For a long, nervous time, lasting some twenty minutes that seemed to Lynne like as many hours, nothing happened. Then, inside herself, she felt a stirring of angry forces, a gathering tension that rose and rose until it seemed past the breaking point. She gripped Rolf’s hand tightly, and he returned the grip. Unease was evident on the faces of Revere and Rana and the other telepaths present from Nampura Station. But the rest--the non-telepathic--merely looked bored or restless or impatient or interested or hopeful as the case might be. Lynne thought, _it has to work, it has to. I’ve made no mistake._ And Rolf returned her thought with, _don’t worry_, VINRAL, _it’s working. I can feel something happening right now!_ A sudden, long-repressed _aaaaah_ rose from a hundred throats as a blaze of light flashed on the horizon. It was followed by another, and another, and another, until the sky resembled a vidar-image of one of the ancient atomic-war battles that had so nearly destroyed humanity two centuries earlier. The ground above the spot where the relays were planted in their concrete casing, seemed to shimmer and leap. And then came the thunderclaps, rolling like drumfire over the flat Martian plain. The air shook around them and their eardrums hurt, even from two kilometers away. But the sky remained its usual dark, undisturbed blue, with the sun small and reddish-hued near the meridian. “Where’s your rain, young lady?” Weather wanted to know. It was Rana who pointed in the direction of the irritated entity and cried in her small voice, “Look, here it comes.” Again there was a gasp of excitement from the assemblage as a moving barrier appeared, first low against the horizon, then rising higher and higher as it approached. To men and women who had spent all their adult lives under the cloudless Martian sky, it was a miracle--and like all miracles, terrifying. Lynne could sense the thoughts of panic darting about her. A scientist, checking a barometer to make sure too much moisture was not being drained from the atmosphere, suddenly shouted, “Believe it or not, the moisture-table’s rising!” Panic faded before excitement and delight but Lynne, watching the approaching weather front, its edge ominous with the lightning flickers, felt mounting disquiet. This didn’t look like a rainstorm approaching to her. It looked at lot more like.... It _was!_ As the sun was obscured, the snowflakes fluttered down upon them, first by ones and twos, then by dozens, then in countless armies that blotted out the far horizon. And Lynne laughed, laughed wholeheartedly for the first time since her brother’s wedding. She laughed until she cried.