Jill didn’t know what to say. Despite her brave words her stomach was in knots. She was a scientist; she didn’t believe in coincidences or fate. And she didn’t like it when life looked rigged any more than Nate did.

They both sat there for a moment. Then Jill reached over and gave his arm a big pinch.

“Hey!”

“Feels real to me.” She sighed. “We have been lucky. But if you’re suggesting that someone is watching our every move and pressing buttons… I can’t buy that any more than I bought it when Christians back on Earth claimed God was doing it.”

Nate frowned as a thought crossed his mind. “Haven’t we had this conversation before?”

Jill could see he was on to something. She waited. After a moment, his face cleared; his eyes widened. “I know what it is. Dang!”

“What?”

He shifted to face her, face avid. “Jill—we’re on a seventy-thirty planet!”

She studied him, eyes narrowed. “Go on.”

“We were talking about how this place should be a paradise. Well, obviously it’s not, but what it might be…” He took a shaky breath. “What it might be is easy. Is that possible? That things go the way you’d wish them to per law of nature? That there’s a much shorter gap between wanting something and having it? That the constant struggle we take as a fundamental part of reality on Earth just doesn’t exist here? Maybe it feels so spooky to us because we fifty-fifty folk are used to having to work our butts off for every little thing and here a quarter of the effort gives twice the return. Could that be it?”

Sometimes he amazed her. He had a theoretical instinct that humbled her, though she didn’t completely trust it. She preferred plodding, methodical work to brainstorms, but as brainstorms went, his were class A hurricanes.

“If our theory about the one-minus-one wave is correct,” she said slowly, “a change in it would affect just about everything. The fundamental way things work.”

“Remember that conversation we had months ago, about how the crests in the one-minus-one didn’t necessarily manufacture good things, but it might cause a right-place-at-the-right-time kind of phenomenon? You know, up your random chances of a particular good thing coming to pass? So maybe these translators weren’t invented for us by some alien maze master. Maybe they were used in the alien’s space program way back when. But the luck—our luck—was that we found them sooner rather than later or perhaps never at all. We might have spent a lifetime on this planet and never discovered them.”

“They’re certainly small enough. But, Nate, does it really matter why we’ve been lucky? The point is, we can read. You were right before—now we have access to absolutely everything. All of the alien technology!”

“That’s not even the best part,” Nate countered, grinning. “The best part is: we can get home.”

Jill paused in her elation like a car hitting a bump in the road. “Really? How’s that?”

Nate’s eyes were dancing. “Don’t you see? Because this planet is lucky! Because all we have to do is really want something and we’ll get it! And I want— Do you hear me, planet?” he shouted. “I want to go home!”

Jill felt a sudden antagonism at his words. Her mind answered back, I don’t.

But that wasn’t true, was it? That wasn’t exactly what she felt. She was going back to Earth at some point, obviously, and she was going to be the next Einstein. She just wasn’t ready to go home yet. There was far too much work to be done right here. How could Nate not see that? What kind of scientist walked away from an opportunity like this one?

Besides, they were in another universe. Just because they wanted to go home didn’t mean there was a chance in hell of getting there.

“Remember, Nate,” she said carefully, “even if this is a seventy-thirty world, that’s still not one hundred percent, right? Not everything that happens is good, and, as you say, we’ve been pretty lucky so far.”

“Are you saying there’s a kickback coming?”

He said it teasingly, but Jill didn’t find it funny at all. She shivered.

“Are you cold?” He put his arm around her.

She stood up abruptly and brushed off her pants. “Why don’t we get back to the main artery? All this sunlight is deceptive. We have to make ourselves rest, Nate. We can’t afford to get overexhausted.”

“Right.” He slowly got to his feet. The excitement on his face dimmed, responding to the reappearance of “strategic Jill.” She felt a perverse relief.

That was what happened when she let down her guard and allowed herself to touch him, as she had while they were walking. It made him think he had the right to have his hands all over her all the time. Talk about dangerous. Someone had to retain control here.

“You sure you’re all right?” Nate asked.

“I’m great,” she said briskly. “Couldn’t be better. After all, you said it yourself, Nate: we’re in Paradise.”

17.3. Sixty-Forty Denton Wyle

Denton Wyle was lost in Paradise and he was in big, big, big trouble. His back was up against the rough, scratched-up bark of one of the bloody trees at the mouth of the horseshoe gorge, his hands were tied behind him, and his mouth was gagged. There were four Sapphians with him in a similar predicament. Their captors had mounted them there early this morning and had taken off again without so much as a thank-you or a parting gift of Valium.

Denton wished very much that he had some good drugs or that he’d fought harder with his captors and been knocked unconscious. Unconsciousness from a head injury would be great about now. But… no. He was completely awake and fully conscious and apparently was going to be for every long, stinking minute of this.

He worked against his bonds. The tree was fat and his arms were forced around the back—back there where they could do nothing to shield his nice soft belly and throat. The vine around his wrists was supertight, and he couldn’t even try to rub the vine against the bark, because he couldn’t move that way. His feet were untied, but there was nothing in front of him to kick and bracing them against the trunk and trying to push himself off only killed his arms. He still tried, crying with frustration and pain, until he could try no more.

The skalkits, whatever they were, still did not come. After giving up on escape, Denton had plenty of time to relish his fear, for the terror to have its way with him. You would think that you couldn’t sustain that level of fear for very long, but yeah, you could. It didn’t help that all he had to look at was the other Sapphians. They were visual echoes of his own doom. Their eyes rolled and streamed and their thin bodies trembled. He thought one of the females had wet herself. He wondered briefly what they’d done to be sent here, but he couldn’t spare much head room for them because he was too consumed with his own tragic loss.

Except that across from him was a young female who had been one of his morning visitors, an unusually shy, skittish type. She pleaded at him with huge brown eyes. As if he could do a freaking thing. As if it weren’t her stupid society’s fault in the first place.

He could have made his peace with all that free time, but all he could think about was how bad it was going to be, how much it was going to hurt, how terrified he was, how he hated this, how unfair it all was, how he would give everything to be far away, how he couldn’t believe this could really be happening to him, Denton Wyle. He cried for himself, great bunny tears. It was so unfair for a nice, white, twenty-first-century guy like him to be treated like this. It just was not right. And the worst thing was, he wouldn’t even get a decent funeral in LA with all his friends to mourn him. No one would ever know what had become of him; that was the worst part.