Hell with the zipper! She pulled her little mending kit out of her pocket and slashed the bag with the scissors. The storm sounded louder now, with the bag gone. The sand blew under her eyelids. Ripped her face. Tore a burning circle around each ankle. Annie put her face in her hands, breathing through her nose and the sock. She held herself stiffly. She didn't want to cough. The whole world was a blind, gritty pain. There was no end to think of. Only pain. A grayness. A blackness. Finally, a voice. Bradman. "You ruined my shrub. Did you have to slash the bag, too?" Annie opened her eyes. They felt red and ruined. They were watering so much her cheeks were wet. She could hardly see. She was having a coughing fit. She dragged herself upright. All she could see was sand. The plastic bubble had blown off the girders and if the furnishings and her suitcase were there, her eyes were still too dim to see them. "Do you know what that shrub's worth on Mars?" Annie found the yarn had fallen out of one ear and she pulled it out of the other. "Do you know what that _bag's_ worth?" Gall ran in her veins. She spat it out of her mouth. She backed up to the steel beam and braced her feet against it, light in the Martian gravity. "I told them not to send a woman out here." She pushed off and sank her fist into his teeth. He went down. She was too light. But he was too light, too. It evened out. She turned his face and held it in the sand. Her strength was insane. "Do you know what a human life is worth?" she screamed. He struggled, but she fought his bucking body, kept his face buried in the sand until he was dead and a long time after. An age passed. Annie was frozen in a world rimed over with white starlight, sequinned with frost. Then the crosseyed moons came up. She found an edge of the plastic bubble, rumpled and limp and half buried in the sand. She pushed off the heaviest hills of sand with her hands and pulled it out. She climbed up the anchored girders with it, and then slept the rest of the night in her own home. The next day she dug out her household supplies from the sand. The day after she cleared the sand from the lichens on her farm. On the fourth day she called a few neighbors in and late in the evening she buried Bradman. No one questioned her. It had been, after all, self-defense. She kept the farm as well as any man. Better. She worked. How she worked! She kept herself numb with labor, her mind drunk with the liquors of fatigue. * * * * * After five years, he came. He just appeared inside the door flap, looking a little nervous but grinning. "I'm Jack Hamstrong," he said, his voice full and wholesome, like Iowa corn. "I--you weren't at the spaceport so I figured, what the heck. I just walked." "This is _my_ farm," Annie said. "My hands are on every inch of it."