It had been orbiting out toward Mars for the last seven months.Thousands of years ago, a disaster had occurred disabling their ship so that it was no ...onger able to move between stars. The heavy elements necessary to restore their star drive were not available in this solar system. Trapped with the local life forms, their continued existence depended entirely on the whims of an unstable dwarf star and whatever preparations they could make for its inevitable demise."We are going to visit our new. I looked around, there was artwork, and not cheap, all over the living room. I had already guessed that these folks had dropped close to a half million on the place, and the bare land had been close to that. Donna brought some cheese and flat crackers of a kind I had never seen, some drinks, and showed us out onto the deck. It was furnished with some expensive looking chairs, I noted the covered hot tub over in the corner. Wandering over to the railing, I glanced over at our Chalet. Sure. He looked like he just swung his bat into a brick wall. But it wasn’t a brick wall, it was the arm of an ten year old girl who had glasses, freckles and braces. And it was so packed with muscle that the sleeves of an XXL t-shirt bunched up above the bulging mass of her biceps and triceps. “My fucking hands,” Jerry said.“If I lose my temper I could kill you, and then I go to jail for sure,” Becky said. “I can’t even fight back, not really. That’s not fair.”Then Roy swung at Becky’s head. We all. And there was the obvious fact that, as beautiful and perfectly formed as the boy was, he was neither here nor there in heritage. His mother was clearly black, but he wasn’t wholly so. Mountainvista was a Southern town. The mixing of races was still something to titter about. There was no father in evidence and never had been—and LaBell Foster didn’t seem to care who turned up their nose about that. LaBell did very much protect any information on where her beautiful young son had come from,.