They took the baby from her arms when she was gone and removed from it the blanket that had kept her from learning that her child was stillborn.

There were two hundred and fifty of them when the first violent storms of spring came. By then eighteen children had been born. Sixteen were stillborn, eight of them deformed by the gravity, but two were like any normal babies on Earth. There was only one difference: the 1.5 gravity did not seem to affect them as much as it had the Earthborn babies.

Lake, himself, married that spring; a tall, gray-eyed girl who had fought alongside the men the night of the storm when the prowlers broke into John Prentiss’s camp. And Schroeder married, the last of them all to do so.