He unkinked himself, stretched and lay down on the sand floor thinking bitterly: why try? You'll be dead in a few days or a few weeks; kiss the world good-bye. Back in Syndic Territory, fat, sloppy, happy Syndic Territory, did they know how good they had it? He wished he could tell them to cling to their good life. But Uncle Frank said it didn't do any good to cling; it was a matter of tension and relaxation. When you stiffen up a way of life and try to fossilize it so it'll stay that way forever, then you find you've lost it. Little Martha wouldn't understand it. Magic, ritual, the power of the goddess, fear of iron, fear of the jeep's vine enclosure--cursed, no doubt--what went on in such a mind? Could she throw things like a poltergeist-girl? They didn't have 'em any more; maybe it had something to do with electric fields or even iron. Or were they all phonies? An upset adolescent girl is a hell of a lot likelier to fake phenomena that produce them. Little Martha hadn't been faking her despair, though. The witch-girl--her sister, wasn't she?--didn't fake her icy calm and power. Martha'd be better off without such stuff-- "_Charles_," a whisper said. He muttered stupidly: "My God. She heard me," and crept to the palisade. Through a chink between the logs she was just visible in the starlight. She whispered: "I thought I wasn't going to see anything or hear anything ever again but I sat up and I heard you calling and you said you wanted to help me if I'd help you so I came as fast as I could without waking anybody up--you _did_ call me, didn't you?" "Yes, I did. Martha, do you want to get out of here? Go far away with me?" "You bet I do. _She's_ going to take the power of the goddess out of me and marry me to Dinny, he stinks like a goat and he has a cockeye, and then she'll kill all our babies. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it." She sounded very grim and decided. "Can you roll the boulders away from the hole there?" He was thinking vaguely of teleportation; each boulder was a two-man job. She said no. He snarled: "Then why did you bother to come here?" "Don't talk like that to me," the child said sharply--and he remembered what she thought she was. "Sorry," he said. "What I came about," she said calmly, "was the ex-plosion. Can you make an ex-plosion like you said? Back there at the jeep?" What in God's name was she talking about? "Back there," she said with exaggerated patience, "you was thinking about putting all the cartridges together and blowing up the whole damn shebang. Remember?" He did, vaguely. One of a hundred schemes that had drifted through his head. "I'd sure like to see that ex-plosion," she said. "The way _she_ got things figured, I'd almost just as soon get exploded myself as not." "I might blow up the logs here and get out," he said slowly. "I think you'd be a mighty handy person to have along, too. Can you get me about a hundred of the machine gun cartridges?" "They'll miss 'em."