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The lifter waits on a second, slightly elevated platfors Logan up to speed Per Logan’s instructions, no one has approached the house, although the building’s inhabitant, a wo in the yard Wilcox’s tea the house, if that’s what Logan wants to do

"Does she know she’s being watched?" Logan asks

"She’d have to, with all those lifters going in and out, but she doesn’t act like it" They take their seats in the bird From the portfolio under his are, taken frorainy and flattened; it shooetable patch She is wearing what appears to be a kind of thickly woven sack, alled doard, is obscured

"So who is she?" Wilcox says

Logan just looks at hi up a hand in forbearance, "and pardonway"

"She’s the sole human inhabitant of a continent that’s been depopulated for nine hundred years Give me another theory and I’ll listen"

"Maybe people ca it"

"Possible But why just her? Why haven’t we found anybody else in thirty-six months?"

"Maybe they don’t want to be found"

"She has no probleraved invitation"

The conversation is drowned out by the roar of the lifter’s engines; a lurch and they are airborne again, rising vertically When a sufficient altitude is achieved, the nose tips upward as the rotorsin low over the water and then the coast The ocean vanishes All below thereen The noise is trehts; there will be no e of sleep when he feels the lifter slowing He sits up and looks out the