"You must bring in a great many plants, Hertha. Remember that--a _great_ many. Don't forget that. When you go outside, through the locks, we lose air. Air is very precious, so you must bring in a great many plants." "Yes, Jimmy." "And you must plant them as I did." "Yes, Jimmy." He began to talk faster, in a race with the growing fever. "I've gathered most of the oxygenating plants around the hut. So you may have to go into the forest to get enough." "The--the forest?" "You _must_, Hertha! You _must_!" Her mouth twisted as if she were ready to cry. "For you. Yes, for you I will go into the forest." The fever came back. His mind wandered away. * * * * * He was walking in the open air. He walked from Nineshime to Venus, down Venus to Windopole, up Windopole to "The Grand Eagle and Barrel." He went in. Hertha came with him and sat down by his side at the bar. The bartender looked at him oddly. "She with you, Mac?" He turned to look at her; her dumb, brown eyes met his. He wanted to snarl: "Get the hell away! Leave me alone!" But he choked back the words. It was not Hertha he was angry with. She had done him no injury. She had merely followed him, perhaps because she knew of nothing else to do; perhaps because of temporary gratitude for the coins; perhaps in hope that he would buy her a drink. When the anger passed, he felt sorry for her again. He said, "Want a drink?" She shook her head without changing expression. He looked at her and shrugged and thought that after a while she would get tired and go away. He ordered, and the bartender brought a bottle and one glass. Hertha continued to stare at him; he tried to ignore her. He drank. He thought it would get easier to ignore her as the level of the bottle fell. It didn't. He drank some more. It grew late. "I gotta explain," he said, the liquor swirling in his mind. She waited, cow-eyed. "Ernest Dowson. Man's name. He wrote a poem--_Beata Solitudo_. I wanna explain this. Man lived long, long, long, long time ago. You listenin'? Okay. That's good. That's fine. He said--it's ver' importan' you should unnerstan' this--he said how you put honor and labor out of your mind when you ... you're out here. What he meant, it's ... it's ... you see.... Now I gotta make you see all this. So you listen real close while I tell it to you. There was a man named...." He wanted to explain how the frontier does things to people. He wanted to explain how society is a tight little box that keeps everything locked up and hidden, but how society breaks down and becomes fluid in the stars, and how people explode and forget what they learned in civilization, and how everything is unstable. "This man, his name's--" he said. He wanted to explain how the harsh elements and brute nature and space, the God-awful emptiness and indifference and the sense of aloneness and selfishness and....