"You'd be that way," she said presently. "But not
everybody. Some people will do anything to stay alive. But you
wouldn't."

The rain made drumming sounds on the barn roof. Lockley said, "But
what's happened isn't altogether what humans would devise. Humans who
planned a conquest would know they couldn't make us surrender to them.
If this was a sort of Pearl Harbor attack by human enemies--and you
can guess who it might be--they might as well start killing us on the
largest possible scale at the beginning. If monsters with no
information about us landed, they might perpetrate some massacres with
the entirely foolish idea of cowing us. But there haven't been any
massacres. So it's neither a cold war trick nor an unadvised landing
of monsters. There's another angle in it somewhere. Monster-human
cooperation is only a guess. I'm not satisfied, but it's the best
answer so far."

Jill was silent for a long time. Then she said irrelevantly, "You must
have been a good friend of ... of...."

"Vale?" Lockley said. "No. I knew him, but that's all. He only joined
the Survey a few months ago. I don't suppose I've talked to him a
dozen times, and four of those times he was with you. Why'd you think
we were close friends?"

"What you've done for me," she said in the darkness.

He waited for a lightning flash to show him her expression. She was
looking at him.

"I didn't do it for Vale," said Lockley.

"Then why?"

"I'd have done it for anyone," said Lockley ungraciously.

In a way it was true, of course. But he wouldn't have gone up to the
construction camp to make sure that anyone hadn't been left behind.
The idea wouldn't have occurred to him.

"I don't think that's true," said Jill.

He did not answer. If Vale was alive, Jill was engaged to him;
although if matters worked out, Lockley would not be such a fool as to
play the gentleman and let her marry Vale by default. On the other
hand, if Vale was dead, he wouldn't be the kind of fool who'd try to
win her for himself before she'd faced and recovered from Vale's
death. A girl could forgive herself for breaking her engagement to a
living man, but not for disloyalty to a dead one.

"I think," said Lockley deliberately, "that we should change the
subject. I will talk about why I went to the Lake after you when
everything has settled down. I had reasons. I still have them. I will
express them, eventually, whether Vale likes it or not. But not now."

There was a long