Standing at a circular window, ten feet in diameter, Michael saw, far below, the lights of the city extending into the darkness along the shoreline of the sea.

"We should have delivered our message by radio," he said, "and gone back into space."

"You could probably still go," she said quietly.

He came and stood beside her. "I couldn't stand being out in space, or anywhere, without you."

She looked up at him. "We could go out into the wilderness, Michael, outside the force walls. We could go far away."

He turned from her. "It's all dead. What would be the use?"

"I came from the Earth," she said quietly. "And I've got to go back to it. Space is so cold and frightening. Steel walls and blackness and the rockets and the little pinpoints of light. It's a prison."

"But to die out there in the desert, in that dust." Then he paused and looked away from her. "We're crazy—talking as though we had a choice."

"Maybe they'll have to give us a choice."

"What're you talking about?"

"They went into hysterics at the sight of those bodies in the picture. Those young bodies that didn't die of old age."

He waited.

"They can't stand the sight of people dying violently."

Her hand went to her throat and touched the tiny locket.

"These lockets were given to us so we'd have a choice between suffering or quick painless death.... We still have a choice."

He touched the locket at his own throat and was very still for a long moment. "So we threaten to kill ourselves, before their eyes. What would it do to them?"

He was still for a long time. "Sometimes, Mary, I think I don't know you at all." A pause. "And so now you and I are back where we started. Which'll it be, space or Earth?"

"Michael." Her voice trembled. "I—I don't know how to say this."

He waited, frowning, watching her intently.

"I'm—going to have a child."

His face went blank.

Then he stepped forward and took her by the shoulders. He saw the softness there in her face; saw her eyes bright as though the sun were shining in them; saw a flush in her cheeks, as though she had been running. And suddenly his throat was full.

"No," he said thickly. "I can't believe it."

"It's true."

He held her for a long time, then he turned his eyes aside.

"Yes, I can see it is."

"I—I can't put into words why I let it happen, Michael."

He shook his head. "I don't know—what to—to say. It's so incredible."

"Maybe—I got so—tired—just seeing the two of us over and over again and the culturing of the scar tissue, for twenty centuries. Maybe that was it. It was just—something I felt I had to do. Some—real life again. Something new. I felt a need to produce something out of myself. It all started way out in space, while we were getting close to the solar system. I began to wonder if we'd ever get out of the ship alive or if we'd ever see a sunset again or a dawn or the night or morning like we'd seen on Earth—so—so long ago. And then I had to let it happen. It was a vague and strange thing. There was something forcing me. But at the same time I wanted it, too. I seemed to be willing it, seemed to be feeling it was a necessary thing." She paused, frowning. "I didn't stop to think—it would be like this."

"Such a thing," he said, smiling grimly, "hasn't happened on Earth for three thousand years. I can remember in school, reading in the history books, how the whole Earth was overcrowded and how the food and water had to be rationed and then how the laws were passed forbidding birth and after that how the people died and there weren't any more babies born, until at last there was plenty of what the Earth had to give, for everyone. And then the news was broken to everyone about the culturing of the scar tissue, and there were a few dissenters but they were soon conditioned out of their dissension and the population was stabilized." He paused. "After all this past