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say. He got up, walked around the table and hugged her from behind.
    Her hands covered his. “I’m all right”
    “I wish you’d called me.”
    She let go his hands and stood up, touched his arm, a weary gesture. Looked at him suddenly, directly, with that same dark tiredness. “There’s one of us left,” she said. He blinked, perplexed, realized then that she meant the Quens.   Estelle’s folk. Merchanters owned names as stationers had a home. She was Quen; that meant something he knew he did not understand, in the months they had been together. Revenge was a merchanter commodity; he knew that… among folk where name alone was a property and reputation went with it “I want a child,” she said.
    He stared at her, struck with the darkness in her eyes. He loved her. She had walked into his life off a merchanter ship and decided to try station life, though she still spoke of her ship. Four months. For the first time in their being together he had no desire for her, not with that look and Estelle’s death and her reasons for revenge. He said nothing. They had agreed there would be no children until she knew for certain whether she could bear to stay. What she offered him might be that agreement. It might be something else. It was not the time to talk about it, not now, with insanity all about them.   He simply gathered her against him, walked with her to the bedroom, held her through the long dark hours. She made no demands and he asked no questions.   ii “No,” the man at the operations desk said, without looking this time at the printout; and then with a weary impulse toward humanity: “Wait. I’ll do another search. Maybe it wasn’t posted with that spelling.”
    Vasilly Kressich waited, sick with terror, as despair hung all about this last, forlorn gathering of refugees which refused to leave the desks on dockside: families and parts of families, who hunted relatives, who waited on word. There were twenty-seven of them on the benches near the desk, counting children; he had counted. They had gone from station main-day into alterday, and another shift of operators at the desk which was station’s one extension of humanity toward them, and there was nothing more coming out of comp but what had been there before.
    He waited. The operator keyed through time after time. There was nothing; he knew that there was nothing, by the look the man turned toward him. Of a sudden he was sorry for the operator too, who had to sit out here obtaining nothing, knowing there was no hope, surrounded by grieving relatives, with armed guards stationed near the desk in case. Kressich sat down again, next to the family who had lost a son in the confusion.
    It was the same tale for each. They had loaded in panic, the guards more concerned for getting themselves onto the ships than for keeping order and getting others on. It was their own fault; he could not deny that The mob had hit the docks, men forcing their way aboard who had no passes allotted to those critical personnel meant for evacuation. The guards had fired in panic, unsure of attackers and legitimate passengers. Russell’s Station had died in riot.   Those in the process of loading had been hurried aboard the nearest ship at the last, doors had been sealed as soon as the counters reached capacity. Jen and Romy should have been aboard before him. He had stayed, trying to keep order at his assigned post. Most of the ships had gotten sealed in time. It was Hansford the mob had gotten wide open, Hansford where the drugs had run out, where the pressure of lives more than the systems could bear had broken everything down and a shock-crazed mob had run riot. Griffin had been bad enough; he had gotten aboard well before the wave the guards had had to cut down. And he had trusted that Jen and Romy had made it into Lila. The passenger list had said that they were on Lila, at least what printout they had finally gotten in the confusion after launch.
    But neither of them had