Victor Radcliff didn't like to go into Hanover or New Hastings or any of Atlantis' other seaboard towns. Too many people crowded too close together to suit him in places like that. He lived on a farm well to the west, more than halfway out to the Green Ridge Mountains. Whenever he found-or made-the chance, he ranged farther a'field yet.

But towns were sometimes useful. He had a manuscript to deliver to a printer in Hanover. Unless he cared to buy a printing press himself (which he didn't) or to stop writing (which he also didn't), he needed to deal with the men who could turn his scribble into words someone besides himself and the compositor could understand.

His wife kissed him when he left. "Come home as soon as you can," Margaret said. "I'll miss you."

What might have been lay not far below the surface of her voice. They'd had two boys and a girl. None of the children saw its third birthday. Without Victor, Meg had a lonely time of it. Adam would have been fourteen now…

"I'll miss you, too." Victor meant it, which didn't keep him from plunging into the trackless swamps and forests of western Atlantis as often as he could. A lot of Edward Radcliffe's descendants-those who still kept the e on the end of their surnames and those who didn't-still had the restless spirit that came down from the Discoverer.

No doubt Edward had it, for without it he never would have started the English settlement in Atlantis. On sea and land, his descendants through his sons-and others through his daughters, who didn't wear the family name any more-had kept it through more than three centuries now.

"Give my regards to all the cousins you see," Meg said. "There'll be a swarm of them," Victor replied. Radcliffs and Radcliffes had thrived here as they never would have in England. Without a doubt, old Edward had known what he was doing when he decided this was a better land than the one he'd left behind. Englishmen thought of Atlanteans as colonials, and looked down their noses at them. Atlanteans thought of Englishmen as strait-jacketed on their little island, and felt sorry for them.