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where that was concerned. She didn’t know, though, if she could quite handle his being an
uneducated
Earthman.
    But no one ever suggested he was, and he listened to the tales of her work on the Far Probe with patience. She never tested his education by discussing the technical details, of course. Yet sometimes he asked questions or made comments that reflected on such things and she valued them, when they came, for she always managed to convince herself that they were intelligent questions and comments.
    Fisher had a job on one of the farms, a perfectly respectablejob, even an essential one, but a job that was not high on the social scale. He did not complain or make a fuss about that—she’d give him that—but he never talked about it, or showed any pleasure in it. And there was always that air of discontent about him.
    Insigna learned, therefore, to attempt no cheery “And what happened to you at work today, Crile?”
    The few times she had asked, just at first, the answer had been a flat “Nothing much.” And that would be all, except for a short annoyed look.
    Eventually, she grew nervous about talking to him even of petty office politics and annoying errors. That, too, might serve as an unwelcome comparison of her work with his.
    Insigna had to admit that her fears went against the evidence there, an example of her own insecurity rather than his. Fisher didn’t show signs of impatience when she did find herself forced to discuss the day’s work. Sometimes he even asked, with a pallid interest, about hyper-assistance, but Insigna knew little or nothing about that.
    He was interested in Rotorian politics and showed an Earthman’s impatience with the smallness of its concerns. She fought with herself not to show displeasure at that.
    Eventually, there fell a silence between them, broken only by indifferent discussions concerning the films they had viewed, the social engagements they undertook, the small change of life.
    It didn’t lead to active unhappiness. Cake had quickly changed to white bread, but there were worse things than white bread.
    It even had a small advantage. Working under tight security meant talking to
no one
about one’s work, but how many managed to whisper partial confidences to wife or husband? Insigna had not done so, for she had little in the way of temptation, since her own work required little in the way of security.
    But when her discovery of the Neighbor Star was suddenly placed under tight wraps, without warning, could she have managed? Surely it would have been the natural thing to do—to tell her husband of the great discovery that was bound to put her name into the astronomy texts for as long as humanity existed. She might have told himeven before she told Pitt. She might have come bouncing in: “Guess what! Guess what! You’ll never guess—”
    But she hadn’t. It didn’t occur to her that Fisher would be interested. He might talk to others about their work, even to farmers or sheet-metal workers, but not to her.
    So it was no effort to mention nothing to him of Nemesis. The matter was dead between them, was not missed, did not exist, until that dreadful day when their marriage came to an end.
8.
    When did she move over wholeheartedly to Pitt’s side?
    At the start, Insigna had been horrified at the thought of keeping the Neighbor Star a secret, profoundly uneasy at the prospect of moving away out of the Solar System to a destination concerning which they knew nothing but the location. She found it ethically wrong and indecently dishonorable to set about building a new civilization by stealth, one which excluded all the rest of humanity.
    She had given in on the grounds of Settlement security, but she had intended to fight Pitt privately, to bring up points of argument. She had rehearsed them in her own mind till they were foolproof and irrefutable and then, somehow, she never presented them.
    Always—always—he took the initiative.
    Pitt said to her, early on, “Now