sciousness came back in little dribbles like a montage--half reality
and half nightmare of the insomniac. Lt. Harper's voice shouting at her
with a roar like a waterfall, "My God, Miss Kitty, are you sick?"
Blackness. More shouting, Sam calling the lieutenant, something about a
red flare in the sky. A lucid moment, when Sam was explaining to her
that Earth had been given the warp coordinates, and had sent a red flare
to see if they could get through. Then another gap. A heavy trampling of
feet, a great many feet. Some kind of memory of a woman in white,
sticking a thermometer in her mouth. The prick of a needle in her arm.
The sense of being carried. A memory of knowing she was in a ship. A
flash that was more felt than seen.

Nightmares! All nightmares! She would wake up in a moment. She would get
up, dress, go out and start a fire to heat water on the cookstove. She
had planned to have coffee, a special treat from their almost exhausted
store. She would have coffee. The men would come in sheepish, evading
her glance.

Very well, she would simply tell them that she had misunderstood, save
them the embarrassment of telling her. She would not be the woman
scorned.

She moved her hands to throw back her blankets, and froze. Her fingers
had not touched blankets, they had touched cool, slick sheets! Her eyes
popped open.

It had not been a nightmare, a wish fulfillment of escape. She was in a
hospital room. A nurse was standing beside her bed, looking down at her.
A comfortably motherly-looking sort of woman was speaking to her.

"Well, now, Miss Kittredge, that's much better!" the woman said. "So you
will go gather wild rice in the swamp and get your bloodstream full of
bugs!" But it was a professional kind of chiding, the same way she had
talked to her kindergarten children when they'd got themselves into
trouble.

"Still," the nurse chatted, "it's made our pathologists mighty happy.
They've been having themselves a ball analyzing the bugs you three
managed to pick up. You got something close to malaria. The two men,
healthy oxen, didn't get anything at all. We had to let 'em out of
quarantine in three days."

* * * * *

Miss Kitty just looked at her in a sort of unthinking lassitude. She was
still trying to make the reality seem real. The nurse helped a little.
She turned to her cart and produced a white enamel, flat container. She
slid it under the top sheet.

"Upsy-daisy now,