccentric uncle did.”

“We can’t do that,” said Ram. “Because it changes too much. We don’t know all the influence raising Deborah had on Uncle Georgia. Without her grounding him, giving him a meaningful personal life, a purpose, who knows whether he would have been all that successful in his career? Or even alive? Men living alone don’t always take care of themselves.”

Wheaton shrugged. “So I allow Deborah’s family to die and her to suffer in order to avoid damaging my career?”

“I don’t care about your career all that much,” said Ram, “except that it’s your career that gives you the money and the privacy for us to hide out with you while we wait for the Visitors to come back from Garden and somehow persuade the people of Earth to commit planetwide genocide.”

“Thank you for reminding me of what I’m here to do,” said Noxon. “I can’t afford to lose track of that. But something Umbo and I learned early on, though we didn’t realize we had learned it for a long time: No matter what grand purposes and causes we enlist in, we still have to be decent and good to the people we meet along the way. People like Professor Wheaton here. And Deborah.”

“So what’s best for Deborah, that still allows Uncle Georgia to be helpful to our cause?” asked Ram.

They were silent for another long while.

“Here’s what I’m going to do,” said Noxon.

“You just decide?” said Wheaton. “Without any kind of discussion or vote?”