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to get past a lump in my throat and thewomen were both crying. It wasn't like my self-contained Lucy. I guessshe thought so herself, for she braced herself. But her voice was stilltrembling when she turned to Bet.

  "A year from now," she said, "we'll all be back here in this room and,this time, part of Hal will be here with us--his son, our little Hal."

  "It might be our little Hallie." Bet smiled through her tears. "It willbe ten weeks before I can run the Schuster test to find out."

  "It won't make any difference. Hal will never know that, but he'll know,way out there on Lydna, that his baby has been born. He'll know, eventhough he can never see it--or us."

  * * * * *

  Lucy blinked, then went on bravely. "Every time he looks in a mirrorthere, he'll say to himself, 'Well, back on Earth, there's a little tykewith my blue eyes and my curly hair and my mouth and nose and chin,who's going to grow up to be tall and straight like me--or maybe likeBet, but also a lot like me.'

  "And as he grows older, he can think back to the way he was as a childand a boy and a man, and know that his son, or his daughter, will befeeling and thinking and looking some day just about the way he himselfis then, and it will be a link with Earth and with us--"

  That was when I had to go to the window and look out for a long time topull myself together before I could face them again.

  Lydna is top-top secret, but as I've said before, we newsgatherers getinside information.

  I have a pretty shrewd idea of what the mysterious Lydna Project is.It's to alter human beings so they can adapt to the colonization ofouter space.

  The medics do things to them to enable them and their descendants toresist every possible condition of temperature and radiation andgravity. They have to alter the genes--acquired characters would be ofuse only in a short-term project, and this is long-term. But you can'talter genes without affecting the individual.

  We'd have Hal's normal child.

  But when Hal got to Lydna, he and the rest of them would be shocked andsick for a while at sight of some of the inhabitants. And if he had anychildren on Lydna, we, back here, would scarcely recognize them ashuman. Some of them might have extra limbs. Some might have eyes andears in odd places. Some might have lungs outside their bodies, orbrains without a skull.

  By that time, Hal himself would have got over being sick--unless, sometime, he got hold of a mirror and remembered the boy he used to be.

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