_Argo IV_ was unequivocally a ship; after her trial Paul had carved for her bow a figurehead with the dreaming face of Pakriaa. "Maybe," Dunin said, "with a few more like this the first explorations could be around the coast instead of overland? If we had two or three more ships when Kris-Mijok is old enough to go?" Paul knew Dorothy had winced, though her face was turned to the evening-reddened field of water. "If he still wants it, when he's old enough to go...." Kris-Mijok Wright, her third-born child and only son, had been born in the Year Three; in Earth years he was only nine. His hunger for the long journeying might be mainly a reflection of his devotion to Dunin, herself full of visions and not yet a woman. A tentative half joke, a means of channeling a child's fantasy into patience, had somehow become a sober adult plan: that the first major explorations would begin when Kris-Mijok would have a man's strength to take part in them. "We might have such ships by then." Paul tried to sound judicial. "Say the Year Eighteen or Nineteen. Yes, a coastal exploration might be better than trying to cross the continent. Not a circumnavigation though, at first." Dunin's big face blossomed in a grin. "Only about thirty-six thousand miles by the old map made from the air. Open water at north and south poles, plenty of it. Could do it in less than a year." "More like fifty thousand, allowing for deflections, tacking, pull of currents we don't know. Storms, flat calms, contrary winds, repairs, expeditions ashore for provisions. You pull your horns in just a bit, my girl. Do you remember a desert plateau the map shows in the southern hemisphere? Solid cliff rising out of the sea for over seven hundred miles, and on top of it roasting sand all the way across the continent--and that plateau is only a small part of the coastal desolation down there. From the equator to the 30th parallel I don't think you'd have a chance to go ashore--and nothing to help you if you did." Dunin still grinned. "Just sail past it." "Yes--well out to sea, with the equatorial sun at work on you. Very few islands in that region, some of them bare rock." And he thought: _If I might go myself...! I am fifty now, in Earth years, a young fifty...._