would never get back to Old Earth. Her instincts had been functioning,
insuring their lives, where intellect had failed them completely. She
tried to laugh scornfully at herself, in feminist tradition. Imagine!
Katheryn Kittredge, Career Woman, devoted to the intellectual
advancement of Man, thinking that mere cooking and cleaning and mending
was the supremely important thing.

But she failed in her efforts to deride herself. The intellectual
discussions among the small groups of intelligent girls back on Old
Earth were far away and meaningless. She discovered she was a little
proud and strangely contented that she could prepare edible food.
Certainly the two men were not talented; and someone had to accept the
responsibility for a halfway decent domestic standard and comfort.

As, for example, with the walls of the cabin halfway up, it was
necessary to point out that while they may be going to put the little
cookstove--welded together out of metal scrap--in the cabin, there was
no provision for a fireplace. How would they keep warm through the long
winter months this year, and in the years to come?

Lt. Harper had started to say something. Then he shrugged and a hopeless
look came over his face.

"Perhaps you are right, Miss Kitty," he said humbly. "It may be spring,
at that, before we can finish trying the more obvious combinations.
We're trying to...." He broke off, turned away, and began to mark off
the spot where they would saw down through the logs to fit in a
fireplace.

* * * * *

Later that day, she overheard him tell Sam that, theoretically at least,
there could be millions of versions of the Earth, each removed an
infinitesimal point from the next. There was the chance the flaw in the
torque motor, which still eluded him, might not automatically take them
back to the right cross-section, even if he found it. They might have to
make an incredible number of trials, and then again they might hit it on
the very next combination.

"And you might not!" she cut into the conversation, with perhaps more
acid in her voice than she intended. "It might not be your next, nor
tomorrow, nor next spring--nor ever!"

Odd that she had felt an obscure satisfaction at the stricken looks on
their faces when she had said it. Yet they had it coming to them. It was
time someone shocked them into a sense of reality. It took a woman to be
a realist. She had already faced the possibility and was