"Nobody comes from Ireland, Zayin."
"There are lots of Irish-Americans."
"To be sure, but no more Irish. A couple of thousand in all the island, the last I knew. They didn't go in for birth-control, you know, so the food ran out. By the Third Famine there were no Irish left at all but the priesthood, and they were all celibate, or nearly all."
Zayin and Kaph smiled stiffly. They had no experience of either bigotry or irony. "What are you then, ethnically?" Kaph asked, and Pugh replied, "A Welshman."
"Is it Welsh that you and Martin speak together?"
None of your business, Pugh thought, but said, "No, it's his dialect, not mine: Argentinean. A descendant of Spanish."
"You learned it for private communication?"
"Whom had we here to be private from? It's just that sometimes a man likes to speak his native language."
"Ours is English," Kaph said unsympathetically. Why should they have sympathy? That's one of the things you give because you need it back.
"Is Wells quaint?" asked Zayin.
"Wells? Oh, Wales, it's called. Yes. Wales is quaint." Pugh switched on his rock-cutter, which prevented further conversation by a synapse-destroying whine, and while it whined he turned his back and said a profane word in Welsh.
That night he used the Argentine dialect for private communication. "Do they pair off in the same couples, or change every night?"
Martin looked surprised. A prudish expression, unsuited to his features, appeared for a moment. It faded. He too was curious. "I think it's random."
"Don't whisper, man, it sounds dirty. I think they rotate."
"On a schedule?"
"So nobody gets omitted."
Martin gave a vulgar laugh and smothered it. "What about us? Aren't we omitted?"
"That doesn't occur to them."
"What if I proposition one of the girls?"
"She'd tell the others and they'd decide as a group."
"I am not a bull, "Martin said, his dark, heavy face heating up. "I will not be judged—"
"Down, down, machismo,"said Pugh. "Do you mean to proposition one?"
Martin shrugged, sullen. "Let 'em have their incest."
"Incest is it, or masturbation?"
"I don't care, if they'd do it out of earshot!"
The clone's early attempts at modesty had soon worn off, unmotivated by any deep defensiveness of self or awareness of others. Pugh and Martin were daily deeper swamped under the intimacies of its constant emotional-sexual-mental interchange: swamped yet excluded.
"Two months to go," Martin said one evening.
"To what?" snapped Pugh. He was edgy lately and Martin's sullenness got on his nerves.
"To relief."
In sixty days the full crew of their Exploratory Mission were due back from their survey of the other planets of the system. Pugh was aware of this.
"Crossing off the days on your calendar?" he jeered.
"Pull yourself together, Owen."
"What do you mean?"
"What I say."
They parted in contempt and resentment.
Pugh came in after a day alone on the Pampas, a vast lava-plain the nearest edge of which was two hours south by jet. He was tired, but refreshed by solitude. They were not supposed to take long trips alone, but lately had often done so. Martin stooped under bright lights, drawing one of his elegant, masterly charts: this one was of the whole face of Libra, the cancerous face. The dome was otherwise empty, seeming dim and large as it had before the clone came. "Where's the golden horde?"
Martin grunted ignorance, crosshatching. He straightened his back to glance around at the sun, which squatted feebly like a great red toad on the eastern plain, and at the clock, which said 18:45. "Some big quakes today," he said, returning to his map. "Feel them down there? Lot of crates were falling around. Take a look at the seismo."
The needle jigged and wavered on the roll. It never stopped dancing here. The roll had recorded five quakes of major intensity back in mid-afternoon; twice the needle had hopped off the roll. The attached computer had been activated to emit a slip reading, "Epicenter 61' N by 4'24" E."
"Not in the Trench this time."
"I thought it felt a bit different from usual. Sharper."
"In Base One I used to lie awake all night feeling the ground jump. Queer how you get used to things."
"Go spla if you didn't. What's for dinner?"
"I thought you'd have cooked it."
"Waiting for the clone."
Feeling put upon, Pugh got out a dozen dinnerboxes, stuck two in the Instobake, pulled them out. "All right, here's dinner."
"Been thinking," Martin said, coming to the table. "What if some clone cloned itself? Illegally. Made a thousand duplicates—ten thousand. Whole army. They could make a tidy power-grab, couldn't they?"
"But how many millions did this lot cost to rear? Artificial placentae and all that. It would be hard to keep secret, unless they had a planet to themselves. . . . Back before the Famines when Earth had national governments, they talked about that: clone your best soldiers, have whole regiments of them. But the food ran out before they could play that game."
They talked amicably, as they used to.
"Funny," Martin said, chewing. "They left early this morning, didn't they?"
"All but Kaph and Zayin. They thought they'd get the first pay load aboveground today. What's up?"
"They weren't back for lunch."
"They won't starve, to be sure."
"They left at seven."
"So they did." Then Pugh saw it. The air-tanks held eight hours' supply.
"Kaph and Zayin carried out spare cans when they left. Or they've got a heap out there."
"They did, but they brought the whole lot in to recharge." Martin stood up, pointing to one of the stacks of stuff that cut the dome into rooms and alleys.
"There's an alarm signal on every imsuit."
"Its not automatic."
Pugh was tired and still hungry. "Sit down and eat, man. That lot can look after themselves."
Martin sat down, but did not eat. "There was a big quake, Owen. The first one. Big enough, it scared me."
After a pause Pugh sighed and said, "All right."
Unenthusiastically, they got out the two-man sled that was always left for them, and headed it north. The long sunrise covered everything in poisonous red jello. The horizontal light and shadow made it hard to see, raised walls of fake iron ahead of them through which they slid, turned the convex plain beyond Hellmouth into a great dimple full of bloody water. Around the tunnel entrance a wilderness of machinery stood, cranes and cables and servos and wheels and diggers and robocarts and sliders and control-huts, all slanting and bulking incoherently in the red light. Martin jumped from the sled, ran into the mine. He came out again, to Pugh. "Oh God, Owen, it's down," he said. Pugh went in and saw, five meters from the entrance, the shiny, moist, black wall that ended the tunnel. Newly exposed to air, it looked organic, like visceral tissue. The tunnel entrance, enlarged by blasting and double-tracked for robocarts, seemed unchanged until he noticed thousands of tiny spiderweb cracks in the walls. The floor was wet with some sluggish fluid.