Crystal closed the door with relief. The air had been so cold it felt like it was stabbing into her lungs.Carl eyed the things she'd brought. "Probabl... a good thing, " he said. "The National Weather Service is saying another blast is coming tomorrow. This is the lull." This?" She wanted to laugh. She could see the Tim/Temperature on the bank on the next block, and it said 15 degrees, and the wind was blowing snow across the road."It sounds like a good day for staying inside." And then it'll be. No matter what the sequence of events programmed into the great ship, something was going to happen that could not be determined by the Seeker, and therefore could not be prevented from occurring. The Praetor had run a dozen sequences through the planning stages, checking with the Seeker each time it changed the ship's programming. The results remained the same; if the ship returned to Earth to pick up Béla after this next journey, the ship was doomed. If she was to return to New Eden, Béla. "If I'd known what that ... had been up to I would have already used it and we wouldn't be going through this nightmare."I gave her a sympathetic look, feeling the same way. On Friday, when I should have been protecting Peggy, I'd been frolicking with Greg and Kathy in the art studio. If just one student victim had said something...Shit.The doorbell rang and I ran to get it. Missy looked nervous, her parents worried. "You guys introduce yourselves," I told Missy's parents, pointing them to the. That’s not quite right. You earned their respect today.”“Thanks, Mike.”“That was a brave thing you did, today,” Mike said.“I was more angry than brave,” Sanjay said. When Utpal had asked him why he was bothering to sit with the Americans, Sanjay had gotten angry. He’d heard a number of the Indians talking about sending their families back home; meaning by that, to India. It was at that moment when he realized that very few of them considered themselves Americans.“Very few brave acts occur when.