Nate tugged Jill again and this time they ran, down the hall, through the waiting room, out into the street, back outside, into the bright, hot sun.

They were quiet as they walked back to the apartment, quiet as they sat on the floor and ate food bars. Jill could tell Nate was feeling the lethargic effect of the planet—he looked tired. She was feeling it herself. And the clinic… the clinic had gotten to them both.

“Jill?” he said at last, clearing his throat.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking about how far away from Earth we are.” Nate looked down at his bar, half-eaten. “And I was thinking that… You were right. We may never get home.”

Jill sighed. “This place has all the technology we could ever need for anything. Including getting home. It may take us a while to find it.”

He looked at her, his eyes savage with the purple stain of exhaustion under them. “A while.”

“Well. Quite a while, actually.” She smiled. “What are you worried about? You’re the one who said this place was lucky.”

“Not so lucky for the aliens,” he muttered, looking back down at his food.

Jill could feel that Nate was really in the thick of it. She tried her cheeriest voice. “Look at the bright side. We have water, food, and shelter, and all of those indefinitely, as far as we can tell. We can set up a more permanent place to live—a home base, if you will. And we could use an air car or two to save time. You’ll have fun with that. Perhaps in a few days you can see if you can find one.”

He didn’t answer.

“I know this is hard, Nate. But the important thing is the work. We should be able to take notes on the computer now. Remind me to try that tomorrow morning. Of course, the biggest priority is to learn how they’re using wave technology, particularly for things like space travel and energy—maybe even medicine or the production of goods. We really have to go see those antennae tomorrow.”

Nate clenched his jaw. She didn’t seem to be getting through to him. The clinic had been awful, so very alien and heartbreaking, too, in a way. But it wouldn’t do for them to brood. She decided to talk about something she’d been holding back, the way a mother might offer a pouting child a new toy.

“Listen, you’ve been so worried about the government getting the one-minus-one, about how it could be used as a weapon. Well, it’s true, there is the potential for a devastating weapon, if you pushed the negative one pulse. But what if you pushed the one pulse? You could create a climate of benevolence, couldn’t you? Imagine the possibilities! Everything you were saying about ‘there’s always a catch,’ well, that might have been true up until now. But if we could increase the crest of the one-minus-one with a one pulse, maybe for the whole world, that wouldn’t have to be the case any longer! Think about what that could mean for us, for our entire species. That’s why those antennae interest me. Tomorrow we can—”

“Jill, what is wrong with you? Are you crazy or just plain stupid?” Nate’s eyes were blazing from under a deeply furrowed brow.

She blinked at him, mouth still open to speak.

“What does any of that matter now? Suppose we spend the next ten or twenty years researching this place and writing little notebooks full of our findings. So what? So those notebooks can lie next to our bones bleaching in the sun? If we can’t get home, none of it matters. You don’t seem to get that. And frankly,” a flare of embarrassment stained his cheeks, “frankly, I’m not so sure it wouldn’t be the best thing for Earth if we never did get home.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means…” He took a deep breath. “It’s exactly like this situation, Jill. All you see is the science, not the human equation, not our predicament. God! Don’t you think I know you were planning to work for the DoD? Even after we’d gone to Poland?”

She pressed her lips tight, looked away.

“Even now you can’t give it up. Can’t you see that whatever this species knows, it hasn’t done them any good? Why do you want it so badly?”

He didn’t seem to be angry anymore, more genuinely trying to express himself, to plead with her. But that only made his words that much more unbearable. A groundswelling of resentment pulsed inside her.

“I’m a scientist, that’s why! That’s my job. And, as long as we’re being honest here, why can’t you just do your job instead of whining all the time? If we’re stuck here, we’re stuck here! What do you want me to do about it? Lie down and give up? You’re a man, not a boy. Why don’t you act like one!”

He laughed. “A man? Really? I didn’t think you’d noticed. How am I not being a man? Because I’m reacting, for god’s sake? You can say that so blithely: ‘We’re stuck here.’ That would be fine with you, wouldn’t it? You’d be perfectly happy to bury yourself in work again. My god, it isn’t even the fame, is it? I always thought you were just incredibly ambitious. But there’s no chance of fame here. It’s just blind work. What is that? Escapism, is that what it’s about for you? Do you work so you don’t have to feel?”

She started to protest but didn’t know where to begin. His words were so malicious and so unfair.

He stood up, shoving himself back from the table. “Well, I, for one, don’t like this place. Maybe you’re content to spend the rest of your life eating little white food bars and being alone, never seeing your family again, and…” There was the angry edge of tears in his voice. “Forget that there’s no one to talk to, no TV, no books, no news, no food, no beer, no music, no anything—it’s so dead, Jill. The aliens… and this whole place—it’s sterile and lifeless and dead! Didn’t you see what I saw today? Don’t you get it? This place is a tomb!”

Jill was purposefully not looking at him, embarrassed by his emotion. She felt nothing but anger, but she was already cooling, had already decided that she wasn’t going to give him what he wanted, wasn’t going to have a big scene and allow herself to get all upset. It was the stress, she told herself, the effects of the altered one-minus-one on his system.

“I understand that you’re homesick,” she said in a let’s-be-reasonable tone. “But we have no idea what might happen down the road. We may find a way home. We may even be rescued. In the meantime, I see no excuse for wasting this precious opportunity. If you were thinking clearly, you’d feel the same, so I think we should just—”

“Rescued?” he laughed. “By whom?”

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” she said, with a deep sigh.

Nate, apparently, didn’t agree. He got up abruptly and went outside, flinging his chair aside as he went. The door wasn’t the kind you could slam, but Jill heard the noise in her head all the same.

Although she’d been tired for hours, Jill couldn’t sleep. What she really wanted was to be alone—alone, as in not having to worry about where Nate was or what he was thinking or when he would come in. She wanted a break from all of this, from the burden of the relationship, from feeling like it was her fault that he was here, that she needed to take care of him. But she wasn’t going to get a break from that responsibility. More to avoid another argument upon his return than anything else, she bedded down. She could have pulled his mattress farther away from her cot or even put it in another room, but she didn’t want to set him off again, so she left it.

She lay down and tried to sleep, but something was growing inside her. She felt a hollowness blooming, despite her determination to ignore it. It was a niggling doubt: What if Nate was right? What if they couldn’t get home—was it all pointless after all? And would it really be the best thing for Earth if she was lost for good, and the one-minus-one with her?