"Good." She flashed him an almost cheerful smile. But when Ann spoke of her singing--and in the singing itself--there was, in spite of her, an aching wordless reminder of the violin gone silent. Her voice was sweet but without strength or resonance, and she took no ardent pleasure in using it. Her love was the violin--covered as well as might be in the comparative safety of the lifeboat, waiting for a distant day. If the day ever came (Sears had already dissected out, dried, and oiled some long leg-tendon fibers of a deerlike animal in a humble experiment aimed chiefly at Ann's morale)--if the day came, there would still be no piano, no answering of other strings, no splendid cry of brass. Crude wood winds, perhaps, sometime.... "Yes, he was good," said Ann, smiling. "Organ point in the tonic, and right in our own scale. Once he even upped to the dominant. Instinct, huh? Sounded good, Paul, even with you trying to fill in the middle." "Hell, I didn't think you heard me," Spearman snorted. "You kind of stood out," she said, "because Mijok was much better on pitch, my good man. It did sound hollow without something to fill in. He was on A-flat below the bass clef and no fooling.... _Why_ haven't we seen other giants?" "We got something on that this morning. I guess it was while you were in swimming. Each giant male has an inviolate hunting territory, and they don't trespass. Definite breeding season: the month before the rains. That was five or maybe six red-moon changes ago. Mijok wasn't too clear on the count--doesn't like mathematics much better than I do. The women go where they please, in small groups, with the children who still need care, but I gather the males are expected to stay in their own private grounds until the Red-Moon-before-the-Rains." Spearman wondered: "Will the pygmies have a season too?" "Doubt it. Probably like us--except that women are the bosses. The clothes suggest a continuing sex consciousness." The pygmy leaders halted. A murmuring explained itself as the music of a stream. Paul consulted his memory of the map made from orbit photographs and of his one solo exploration flight in the lifeboat. There could be few such flights: the charlesite, even with the surplus salvaged from the wrecked boat, must be hoarded. Ann and Ed had flown over the lake on the day after their recovery, searching for any sign of _Argo_. Returning, Ed's face had been a leather mask of grief, and neither had wanted to talk of it. Later they explained: the lake was a profundity of secret blue; a shelf of sand or possibly white stone ran out some yards offshore, under water marvelously clear, and ended abruptly. Beyond it, where _Argo_ must have fallen, no bottom could even be guessed at; the lifeboat's camera confirmed the presence of an abyss that would have thwarted the most complex twenty-first-century machinery.