The rain made drumming sounds on the barn roof.  Lockley said, “But what’s happened isn’t altogether what humans would devise.  Humans who planned a conquest would know they couldn’t make us surrender to them.  If this was a sort of Pearl Harbor attack by human enemies—­and you can guess who it might be—­they might as well start killing us on the largest possible scale at the beginning.  If monsters with no information about us landed, they might perpetrate some massacres with the entirely foolish idea of cowing us.  But there haven’t been any massacres.  So it’s neither a cold war trick nor an unadvised landing of monsters.  There’s another angle in it somewhere.  Monster-human cooperation is only a guess.  I’m not satisfied, but it’s the best answer so far.”

Jill was silent for a long time.  Then she said irrelevantly, “You must have been a good friend of ... of....”

“Vale?” Lockley said.  “No.  I knew him, but that’s all.  He only joined the Survey a few months ago.  I don’t suppose I’ve talked to him a dozen times, and four of those times he was with you.  Why’d you think we were close friends?”

“What you’ve done for me,” she said in the darkness.

He waited for a lightning flash to show him her expression.  She was looking at him.

“I didn’t do it for Vale,” said Lockley.

“Then why?”

“I’d have done it for anyone,” said Lockley ungraciously.

In a way it was true, of course.  But he wouldn’t have gone up to the construction camp to make sure that anyone hadn’t been left behind.  The idea wouldn’t have occurred to him.

“I don’t think that’s true,” said Jill.

He did not answer.  If Vale was alive, Jill was engaged to him; although if matters worked out, Lockley would not be such a fool as to play the gentleman and let her marry Vale by default.  On the other hand, if Vale was dead, he wouldn’t be the kind of fool who’d try to win her for himself before she’d faced and recovered from Vale’s death.  A girl could forgive herself for breaking her engagement to a living man, but not for disloyalty to a dead one.

“I think,” said Lockley deliberately, “that we should change the subject.  I will talk about why I went to the Lake after you when everything has settled down.  I had reasons.  I still have them.  I will express them, eventually, whether Vale likes it or not.  But not now.”

There was a long silence, while rain fell with heavy drumming noises and the world was only a deep curtain of lightning-lighted droplets of falling water.

“Thanks,” said Jill very quietly.  “I’m glad.”

And then they sat in silence while the long hours went by.  Eventually they dozed.  Lockley was awakened by the ending of the rain.  It was then just the beginning of gray dawn.  The sky was still filled with clouds.  The ground was soaked.  There were puddles here and there in the barnyard, and water dripped from the barn’s eaves, and from the now vaguely visible house, and from the two or three trees beside it.