He was wondering idly what the outcome of this might be--conscious of me, but careless. It jolted me. He might be uncertain, but I _knew_ Ven was from good family stock, and "good" to a Thalassan meant something entirely different than it commonly did to the natives of this planet! I disengaged hurriedly and shook Ven out of her rapport with Edith. "We've no time to lose," I said. "We must leave at once! You know what's going to happen!" "I know," Ven said. "I feel the changes already." "That's just in your mind," I snapped. "We're not going home," she said. There was a note of prophecy in her voice. "We'll never make it." "We can't stay here!" "I know." "Then what are we going to do?" * * * * * We couldn't stay here. But we couldn't go home either. The trip would take weeks, and hyperspace is fatal to a gravid Thalassan female. That was something we learned long ago, and the principal reason for continence-conditioning for couples in space. What was more, I knew that where Ven stayed, I would stay. "Remember the fourth planet of this system?" Ven asked. "Yes. Ideal gravity, adequate oxygen, but too cold." "And with no intelligent life," Ven added. "That's an advantage--and we can beat the cold. It wouldn't be too hard to build domes. We have plenty of power metal, and a matricizer. We could hatch our clutch there. With the mammals to help us, we should be able to make a comfortable enough life for the forty years it'll take to bring our offspring to maturity. We should be able to do this easily, and still get home before we're strangers." "Hmm," I said. "It's possible. And we can use this world for a supply base. But would you care to live on that cold barren planet?" "There are worse places," she said matter-of-factly. "And we'd be close to everything we'd need." It did have possibilities. And the mammals could be adapted. They were a more advanced evolutionary form than we, but lower on the adaptive scale--nonspecialized--more so than any other intelligent race I had encountered. Ven said, "We would actually be doing their race a favor, if the computation of this world's future is correct. Some of them would still survive if this planet commits suicide. And if the prediction is wrong, we would have done no harm. If they reach space, they'll merely find that they've already arrived when they reach the fourth planet." "Which might be something of a surprise to their explorers," I said with a chuckle. "All right. We'll play it your way." I was pretty sure how Donald would take this. He was going to be furious, but after all one doesn't make a pet of a wolf and then turn it loose. It's too hard on the livestock. But I didn't think he'd be too unhappy. He'd be the principal human on Mars; and after we left he'd be ruler of a world. And in the meantime he could be a domestic tyrant.