"You seem unhappy sometimes," Liza shrugged. "I wonder if perhaps you miss the excitement of being out there, where things are happening."
So exhausted was Lamont that he was barely conscious of stumbling across the width of Westward to his cabin. He shrugged his recorder onto his desk, instinctively knowing its location in the nearly perfect darkness, and dropped his many-pocketed expedition jacket heavily onto the floor. Finally, he pressed a projection on the belt of his Martian vacuum suit that released its seal, feeling its metallic mesh loosen against his skin. Peeling the suit off, he felt unnervingly like a snake that was wriggling out of its skin. He was vaguely glad that he couldn't see the process before he fell onto his bunk on the opposite side of the cabin and sank into oblivion.
"Do you want to go back?" Elizabeth was asking.
"Back inside?" Lamont returned. He was sitting on a grassy knoll not far from his wife, gazing absently at a page in his book without absorbing a word of it. A cold wind had come up from the sea, which was separated from their home by a mile of rocky fields and old forest, mostly petrified. The wind carried with it a lone seagull, which wheeled about in the gray haze and cried out as if asking, "Where is everyone? Am I all alone?"
"Back to Tibet," Liza clarified. Her voice was calm and very quiet, somehow carried to his ears by that same lonely wind. She was sitting on a stool in front of her easel, wrapped in a plaid blanket, her short dark hair wild around her ears. Though the scene beyond her easel was bleakly picturesque, the painting on her canvas bore no apparent relation to it. She had painted what looked like two concentric circles cut through with a "V." Like all her work, it was entirely abstract.
"What kind of talk is that?" Lamont asked, putting his book down and sitting straight.
"You seem unhappy sometimes," Liza shrugged. "I wonder if perhaps you miss the excitement of being out there, where things are happening."
"Every day for five years, the only thing in the world I wanted was to be with you again," Lamont assured her gravely, standing up and walking to her. He felt as if the wind was trying to pull his words away from her. "It's what I lived for. It's what I fought for. It's what I…what I…"
Liza turned to look up at him. But suddenly, it wasn't Liza. His wife's narrow, delicate features had been replaced by a vibrant, cherubic face with round green eyes. Her raven mop of hair was now a ginger bob. "What are you doing all the way out here then, Monty?" She asked in a Northern accent.
"You don't understand!" Lamont insisted. "I was trying to get back home, but they said you were missing! They said that I was responsible for it! I had to do what was necessary…"
"Of course, citizen," She replied. But her face had changed again. It was bold and chiseled, with a strong jaw, a nose like a hawk's beak, and a black mark above her full, expressive lips. "We always knew that it wasn't going to be easy."