is only the faintest degree paler than my surroundings.

Silence for a couple of minutes. I stand still. But it can't have gone
away. What happens when the hopper comes? They will see whoever it is
on the infrared vision screen. They won't come--

Footsteps again. Several.

Then the clouds part and one of those superfluous little moons shines
straight through the gap.

The bay is not like the stereo the colonel showed because that was
taken in winter; now the snow is melted, leaving bare shingle and mud
and a tumble of rocks; more desolate than the snow. Fifty feet off is
a man.

He is huddled up in a mass of garments but his head is bare, rising
out of a hood which he has pushed back, maybe so as to listen better;
he looks young, hardly older than me. He is holding a long thin object
which I never saw before, but it must be a weapon of some sort.

This is the end of it. All the evidence of faking is destroyed; except
M'Clare and me. Even if I use the Andite he has seen me--and that
leaves M'Clare.

[Illustration]

I am standing here on one foot like a dancer in a jammed movie,
waiting for Time to start again or the world to end--

Like the little figure in the dance-instruction kit Dad got when I was
seven, when you switched her off in the middle.

* * * * *

Like a dancer--

My weight shifts on to the forward foot. My arms swing up, forwards,
back. I take one step, another.

Swing. Turn. Kick. Sideways.

Like the silly little dancer who could not get out of the plastic
block; but I am moving forward little by little, even if I have to
take three steps roundabout for every one in advance.

Arms, up. Turn, round. Leg, up. Straighten, out. Step.

Called the Dance of the Little Robot, for about three months Dad
thought it was no end cute, till he caught on I was thinking so, too.

It is just about the only kind of dance you could do on shingle, I
guess.

When this started I thought I might be going crazy, but I just had not
had time to work it out. In terms of Psychology it goes like this; to
shoot off a weapon a man needs a certain type of Stimulus like the
sight of an enemy over the end of it. So if I do my best not to look
like an enemy he will not get that Stimulus. Or put it another way
most men think twice before shooting a girl in the middle of a dance.
If I should happen to get away with this, nobody will believe his
story, he won't believe it himself.

As f