People No Different Flesh

“I’m Jemmy,” came the reply. “I’m with an Outsider Disaster Unit. We’ve got our hands full fishing people out of this dammed lake!” He chuckled. “Serves them right for damming Cougar Creek and spoiling the Canyon. But tell me, what’s the deal? You shouldn’t be here. You went back to the Home, didn’t you?”

“The Home-” I burst into tears and all the rest of the time that the ‘copter circled back and found a settling-down space on a flat already awash with two inches of water, Jemmy and I talked. Mostly I did the talking. We shifted out of verbalization and our thoughts speeded up until I had told Jemmy everything that had happened to me since that awful crashing day. It was telling of someone else-some other far, sad story of tragedy and graceless destitution-Outsider makeshifts. I had just finished when the ‘copter door swung open and Jemmy stepped out to hover above the water that was sucking my sneakers off the slant of the boulder I was crouched on.

“Oh, thanks be to The Power,” I cried, grabbing for Jemmy’s hands, but stubbing my own on my personal shield.

“Oh take me out of this, Jemmy! Take me back to The People! I’m so sick of living like an Outsider! And Child Within doesn’t want to be born on a dirt floor in a mine! Oh, Jemmy! How horrible to be an Outsider! You came just in time!” Tears of thankfulness wet my face as I tried to smile at him.

“‘Debbie!”

Surely that couldn’t be my name! That cold, hard, accusing word! That epithet-that-

“Jemmy!” I collapsed my shield and reached for him. Unbelievably, he would not receive me. “Jemmy!” I cried, the rain wetting my lips. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

He floated back so I couldn’t reach him. “Where are Glory and Seth?” he asked sternly.

“Glory and Seth?” I had to think before I could remember them. They were another life ago. “Why back at the cabin, I guess.” I was bewildered. “Why?”

“You have no concern of them?” he asked. “You ask for rescue and forget them? What did The Home do to you? You’re apparently not one of Us any more. If you’ve been infected with some sort of virus, we want no spreading of it.”

“You don’t want me?” I was dazed. “You’re going to leave me here! But-but you can’t! You’ve got to take me!”

“You’re not drowning,” he said coldly. “Go back to the cave. I have a couple of blankets in the ‘copter I can spare. Be comfortable. I have other people who need rescue worse.”

“But, Jemmy! I don’t understand. What’s wrong? What have I done?” My heart was shattering and cutting me to pieces with its razor-sharp edges.

He looked at me coldly and speculatively. “If you have to ask, it’d take too long to explain,” he said. He turned away and took the blankets from the ‘copter. He aimed them at the mine entrance and, hovering them, gave them a shove to carry them through into the mine.

“There,” he said, “curl up in your comfort. Don’t get your feet wet.”

“Oh, Jemmy, don’t leave me! Help me!” I was in a state of almost complete collapse, darkness roaring over me.

“While you’re curled up, all nice and safe,” Jemmy’s voice came back to me from the ‘copter, “you might try thinking a little on ‘Just who on Earth do you think you are!’ And if you think you have the answer to that, try, ‘I was hungry-’”

I didn’t hear him go. I sat hunched in my sodden misery, too far gone even to try to puzzle it all out. All my hopes had been built on when my People would find me. They’d set everything right. I would be freed from all my worry and hardships-and now-and nowA wave of discomfort that had been building up slowly for some time suddenly surged over me and my fingers whitened as I clutched the rock. How could I have mistaken that other pain for this? “Glory!” I whimpered. “It’s Child Within!” Now I could remember Glory and Seth. I was back in the miserable half-life of waiting for my People. I scrambled to my feet and closed my shield, setting it to warmth to counteract the chill that stuck to my bones. “I can’t face it alone! Anything, anything is better than being alone!”

I streaked back along the hogback that had almost disappeared under the creeping muddy tide. The cabin was in a lake. The back door was ajar. The whole thing tilted slightly off true as though it were thinking of taking off into the roar of the incredible river that swept the creek bed from bank to bank. I staggered against the door as another hard surge of pain lightened my hands and wrung an involuntary cry from me.

When it subsided, I wiped the sweat from my upper lip and pushed the door further open. I stepped into the magnified roaring of the rain on the roof. Blue light was flooding serenely from the baking powder can on the table in the empty kitchen. I snatched it up and ran to the bedroom.

Seth lay white and unmoving on his bed, his eyes sunken, his chest still. I pressed the back of my clenched hand hard against my mouth, feeling the bruise of my teeth. “Oh, no!” I whispered, and gasped with relief as a quick shallow breath lifted the one thin quilt Glory had left him from the bundle of bedding.

“You came back.”

My eyes flew to Glory. She sat on the other side of the bed, a shoe box in her lap, one hand clutching a corner of the battered old quilt.

“You didn’t come,” I whispered. “I waited.”

“No need to whisper.” Her voice was quite as usual except for a betraying catch on the last word. “He can’t hear you.”

“But you must come!” I cried. “The house will go in a minute. The creek’s already-“

“Why should I come,” she asked without emphasis. “He can’t come.”

We both watched another of the shaken breaths come and go.

“But you’ll be washed away-“

“So’ll you if you don’t git goin’.” She turned her face away from me.

“But Glory-” Her name came, but twisted-a muffled cry of pain. I clenched both hands on the doorjamb and clung until the pain subsided.

“Child Within,” said Glory-her eyes intent on me.

“Yes,” I gasped. “I guess so.”

Glory stood up and laid the shoe box on the corner of the sagging dresser. She leaned over and smoothed the covers under Seth’s chin. “I’ll be back,” she told him. She waded through the ruffle of water that covered the floor ankle-deep and rounded the bed.

“We better go,” she said. “You’ll have to point me the way. The trail’s gone-“

“You mean you’d leave him here alone!” I was stunned.

“Your own husband!”

She looked back at Seth and her lips tightened. “We all die alone, anyway,” she said, “He’d tell me to go, if’n he could.”

Then I was still as I caught the passionate outpouring of her grief and love-her last, unspoken farewell to Seth. With an effort she turned her eyes back to me. “Our duty’s to the living,” she said. “And Child Within won’t wait.”

“Oh, Glory!” Anguish of sorrow filled my chest till I could only gasp again. “Oh, Glory! We can’t, we can’t!” My throat ached and I blinked against tears of quite a different sort than those I’d been shedding since Thann died.

I snatched the glowing nickel out of the baking powder can and shoved it into my pocket. “Tuck him in good,” I said, nodding at Seth. “Bring whatever you need.”

Glory looked at me briefly, hope flaring in her eyes, then, with hasty shaken hands, she tucked the covers tight around Seth and, grabbing up her shoe box, she pushed it under the covers next to him. There was a grating grind and the whole shack swung a quarter circle around.

“Can we get the bed through the doors?” I asked shrilly.

“Not unless we take it apart,” said Glory, the quietness of her voice steadying me, “and there isn’t time.”

“Then-Then-“

“The mattress will bend,” she said. “If both of us-“

With all my faith and power I withdrew into the Quiet within me. Help me now, I prayed. I can do nothing of myself. Strengthen me, guide me, help me—

The last words came audibly as I clutched the foot of the bed, waiting until the wave subsided. Then, slowly, deliberately, quietly and unhurried, I lifted the mattress Seth lay on and bent its edges enough to get it out of the bedroom. I hovered it in the kitchen. Glory and I both staggered as the house swayed underfoot-swayed and steadied.

“Have you something to put over him to keep the rain off?” I asked, “I can’t extend my shield that far and lift that much at the same time.”

“Our slickers,” said Glory, her eyes intent on me with that different took in them. “They’ll help a little.”

“Get them then,” I said, “and you’ll have to get on the mattress, too, to keep him covered.”

“But can you-” Glory began.

“I will,” I said, holding my Quietness carefully in my mind. ” Hurry-the house is going.”

Hastily, Glory snatched the two yellow slickers from the nails behind the front door. She scrambled into one and spread the other over Seth. “His head, too,” I said, “or he’ll nearly drown. You’d better cover your head, too. It’ll be easier to take. Hurry! Hurry!”

Glory gave one look at the hovering mattress and, setting her lips grimly, crawled on and lay beside Seth, one arm protectively across his chest. She’d hardly closed her eyes before I started the mattress out the door. The house began spinning at the same time. By the time we got outside, it had turned completely around and, as we left it, it toppled slowly into the creek and was lost in the tumult of the waters.

It’s no more than the windows and siding, I whispered to myself. In fact, it’s less because there’s no glass to break. But all my frantic reassurances didn’t help much. There were still two olives hanging on my ability to do the inanimate lift and transport them: Doggedly I pushed on, hardly able to see beyond the cascade of rain that arched down my shield. Below me the waters were quieting because they were getting so deep that they no longer quarreled with the boulders and ridges. They smothered them to silence. Ahead and a little below me, rain ran from Glory and Seth’s slickers, and the bed, other than where they lay, was a sodden mess.

Finally I could see the entrance of the mine, a darker blot in the pervading grayness. “There it is, Glory!” I cried.

“We’re almost there. Just a little-” And the pain seized me. Gasping, I felt myself begin to fall. All my power was draining out thinly-my mind had only room for the all-enveloping anguish. I felt the soggy end of the mattress under one arm, and then two strong hands grabbed me and began to tug me onto the bed.

“Try-” Glory’s voice was almost too far away. “Help yourself! Onto the bed! Help yourself!”

Deliberately I pushed all thought of pain aside. As though in slow. motion I felt myself lift slightly and slide onto the end of the bed. I lay half on half off and tried to catch my breath.

“Debbie,” Glory’s voice came calmly and deliberately.

“We’re almost in the water. Can you lift us up a little?”

Oh no, I thought. It’s too much to ask! Let me rest.

Then for no reason at all I heard Jemmy’s voice again.

“Where’s Glory and Seth?” as though in some way I were responsible. 1 am! I cried to myself. I am responsible for them. 1 took their lives in my hands when we left the bedroom. Even before that! 1 made myself responsible for them when they took me in—

With infinite effort I pushed myself into the background and reached out again to lay hold on The Power and, slowly, the bed rose from the lapping of the waters and, slowly, it started again toward the mine entrance and I held Glory’s hand in such a bruising grasp you would have thought I was birthing something or someone out there in the pelting rain.

The events of the next few minutes ran hurriedly and clear, but as far removed from me as though I were watching everything through the wrong end of binoculars. I settled the mattress near the glowing wheel. Glory was off in unflurried haste. She spread my bedclothes and got me undressed by the light of the nickel she had propped up on a ledge on the wall. I cried out when I felt the warmth of my tekla nightgown gliding over my head. I’d forgotten the clothes for Child Within! The muddy waters were tumbling all their softness and smallness now.

Another pain came and when it subsided, Glory had brought a coffee pot from somewhere—one of those huge enameled camp pots-and had filled it from somewhere and put it on the wheel-stove to heat. The cases were gone from our pillows and they lay beside my bed torn into neat squares in a little heap, topped by a battered old jackknife with one sharp blade open. One of the thin blankets had been ripped in four.

Glory’s face appeared over me, rugged, comforting.

“We’re doin’ fine,” she said. “Me and Seth had a few things stashed here in the mine. Seth’s breathing better. You got nothing to worry about now ‘ceptin’ Child Within. Nothing to worry about there neither ‘ceptin’ what you’ll name him now that he won’t be within any more.”

“Oh, Glory!” I whispered and turned my cheek to press against her hand.

From there on, I was three people-one who cried out and gasped and struggled with the pain and against the pain and was bound up in the blindness of complete concentration on the task at hand, and an accusing one-one sitting in judgment. And the third me was standing before the bar of that judgment, defenseless and guilty.

The indictment was read from the big Book.

“I was hungry,” came the accusation, “‘and they fed me.”

“I ate their food,” I admitted. “Unearned-“

“I was naked and they clothed me-“

“‘Now we can have decent clothes,’” I heard myself saying again.

“I was a stranger and they took me in-“

“I condescended to let them care for me,” I admitted.

“I was in the prison of my grief and they visited me.”

“And I accepted their concern and care of me as an unquestioned right. I took and took and took and gave nothing-” Remorse was sharper than the pain that made the other cry out and struggle on the thin bedclothes.

Think no more highly of yourself than you should. The voice had stopped. Now the words ran in ribbons of flames, wavering before my closed eyes, searing the tears dry.

To whom much is given, much is expected. Who would be first must be last. Who would be greatest must be the servant of all.

Whatsoever you do unto the least of these—

Then suddenly the separation was over and the three of me coalesced in a quick blind rush and I listened blissfully to the lusty, outraged cry of My Child.

“Oh, Thann!” I whispered as I slid into a cloud of comfort and relaxation. “Oh, Thann, he’s here. Our child-our Thann-too.”

“You’re mighty sure, aren’t you?” Glory’s voice was amused. “But you’re right. He’s a boy.”

I pushed sleep away from me a little to fret, “Let .me see my poor naked baby. All his little clothes-“

“Not so naked,” said Glory. “Here, hold him while I get things squared around.” She laid the blanket-wrapped bundle beside me and I lifted up on one elbow to look down into the miracle of the face of my child. I brushed my forefinger across the dark featherdown of his damp hair and lost myself in the realization that here was Child Within. This was what had been Becoming, serenely untouched, within me during all the tumultuous things that had happened. I protested from my half sleep when Glory came back for my child.

“Just going to dress him,” said Glory. “You can have him back.” .

“Dress him?” I asked fuzzily.

“Yes,” said Glory, unwrapping the blanket. “I had that sugar-sack gown in my shoe box and them old pillowcases make pretty soft diapers. Not very wetproof though, I’m afraid.”

“A boy?” It was Seth’s voice, shaken but clear-his first words since the cabin.

“A boy!” Glory’s voice was a hymn of thankfulness. “Want to see him?”

“Sure. Us men gotta stick together!”

I lay and smiled to keep from crying as I heard their murmuring over my child.

“Dark like Davy,” Glory finally said softly. “Well, better give him back, I guess.” She laid him beside me.

“Glory,” I said, “the gown could have been for Davy’s child. So you and Seth must be grandparents for my Thann-too.”

“I-” Glory bit her lips and smoothed his blanket with a trembling hand. “We-” She swallowed hard. “Sure. It’s a pleasure.”

“Hey, Grandma,” called Seth, hardly above a whisper. “I could do with some coffee!”

“Okay, Grampa, keep your shirt on,” said Glory. “One coffee coming up!”

That night after Glory had got us all settled and the nickel light was tucked under a rusty tin can and sleep was flowing warmly around us all, I roused a little and leaned up on one elbow, instinctively curving myself around the precious bundle of my child. The wheel-stove glowed on, taking a little of the raw chill off the rocky room. Glory and Seth were sleeping on the other side of the wheel, their bedding augmented by one of the blankets Jemmy had left. When I told Glory where they were, but not where they came from, she got them and, looking at me over the folded bulk of them, opened her mouth, closed it again, and silently spread one blanket for me and one fur them. Now they were both asleep and I was awake listening to the “voice of many waters, praising-” and added my praise to theirs. Outside, the sky was clearing, but the murmuring lap of the waters reminded that the numberless creeks in the hills had not yet emptied themselves and the tide was rising higher.

I turned over in my mind the odd duality of events of the night. I heard and saw again all the accusations, all the admonitions. They must have all been waiting for just such a chance when the Distorted Me wasn’t watching, to break through and confront me with myself. I had known all the words before. Their pertinent wisdom had been familiar to The People before they ever arrived on Earth and it was one of the endearing things of Earth that we had there found such beautifully rhythmic paraphrases of them.

As I had laid down the burden of Child Within only to assume the greater burden of Thann-too, so also must I lay down the burden of my spoiled-brat self and take up the greater burden of my responsibility as one of The People toward Glory and Seth and whatever the Power sent into my life. Jemmy had been right. I wasn’t of The People. I had made myself more of an Outsider than an Outsider, even. Well, remorse is useless except insofar as it changes your way of doing things. And change I would-the Power being my helper.

Then I closed my eyes and felt them begin to dampen a little, as I wondered wistfully how long it would be before Jemmy would come again. Thann-too stirred in the curve of my arm. I looked down into the shadow that held him. “But I do think Jemmy was unnecessarily hard on Child Within!” I whispered as I gathered the warm little life closer.

“I do, too,” came a voice-subvocally.

Startled, I glanced up. There were two of them standing in the cave entrance.

“And I told him so, too.” The figures moved in, quiet inches above the crunch of the mine floor. “Remember me, Debbie? It’s Valancy. Maybe you’ve forgotten-“

“Forgotten? Oh, Valancy!” And we were hugging each other tightly. There was a lovely, warm intermingling of thoughts among the three of us, and all sorts of explanations-Jemmy had had no idea Child Within was so nearly ready to be born-and apologies-“If I’d had any idea, but when you-” and acceptances and reasons why and such things as Necessary Patterns-“Since you had the situation in hand I went to see if someone else—” until finally, chastened and relaxed, I watched Valancy cuddling my child.

How could I ever have forgotten Jemmy and Valancy-the glamorous Grown-ups-the Old Ones of the Group of my People in Cougar Canyon, when the Canyon was still habitable. We had all waved them good-by when our ship left for the Home so long ago.

“You can look,” said Valancy to Jemmy. “But don’t touch.” Then she contradicted herself by putting the sleeping bundle into his arms. She snapped her fingers and a small bundle floated in from the mine entrance.

“I brought some clothes,” she said. “Though it looks as if Glory has things well in hand. But here are some of Our Child’s clothes. She grew so fast that she hardly got to use some of them. If we don’t tell him, Thann-too will never know he had to wear girl-type clothes.” She unfolded the torn blanket square from around the baby. “And there’s the gown,” she said, smiling, fingering the hem of it, now regrettably damp.

“There’s the gown,” I said. “Oh, Valancy, wasn’t I the luckiest person in the whole world to have Glory with me? I didn’t deserve it a bit! What a mess I was!”

“The Glorys of this world have to put up with a lot of messes,” said Valancy, deftly changing my child from the skin out, and returning him, still blissfully sleeping, to my arms. She folded the wet clothes and bundled them up.

“We’re taking you and the child back with us,” said Jemmy. “We’d better wake Glory and tell her.”

“Glory!” I called softly and audibly.

Instantly she was awake and out of bed, blinking in the dimness. “Glory, my People have come,” I said. “‘They want to take me and Thann-too back with them. But I’ll be back, just as soon as I can.”

Valancy surrendered the baby into Glory’s waiting arms. She held him close. “I reckon you do have to go,” she said, her voice muffled against his blanket. “He’s going to be needing diapers by the dozen pretty darn soon. It’d keep us hopping, washing out what we have.”

“We brought some supplies for you,” said Jemmy. “They’re from the disaster unit. We’re working all around this area helping people who got flooded out.”

“Is Jicker all right?” Seth’s voice came huskily.

“Jicker?” Jemmy did some fast scanning-“Oh, yes,” chuckled Jemmy. “I remember him. We fished him off the roof of his cabin. Never heard such cussing in all my life. Ten minutes solid without repeating himself once!”

“That’s Jicker,” grinned Seth and settled back down. “I’m glad the old cuss is okay.”

Jemmy was looking around the shadowy room. “This is the Skagmore, isn’t it?” he said. “I thought she was played out a long time ago.”

“She was-a couple of times,” said Seth. “But we managed to find a few more pockets. Enough to keep us going for a while, but I reckon she’s about done for now, with all this water and stuff.”

“We had a mine on the other side of Baldy,” said Jemmy. “When we moved on up into the hills we didn’t think there was enough left to make it worthwhile to leave a crew behind. I think there’s pretty good pickin’s there for a couple of willing workers. A sort of shack’s there, too, where the fellows bunked when it was their shift. I think we piped the spring into the kitchen the last summer. It’s not bad. As soon as we get Debbie settled at home, we’ll come back and take you there. You can look the setup over and see if you’d like to take a whack at it.”

“Thanks,” said Glory huskily. “We’ll give her a look. We’re kinda wiped out here. This is it.” She gestured at the few possessions huddled around the glowing wheel.

“And only the clothes they stand in,” I added. “And Glory’s treasure box.” I lifted the shoe box from the edge of Seth’s bed and floated it to Glory’s hands. “Glory,” I said on sudden impulse, “do you have your mirror in there?”

“The pieces.” Glory’s face reddened slightly. “Silly, keeping useless things.”

“Show it to them,” I asked. “They know I broke it.”

Slowly Glory took the lid off the box and carefully lifted out the mirror. She had fitted all the broken pieces together and they caught and cut into pieces what little light there was in the cave. I took the mirror from her and looked into it at my shattered, shamed face. “Jemmy,” I said, holding it out to him. “I broke it. I ruined something I can’t make right. Can you help me?”

Jemmy took the mirror and stared down into it, his face tight with concentration. After long seconds, there was a sudden liquid flow of light and the broken pieces of glass melted into one another and glazed across. He gave the mirror back to me and I saw myself mended and whole again.

“Here, Glory,” I said, putting it into her hands. “It’s only a part of all the apologies and makings-up for what I owe you.”

She ran her finger across the mended glass, her face tender with memories.

“Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

Jemmy was bringing in a carrycase for me so I wouldn’t have to exert myself at all on the return trip. Glory held Thann-too while Valancy and Jemmy got me settled. She fingered the soft warmth of the baby blanket and burrowed in to uncover one of the tiny pink hands. She tucked it back gently, folding the cuff of the gown around it first.

“Where’s the other stuff?” she asked. “No sense taking makeshifts back with you.”

“No,” I said. “You can’t have the gown back, even if you do want to keep it. That’s Thann-too’s very first gown, and might have been his only gown if things hadn’t worked out as they did. It’s staying in our family, every thoughtful stitch of it, and Thann-too’s first child will wear it-” I broke off, overwhelmed by a sudden thought. “Oh, Valancy! I’m a mother! And when Thann-too grows up, I’ll be a grandmother/”

They all laughed at my shocked astonishment. And the emotional temperature of our parting eased.

When Jemmy and Valancy were ready to transport me out into a sky aglow with moonlight and puffy leftover clouds, Glory knelt to surrender my baby into my arms. I reached up and hugged her fiercely to me. “You’re Thann-too’s grandma, and don’t you forget it,” I whispered. “I’ll be back. We’ll both be back, and make everything as right as we can after such a horrible beginning. Honestly, all the People aren’t as bad as I make them seem. Don’t judge them by me.”

“Your folks seem to be mighty nice.” Glory was ignoring the tears that stood in her eyes. “I-I never minded you too much. Kids will be kids and then there was Child Within-” Her finger touched his sleeping cheek and she stood up abruptly. “Lordee! Here I am in my nightclothes in front of ever’body!” And she retreated into the shadows to find her slicker to use for a robe.

I waved good-by once as we launched out over the waters. Glory’s arm went up in brief salute and she turned back into the darkness without waiting to see us gone.

“You certainly lucked out there, didn’t you?” said Jemmy from behind me.

“Didn’t I?” I murmured drowsily. “I didn’t expect an angel in jeans and plaid shirt. That’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation.”

Jemmy chuckled and in silence we streaked across the sky. I closed my eyes against the brightness of the moon. Swallowing sorrow and hugging my child close against me, I whispered, “Oh, Thann-oh, Thann-oh, Thann!”

And felt him very near.

“Chee!” Meris’s breath came out in a long sigh.

“Hmm,” said Mark, unfolding his long legs to attend again to the fire. “Not exactly-” He broke off, absorbed in poking the coals.

Debbie laughed. “Not exactly the behavior you would expect from one of the People?” she said.

“Well, I guess that’s it.” He reached for another length of wood.

“Don’t think it wasn’t a big blow to me, too, when I finally stepped back for a good look.” Debbie sobered, the flaring fire lighting her face. “Of course the People are far from perfect, but it was terribly humbling to me to realize that I was a big, fat part of the clay on the feet thereof and an excellent object lesson to the rising generation. Believe me, I’ve learned to check myself often against a standard more reliable than my own egocentric two-foot yardstick.”

“Thann-too,” mused Meris. “Eva-lee’s husband was named Thann.”

“Yes,” said Debbie. “He was one of my-Thann’s Befores. Thann is a fairly common name among us.”

“Speaking of names,” said Meris casually, “‘do you know a Timmy and-“

“And a Lytha?” Debbie laughed. “I passed Bethie on my way in! She said you were wondering-Maybe someday you can hear their story from them in person. I don’t have it well enough to pass it on.”

“Well, I just thought,” Merle smiled.

“Bed.” Mark stood and stretched. “Bed for our guest along with our many thanks. How long can you stay?”

“Only tonight and tomorrow night,” said Debbie. “I have involvements back with the Group, but Bethie wants me to stay long enough to tell you about Shadow.”

“Shadow?” Meris laughed.

Mark laughed. “Look at her ears prick up!”

“Yes, Shadow,” said Debbie. “She’s a Too, too. In fact she is Bethie-too. She and-you know her brother-Remy had quite an experience not so long ago. In the light of recent developments, Bethie thought you might like to hear of it. Also, it all started pretty close to your summer cabin. You see, from where you live, you go northeast about-” She broke off. “Bed,” she said firmly. “Bed, right now. Talking is almost as addictive as listening.”

The next evening-school keeps, guest or no guest, and Mark had daily duties-Debbie settling down on the couch between Mark and Meris said, “I suppose that Bethie was relieved to be called away before she could tell you this segment of our story. It concerns mostly her own family and she’s so shy about talking of herself or those close to her.” Debbie laughed. “It is to smile a little ruefully for me to realize how parallel my actions and thinking were with Remy’s, only he’s really a Teener and I was supposed to be a responsible married woman.

“Well, anyway, give me your hands and listen to Shadow-“

SHADOW ON THE MOON

“No, we can’t even consider it.” Father smoothed his hand along the board he was planing. It was to be a small table for Mother’s birthday. I curled one of the good smelling shavings around my finger as I listened.

“But, Father-” I could see Remy’s hands clenching themselves as he tried to control his voice and keep it low and reasonable-a real job for the volatile person he was. “If you’d only-“

Father put the plane down and looked at Remy. I mean really looked at him, giving him his full attention. “Has anything changed materially since last we discussed the matter?” he asked.

“Apparently not.” Remy laughed shortly. “1 hoped you might have-If you’d only consider it-“

“You know I’m not the only one that thinks this way,” said Father. “Though I concur heartily with the thinking of the rest of the Old Ones. No good would be served. Can’t you see that, Remy?”

“I can’t see any flat statement like that!” cried Remy, his control of his impatience beginning to slip. “Every step of progress anyone makes is some good. Why don’t you let us-“

“Look, Remy.” Father sat on one hip on the edge of the workbench. “Shall we A B C it again. A-we couldn’t possibly let anyone else know we had gone to the moon in a spacecraft. B-to the best of our knowledge, there is no immediate need for anything to be found on the moon. C-he smiled-” ‘We bin there already.’ At least on our way in. And that was enough for most of us. It looked as good to us as the Statue of Liberty did to the flood of immigrants that used to come over from Europe, but we’re most of us content to stay where we are now-looking at it from this side, not that.” He grinned at Remy. “Unless you have any information that would materially alter any of these three checkpoints, I’m afraid the discussion is closed-“

“Why couldn’t we tell?” cried Remy desperately, feeling the whole situation going down the drain. “Why do we have to keep it a secret? Isn’t everyone risking their lives and spending fortunes trying to get into Space? Why can’t we help?” He broke off because his throat got so tight with anger and frustrated tears that he couldn’t talk any more.

Father sighed patiently. “So we go to the moon and back and announce it. So they all swarm around. Can’t you hear them screaming?-What propellant? What engine? Escape velocity-air pressure-radiation-landing-return launching

-reentry! What would you tell them? Go on, boy-type, answer the nice people. Show them the engines. What? No engines! Show them the fuel tank. żQue? No fuel tank! Show them our protection against radiation. Quoi? No protection?

“No, Remy. I wish, because you want it so much, that we could make this expedition for you. Your grandfather’s memories of Space can hardly be much comfort to you at your age. But it’s out of the question. We cannot deliver ourselves over to the Outsiders for the whim of just one of us. If only you’d reconcile yourself to it-“

“What’s the use then?” Remy flung at Father. “What’s the use of being able to if we don’t?”

“Being able to is not always the standard to go by,” said Father. He flicked his fingers at the ceiling and we three watched the snowflakes drift down starrily to cover the workbench. “Your mother loves to watch the snow,” he said, “but she doesn’t go around snowing all the time.” He stopped the snow with a snap of his fingers and it dampened the wood shavings with its melting. “No, just being able to is not a valid reason. And reason there must be before action.”

Remy kicked a block of wood out of the workshop and all the way up the slope to our walnut tree on the hill above the twisted, glittering string that was Cayuse Creek. I followed along. I always follow along-Remy’s shadow, they call me-and he usually pays about that much attention to me. What can I expect else, being a girl and his sister besides. But I like it because Remy does things-lots of things-and he can usually use a listening ear. I am the willing ear. I’m Bethie-too, because Mother is Bethie.

“Then we’ll do it by ourselves!” he muttered as he dug a rock out of the ground where it was poking his shoulder when he tried to relax against the hillside. “We’ll build our own craft and we’ll go by ourselves!” He was so used to me that he automatically said “we”-though it usually meant he had decided he’d do something-a sort of royal “we.” He lay back under the tree, his hands under his head, his eyes rebelliously on the leaves above. I sat by him, trying to snow like Father had, but all I got was cold fingertips and one big drop of rain that I flicked at Remy. He wiped it off and glared up at the canopy of leaves. “Derned old birds!”

I laughed.

“Go on! Laugh!” he said, jerking upright. “Fine deal when my own sister laughs!”

“Remy.” I looked at him, smiling. “You’re acting about ten years below yourself and a seven-year-old isn’t very attractive in a frame the size of yours!”

He sank back and grinned. “Well, I bet I could. A craft wouldn’t be so hard to build. I could use scrap metal-though why does it have to be metal? And we could check in the newspaper for when Canaveral says is the best time-“

“Remy”-the light in his eyes quenched at the tone of my voice-“how far is it to the moon?”

“Well, us-I’m not for sure. I think it’s about 250,000 miles, give or take a couple of blocks.”

“How far have you ever lifted a vehicle?” I asked.

“Well, at least five miles-with your help! With your help!” he hastened as I looked at him.

“And how far out of the atmosphere?” I asked.

“Why none at all, of course! Father won’t let me-“

“And in free fall? And landing in no air? And coming back?”

“All right! All right! Don’t rub it in,” he said sulkily. “But you wait!” he promised. “I’ll get into Space yet!”

That evening, Father quirked an eyebrow when Remy said he wanted to start training to become a Motiver. Oh, he could learn it-most any of The People could-but it’s a mighty uphill job of it if you aren’t especially gifted for it. A gifted Motiver hardly needs any training except in how to concentrate on a given project for the time necessary. But Remy would have to start from scratch, which is only a notch or two above Outsider performance-which is mostly nil. Father and Remy both knew Remy was just being stubborn because he so wanted to go out into Space, but Father let him go to Ron for study and I got pretty lonely in the hours he spent away from camp. After all, what is there for a shadow to do when there’s no one to follow around?

For a day or two I ranged above the near slopes and hills, astonishing the circling buzzards by peering over their thin, wide wings, or catching a tingly downward slide on the last slants of the evening sun through the Chimneys. The Chimneys are spare, angular fingers of granite that thrust themselves nakedly up among the wooded hills along one bank of the Cayuse. But exploring on your own stops being fun after a while and I was pretty lonesome the evening I brought Mother a little cottontail rabbit I’d taken away from a coyote on the edge of night.

“I can tell he’s hurt,” I said, holding the soft, furry thing gently in my hands and securely in my Concern. It lay unwinking on my palms, its quick nose its only movement.

“But I can’t decide whether it’s a break or a strain. Tell me again how to tell the difference.”

Mother laid her hand softly on the creature after reassuring it with her Concern. “It’s a strain,” she said softly. “Don’t you sense ” And the rest of it was thinking that has no separate words for it so I can’t write it down. And I did finally Sense the strain in the rabbit’s muscles and the difference between it and how a break in a bone would feel.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I won’t forget again. Shall I let him go, then?”

“Better put him in the patient-pen,” said Mother. “At least for the night. Nothing will fright him there and we can let him go tomorrow.”

So we slipped him into the pen and Mother and I leaned over to watch him hide himself in the green tangle of growing things at the far end. Then I carefully did as Mother did. We reached inside ourselves to channel away the pain we had Sensed. That’s one of the most important things to be learned if you’re a Sensitive—which we both are. When Mother was a girl, she lived among Outsiders and she was almost destroyed before she found our Group and was taught how to Channel.

Still full of the warm, prayerlike feeling that follows the Channeling, we walked back toward the house in the half dark.

“You’ve been missing Remy,” said Mother.

“Yes,” I sighed. “It wouldn’t be so bad if we were back with the Group, but being up here till Father’s shift is over makes it kinda lonesome. Even with Remy coming back here to sleep, it’s not the same. There’s nothing to do-“

Mother laughed. “I’d like a dime for every time a child has said that to a parent! Why not use this so empty rime to develop a new Gift or Persuasion?”

“Like what?” I wasn’t very enthusiastic.

“Well.” Mother considered. “Why not something that would go along with being a Sensitive? You’re Gifted with that already. Choose something that has to do with Sensing things. Take metal or water or some Awareness like that. It might come in handy sometime, and you could map the springs or ore deposits for the Group. Your father has the forestry maps for this area, but the People haven’t mapped it yet.”

Well, the idea was better than nothing, so that evening Mother helped me review the Awareness of water and metal and I set my mind to Group Memory that night so by morning I had a pretty good idea of the Basics of the job. It’d take years really to be an expert, but I could play around with it for the rest of the summer.

Water wasn’t scarce enough in Cayuse Canyon to make looking for it much fun, though I loved the little blind stream I found in a cave above the creek, so I tried the metal Awareness and got pretty adept by the evening of the first day. Adept, that is, at finding campers’ dumps and beef cans-which isn’t much to brag about. It’s like finding a telephone pole when you’re really looking for a toothpick.

By the end of the week, I had fined down my Sensing. Hovering a hundred feet or so over the surface, I had found an old, two-tined fork buried under two and a half feet of silt at the base of one of the Chimneys, and an ox shoe caught in a cleft of rock six feet above the creek on another of the Chimneys. Don’t ask me how it got there.

“Big deal!” Remy shoved the shoe with his finger when I showed the family my spoils after supper that night. “Both of them iron both manufactured. Big dealt”

I flushed and talked right back at him as I practically never do. “How far did you move the world today, wise guy? Was that the house I heard roaring past me this afternoon or a matchbox you managed to tilt off the table?”

Which was hardly fair of me because he was having a lot of trouble with his Motiving and had got his reactions so messed up that he could hardly lift anything now. Sort of a centipede trying to watch his feet when he walks. The trouble would clear up, of course, with further training, but Remy’s not the patient type.

“Who’s a wise guy?” Before I knew it, I was pressed against the ceiling, the light fixture too hot near the back of my neck.

“Remy!” Mother cried out. “Not at the table!”

“Put her down.” Father didn’t raise his voice, but I was tumbled back so fast that the hem of my skirt caught the flower bowl and nearly pulled it off the table.

“I’m sorry.” Remy glared at his clenched hands on the table and shut us all out so completely that we all blinked, and he kept us out all the rest of the evening.

He hardly said good-by when he left next morning, kicking petulantly at the top of the pinyon tree by the gate as he went by. Mother and Father looked at each other and shook their heads like parents and Father folded his mouth like a father and I was sorry I had started the whole thing-though I’m not sure I did.

I had fun all day. I was so absorbed in sorting out the different junk I Sensed that I lost track of time and missed lunch completely. When I checked the shadows for the time, it was long past the hour and I was too far to bother with going home. I wanted to finish this part of the Chimneys before going home anyway. So I sighed and filled my empty stomach with fresh cold spring water and took off again, enjoying the sweep of wind that brushed my hair back from my neck and dried the perspiration.

Well, concentration paid off! Around about four o’clock I sensed a metal deep inside the last of the towering Chimneys. Or the first one, depending on which mountain you started counting from. Anyway, I sensed a metal near the base of the last one—and not iron and not manufactured! Excitedly I landed on the flank of the mountain and searched out the exact spot. I tore my shirt and scratched my cheek and broke two fingernails before I found the spot in the middle of a brush pile. I traced with my finger the short, narrow course. Wire gold. Six feet inside the solid rock beneath me. Almost four inches of it, as thick as a light bulb filament! I laughed at my own matchbox I’d tilted off the table, but I was pleased anyway. It was small, for sure, but I’d found it, hadn’t I? From over a hundred feet up?

It was getting late and I was two-meal hungry, so I lifted up to the top of the last Chimney and teetered on its crumbling granite capstone to check my directions. I could short-cut home in a fraction of the time I’d taken to get here. The panorama laid out at my feet was so breathtakingly lovely that I could hardly leave it, but I finally launched myself in the direction of home. I cut diagonally away from the Chimneys, headed for the notch in the hills just beyond the old Selkirk mine. Half unconsciously I checked off metal as I passed above it. It was all ABC easily detected stuff like barbwire fence, tin can, roofing, barrel hoop-all with the grating feeling that meant rust.

Then suddenly there it was in my Awareness-slender and shiny and smooth and complicated! I checked in mid-air and circled. Beer can, wire fence, horseshoe-slender and shiny and smooth and not iron! I slid to a landing on the side of the mountain. What could it be? A water tank? Some mining equipment? But it was unrusted, sleek and shiny and slender. But how tall? If only I knew a little about sizes and contents. I could tell sizes of things I was familiar with, but not of this thing. I lifted and circled till I caught it again and narrowed my circle smaller and smaller until I was hovering. Over the old Selkirk mine. I grimaced, disappointed, and Sensed, a little annoyed, the tangly feeling of all the odds and ends of silver left in the fifty-years-abandoned old mine, and the traces of a lot of other metals I didn’t know yet. Then I sighed. Must have misinterpreted, but big and shiny, smooth and complicated-that’s what it still felt like to me. Nasty break. Back to the Differentiations again, girl!

My hunger hurried my lifting for home so much that I had to activate my personal shield to cut the wind.

Before I even got in sight of the ranger station where we were spending our summer in our yearly required shift for the Group, I felt Remy calling for me. Well, maybe not me by name, but he was needing comfort in large quantities and who better than his shadow to give it to him. So I zeroed in on our walnut tree and stumbled to a stop just behind him as he sat hunched morosely over himself.

“I’m grounded,” he said. “Ron says not to come back until I’m Purged. Father says I can start clearing brush out of the campsites tomorrow.”

“Oh, Remy!” I cried, dismayed for his unhappiness. “Why?”

He grinned unhappily. “Ron says I can’t learn as long as I’m trying to learn for the wrong reason.”

“Wrong reason?” I asked.

“Yeah. He said I don’t want to be a Motiver just to be a Motiver. I want to learn to be one so I can show people up, like Father and you and the O1d Ones. He says I don’t want to get into Space because of any real interest in Space, but because I’m mad at The People for not telling the world they can do it right now if they want to. He says-” Remy pulled a double handful of grass with sharp, unhappy yanks “-he says he has no intention of teaching me anything as long as I only want to learn it for such childish reasons. What does he think I’m going to do, drop another Hiroshima bomb?”

I checked firmly the surge of remembered sorrow at his words. “One of us was there in that plane,” I said. “Remember?”

“But he didn’t use any of the Designs or Persuasions in the dropping of the Bomb-“

“No. If he had, we probably never would have been able to help him out of the Darkness afterward. Maybe Ron’s afraid you might do something as bad as that if you learn to be a Motiver and then get mad.”

“That’s silly!” cried Remy. “I wasn’t even born when the Bomb fell! And as if I’d ever do a thing like that anyway!”

“Maybe you wouldn’t, but if you don’t know how to be a Motiver, you can’t. Remember, every person who ever did anything bad was seventeen once, and anger starts awfully early. Some kids start to crook their trigger fingers in their cradles-“

“I still think it’s a lot of foolish fuss over nothing-“

“If it’s nothing,” I said, “give it up.”

“Why should I?” he flared. “I want-“

“What’s the matter with you this summer, Remy?” I asked. “Why are you so prickly?”

“I’m not-” he began. Then he flushed and lay back against the hillside, covering his eyes with his arm. “Sorry, Shadow,” he said gently after a while. “I don’t know what it is. I just feel restless and irritable. Growing pains, I guess. And I guess it bothers me that I don’t have any special outstanding Gift like you do. I guess I’m groping to find out what I’m supposed to do. Do you think it’s because we’re part Outsider? Remember, Mother’s a Blend.”

“I know,” I said, “but Mother managed to work out all her difficulties. You will too. You wait and see. Besides, a lot of kids that aren’t Blends don’t develop their Gifts until later. Just be patient.” Then I sighed without sound, thinking that to tell Remy to be patient was like telling the Cayuse to flow uphill.

It wasn’t until we were at the supper table that I remembered my find of the day. “I found gold today!” I said, feeling a flush of pleasure warming my face. “Real unmanufactured gold!”

“Well!” Father’s fork paused in mid-air. “That’s pretty good for a second week. When do we start carting it away? Will a bucket do, or shall I get a wheelbarrow?”

“Oh, Father, don’t tease,” I said. “You know this isn’t gold-like-that country! It was just a short wire of it, six feet inside a granite slope. But now I know what gold feels like-and silver and-and something slender and shiny-“

I broke off, suddenly not wanting to detail all my findings. Fortunately my last words were swallowed up in activity as Remy cleared the table so Mother could bring in the dessert. It was his table week and my dishes week.

Remy put in the next morning hacking and grubbing to clear the underbrush out of some of the campsites along Cayuse Creek. Very few people ever come this far into the wilderness, but the Forestry Service has set up several camp places for them just in case, and Father had this area this summer. Any other year he’d be spending his time in his physics lab back with The Group, trying to find gadgets to help Outsiders do what The People do without gadgets.

Anyway, Father released Remy after lunch and I talked him into going metal Sensing with me.

“Shall I bring Father’s bucket?” he teased. “It might be diamonds this time!”

“Diamonds!” I wrinkled my nose at him. “I’m metal Sensing, goon-child. Even you know diamonds aren’t metal!”

I didn’t do much Sensing on the way out, what with his chasing me over the ridge for my impertinence to my elders-he’s a year older-and my chasing him up-creek for chasing me across the ridge. We were both laughing and panting by the time we got to the Chimneys.

The Chimneys? “Wait-” I held out my hand and we stopped in mid-flight. “I just remembered. Remy, what’s slender and shiny and not iron and complicated?”

“What do you mean, slender? How slender? How complicated?” Remy sat cross-legged in the air beside me. “Is it a riddle?”

“It’s a riddle, all right, but I don’t know the answer.” And I told him all about it.

“Well, let’s go over and see,” he said, his eyes shining, his ears fairly quivering with interest. “If it’s something at the Selkirk, at least we know where it is.” We started off again.

“Can’t you remember anything that’d give you any idea of its size?”

“No-o-o,” I said thoughtfully. “It could be most any size from a needle up to-up to-” I was measuring myself alongside my memory. “Gee, Remy! It could be higher than my head!”

“And shiny?” he asked. “Not rusted?”

“Shiny and not rusted.”

We were soon hovering over the old Selkirk mine, looking down on the tailings dump, the scant clutter of falling-apart shacks at the mine opening.

“Somewhere there-” I started, when suddenly Remy caught me by the arm and we plummeted down like falling stars. I barely had time to straighten myself for landing before we were both staggering into the shelter of the aspens at the foot of the dump.

“What on earth!” I began.

“Hush!” Remy gestured violently. “Someone came out of the shack up there. An Outsider! You know we can’t let Outsiders see us lifting! And we were right overhead!”

“I didn’t even know there was anyone in the area,” I said.

“No one has checked in since we got here this spring. Can you see them from here?”

Remy threaded his way through the clump of aspen and was peering out dramatically, twining himself around the trunk of a tree that wasn’t nearly big enough to hide him.

“No,” he said. “The hill hides him. Or them. I wonder how many there are.”

“Well, let’s stop lurking like criminals and go up and see,” I said. “It’s only neighborly-“

The trail up to the Selkirk was steep, rocky, and overgrown with brush and we were both panting when we got to the top.

“Hi!” yelled Remy, “anybody home?” There was no answer except the squawk of a starred jay. “Hey!” he yelled again, “anyone here?”

“Are you sure you saw someone?” I asked, “or is this another-“

“Sure I saw someone!” Remy was headed for the sagging shack that drooped against the slope of the hill.

It was too quick for me even to say a word to Remy. It would have been forever too late to try to reach him, so I just lifted his feet out from under him and sent him sprawling to the ground under the crazy paneless window of the shack. His yell of surprise and anger was wiped out by an explosive

roar. The muzzle of a shotgun stabbed through the window, where smoke was eddying.

“Git” came a tight, cold voice. “Git going back down that trail. There’s plenty more buckshot where that came from.”

“Hey, wait a minute.” Remy hugged the wall under the window. “We just came to see-“

“That’s what I thought.” The gun barrel moved farther out. “Sneaking around. Prying-“

“No,” I said. “You don’t yell ‘hi’ when you’re sneaking. We just wondered who our neighbors were. We don’t want to pry. If you’d rather, we’ll go away. But we’d like to visit with you-” I could feel the tension lessening and saw the gun waver.

“Doesn’t seem like they’d send kids,” the voice muttered, and a pale, old face wavered just inside the window. “You from the FBI?” the old man asked.

“FBI”? Remy knelt under the window, his eyes topping the sill. “Heck, no. What would the FBI be wanting up here?”

“Allen says the government-” He stopped and blinked. I caught a stab of sorrow from him that made me catch my breath. “Allen’s my son,” he said, struggling with some emotion or combination of emotions I hadn’t learned to read yet.

“Allen says nobody can come around, especially G-men-” He ran one hand through his heavy white hair. “You don’t look like G-men.”

“We’re not,” I laughed. “You just ask your son.”

“My son?” The gun disappeared and I could hear the thump of the butt on the splintered old floor of the shack.

“My son-” It was a carefully controlled phrase, but I could hear behind it a great soaring wall. “My son’s busy,” he said briskly. “And don’t ask what’s he doing. I won’t tell you. Go on away and play. We got no time for kids.”

“We just wanted to say ‘hi,’” I hastened before Remy could cloud up at being told to go play. “And to see if you need anything-“

“Why should we need anything?” The voice was cold again and the muzzle of the gun came back up on the sill, not four inches from Remy’s startled eyes. “I have the plans. Practically everything was ready-” Again the hinting stab of sorrow came from him and another wave of that mixture of emotions, so heavy a wave that it almost blinded me and the next thing I knew, Remy was helping me back down the trail. As soon as we were out of sight of the shack, we lifted back to the aspen thicket. There I lay down on the wiry grass and, closing my eyes, I Channeled whatever the discomfort was, while Remy sat by sympathetically silent.

“I wonder what he’s so tender of up there,” he finally said after I had sighed and sat up.

“I don’t know, but he’s suffering from something. His thoughts don’t pattern as they should. It’s as though they were circling around and around a hard something he can’t accept nor deny.”

“Something slender and shiny and complicated?” said Remy idly.

“Well, yes,” I said, casting back into my mind. “Maybe it does have something to do with that, but there’s something really bad that’s bothering him.”

“Well, then, let’s figure out what that slender, shiny thing is, then maybe we can help him figure out that much-By the way, thanks for getting me out of range. I could have got perforated, but good-“

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think he was really aiming at you.”

“Aiming or not, I sure felt drafty there when I saw what he was holding.”

I smiled and went on with the original topic. “If only we could get up closer,” I said. “I’m not an expert at this Sensing stuff yet.”

“Well, try it anyway,” said Remy. “Read it to me and I’ll draw it and then we’ll see what it is.” He cleared a little space, shoving the aspen litter aside, and taking up a twig, held it poised.

“I’ve studied hardly a thing about shapes yet,” I said, lying back against the curve of the slope, “but I’ll try.” So I cleared my mind of everything and began to coax back the awareness of whatever the metal was at the Selkirk. I read it to Remy-all that metal so closely surrounded by the granite of the mountain and yet no intermingling! If you took away the metal there’d he nothing left but a tall, slender hole-My eyes flipped open. “The mine shaft!” I cried. “Whatever it is, it’s filling the mine shaft-the one that goes straight down. All the drifts take off from there!”

“So now we have a hole,” said Rainy. “Fill it up. And I’ll bet it’s just the old workings-the hoist-the cage—”

“No, it isn’t.” I closed my eyes and concentrated again, Sensing diagonally up through the hill and into the Selkirk Carefully I detailed it to Remy contour by contour.

“Hey!” I sat up, startled at Remy’s cry. “Look what we’ve made!” I leaned over his sketch, puzzling over the lines in the crumbly soil.

“It looks a little like a shell.” I said. “A rifle shell. Oh, my gosh! Do you suppose that’s what it is? That we’ve spent all of this time over a rifle shell?”

“If only we had some idea of relative size.” Remy deepened one of the lines.

“Well, it fills the hole it’s in,” I said. “The hole felt like a mine shaft and that thing fills it.”

“A rifle shell that big?” Remy flicked a leaf away with his twig. “Why that’d be big enough to climb into-“

Remy stiffened as though he had been jabbed. Rising to his knees, he grabbed my arm, his mouth opening wordlessly. He jabbed his twig repeatedly at the railings dump, yanking my arm at the same time.

“Remy!” I cried, alarmed at his antics. “What on earth’s the matter?”

“It’s-” he gasped. “It’s a rocket! A rocket! A spaceship! That guy’s building a spaceship and he’s got it down in the shaft of the Selkirk!”

Remy babbled in my ear all the way home, telling again and again why it had to be a spaceship and, by the time we got home, I began to believe him. The sight of the house acted as an effective silencer for Remy.

“This is a secret,” he hissed as we paused on the porch before going into the house. “Don’t you dare say a word to anyone!”

I promised and kept my promise but I was afraid for Remy all evening. He’s as transparent as a baby when he gets excited and I was afraid he’d give it away any minute. Both Mother and Father watched him and exchanged worried looks-he acted feverish. But somehow we made it through the evening.

His arguments weren’t nearly so logical by the cold light of early morning and his own conviction and enthusiasms were thinned by the hard work he had to put in before noon at the campsites.

Armed with half a cake and a half-dozen oranges, we cautiously approached the Selkirk that afternoon. My shoulders felt rigid as we approached the old shack and I Sensed apprehensively around for the shotgun barrel-I knew that shape! But nothing happened. No one was home.

“Well, dern!” Remy sat down by me on a boulder near the door. “Where d’you suppose he went?”

“Fishing, maybe,” I suggested. “Or to town.”

“We would have seen him if he were fishing on the Cayuse. And he’s an Outsider-he’d have to use the road to go to town, and that goes by our place.”

“He could have hiked across the hills instead,”

“That’d be silly. He’d just parallel the road that way.”

“Well, since he isn’t here-” I paused, lifting an inquiring eyebrow.

“Yeah! Let’s do. Let’s go take a look in the shaft!” Remy’s eyes were bright with excitement. “Put this stuff somewhere where the ants won’t get into the cake. We’ll eat it later, if he doesn’t turn up.”

We scrambled across the jumble of broken rock that was the top of the dump, but when we arrived where the mouth of the shaft should be, there was nothing but more broken rock. We stumbled and slipped back and forth a couple of times before I perched up on a boulder and, closing my eyes, Sensed for metal.

It was like being in a shiny, smooth flood. No matter on which side of me I turned, the metal was there and, with that odd illusion that happens visually sometimes, the metal under me suddenly seemed to cup upward and contain me instead of my perching over it. It was frightening and I opened my eyes.

“Well?” asked Remy, impatiently.

“It’s there,” I said. “It’s covered over, but it’s there. We’re too close, now, though. I can’t get any idea of shape at all. It could be a barn door or a sheet of foil or a solid cube. All I know is that it’s metal, it’s under us, and there’s lots of it.”

“That’s not much help.” Remy sagged with disappointment.

“No, it’s not,” I said.

“Let’s lift,” said Remy. “You did better from the air.”

“Lift? With him around?”

“He’s not around now,” said Remy.

“He might be and we just don’t Sense him.”

“How could we keep from it?” asked Remy. “We can always Sense Outsiders. He has no way to shield-“

“But if that thing’s a rocket and he’s in it, that means he’d be shielded-and that means there’s some way to get in it-“

We looked at each other and then scrambled down the dump. It was pretty steep and rugged and we lifted part of the way. Otherwise we might have ended up at the bottom of a good-sized rockslide-us under. We searched the base of the hill, trying to find an entrance. We searched all afternoon, stopping only a few minutes to shake the ants off of and out of the cake and eat it and the oranges, burying the peels carefully before we went back to work. We finally gave up, just before sunset, and sprawled in the aspen thicket at the base of the dump, catching our breath before heading home.

I raised up on one elbow, peering upward to the heights 1 couldn’t see. “He’s there now,” I said, exasperated. “He’s back. How’d he get past us?”

“I’m too tired to care,” said Remy, rubbing the elbow he’d banged against a rock-and that’s pretty tired for Remy.

“He’s crying,” I said softly. “He’s crying like a child.”

“Is he hurt?” Remy asked, straightening.

“No-o-o, I don’t think so,” I said, trying to reach him more fully. “It’s sorrow and loneliness-that’s why he’s crying.”

We went back the next day. This time I took a deep-dish apple pie along. Most men have a sweet tooth and miss desserts the most when they’re camping. It was a juicy pie and, after I had dribbled juice down the front of me and down onto Remy where he lifted below, I put it into a nice, level inanimate lift and let it trail behind me.

I don’t know exactly what we expected, but it was rather an anticlimax to be welcomed casually at the Selkirk-no surprise, no shotgun, no questions, but plenty of thanks for the pie. Between gulps and through muffling mouthfuls, we learned that the old man’s name was Thomas.

“Should have been Doubting Thomas,” he told us unhappily. “Didn’t believe a word my son said. And when he used up all our money buying-” He swallowed hard and blinked and changed the subject.

We never did find out much about him and, of course, ignored completely whatever it was in the shaft of the Selkirk. At least we did that trip and for many more that followed. Remy was learning patience the hard way, but I must admit he was doing wonderfully well for Remy. One thing we didn’t find out was the whereabouts of his son. Most of the time for Thomas his son had no other name except My Son. Sometimes he talked as though his son were just over the hill. Other times he was so long gone that he was half forgotten.

Not long after we got on visiting terms with Tom, I felt I’d better alert Remy. “He’s not completely sane,” I told him.

“Sometimes he’s as clear as can be. Other times his thoughts are as tangled as baling wire.”

“Old age,” suggested Remy. “He’s almost eighty.”

“It might be,” I said. “But he’s carrying a burden of some kind. If I were a Sorter, I could Go-In to him and tell what it is, hut every time he thinks of whatever is troubling him, his thoughts hurt him and get all tangled up.”

“Harmless, though,” said Remy.

“Yes?” I brought back to his mind the shotgun blast we had been greeted with. Remy moved uneasily. “We startled him then,” he said.

“No telling what will startle him. Remember, he’s not always tracking logically. We’d better tread lightly for a while.”

One day about a week later, a most impatient week for Remy, we were visiting with Tom again-or rather watching him devour half a lemon pie at one sitting-when we got off onto mines and mining towns.

“Father said the Selkirk was quite a mine when it was new. They took over a million dollars’ worth of silver out of her. Are you working her any?” Remy held his breath as he waited Tom’s response to this obvious fishing.

“No,” said Tom. “I’m not a miner. Don’t know anything about mines and ores and stuff. I was a sheet metal man before I retired.” He frowned and stirred uneasily. “I can’t remember much of what I used to do. My memory isn’t so good any more. Not since my son filled me up with this idea of getting to the moon.” I felt Remy freeze beside me. “He’s talked it so much and worked at it so hard and sunk everything we ever owned into it that I can’t think of anything else any more either. It’s like a horn blaring in my ears all the time. Gets so bad sometimes—” He pressed his hands to his ears and shook his head.

“How soon will you be blasting off?” Remy asked carefully casually.

“My son says there’s only a little left to do. I ought to be able to figure it out from the plans.”

“Where is your son?” asked Remy softly.

“My son’s-” Tom stopped and frowned, “My sons-” His eyes clouded over and his face set woodenly. “My son said no one was to come around. My son said everyone had to stay away.” His voice was rising and he came to his feet.

“My son said they’d come and try to stop us!” The voice went up another notch. “He said they’d come snooping and take the ship away!” He was yelling now. “He said to keep them away! Keep them away until he-until he-” His voice broke and he grabbed for the nearest chunk of rock. I reached out quickly with my mind and opened his hand so it dropped the rock and, while he was groping for another, Remy and I took off down the hill, wordless and shaken. We clutched each other at the foot of the slope.

“It is a rocket!” stuttered Remy, shaken with delight. “I told you sol A real rocket! A moon rocket!”

“He kept saying ‘my son said,’” I shivered. “Something’s wrong about that son of his.”

“Why worry about that?” exulted Remy. “He’s got a spacecraft of some kind and it’s supposed to go to the moon.”

“I worry about that,” I said, “because every time he says ‘my son’ his mind tangles more. That’s what triggered this madness.”

Well, when we got back home, almost bursting with the news we couldn’t share, Mother was brisking around gathering up some essential things. “It’s an emergency,” she said.

“Word came from the Group. Dr’. Curtis is bringing a patient out to us and he needs me. Shadow, you’re to Come with me. This will be a good chance for you to begin on real diagnosis. You’re old enough now. Remy, you be good and take care of your father. You’d better be the cook and no more than two meals a day of fried eggs!”

“But, Mother-” Remy looked at me and frowned.

“Shadow-“

“Yes?” Mother turned from the case she was packing.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, his bottom lip pushing forward in his disappointment.

“Well, this’ll have to be your exclusive little red wagon, now,” I murmured as he reached down a case for me from the top shelf of the closet. “But drag it mighty carefully. If in doubt-lift !”

“I’ll wave to you as we go by, headed for the moon!” he teased.

“Rainy,” I paused with a handful of nightgown poised above the case. “It might still be all a mad dream of Tom’s. We’ve never seen the rocket. We’ve never seen the son. I could be misreading the metal completely. It’ll be fun if you can find out for sure, but don’t get your heart set on it too much. And be careful!”

Mother and I decided to take the pickup truck because Father had the forestry jeep and we might need transportation if we went among Outsiders. So we loaded in our cases. Mother got in touch with Father and told him good-by. As the pickup lifted out of the yard and drifted upward and away over the treetops, I leaned out and waved at Remy, who was standing forlornly on the front porch.

It was a wonderful two weeks-in a solemn sort of way. We have a very small hospital. The People are pretty healthy, but Dr. Curtis, who is an Outsider friend of ours, brings patients out every so often for Mother to help him diagnose. That’s her Gift-to put her hands on the suffering and read what the trouble is. So when he’s completely puzzled with a case, he brings it out to Mother. She’s too shy to go Outside. Besides, the People function more efficiently when they are among their own.

It wasn’t an easy two weeks because a Sensitive must experience whatever the patient is experiencing. Even if it is vicarious, it’s still very real and very uncomfortable, especially for a beginner such as I am. One evening I thought I was going to die when I got so caught up in the smothering agony of a seizure that I forgot to Channel and lost my way in the suffering. Mother had to rescue me and give me back my breath.

When we finally finished at the hospital, we headed home again. I felt as though I were ten years older-as though I had left home as a child and returned as an adult. I bad forgotten completely about Tom and the rocket and had to grope for memory when Remy hissed to me, “It’s real!” Then memory went off like a veritable rocket of its own and I nearly burst with excitement.

There was no opportunity that night to find out any details, but it made pleasant speculation before I fell asleep. Next morning we left right after breakfast, lifting into the shivery morning chill, above the small mists that curled up from the cienega where antelope grazed, ankle-deep in the pooling water or belly-deep in dew-heavy wild flowers.

“No campsites?” I asked, as we left the flats behind us.

“I finished them last week,” said Remy. “Father said I could have some time off. Which is a real deal because Tom needs so much help now.” Remy frowned down at me as he lifted above me. “I’m worried, Shadow. He’s sick. I mean more than a wandery mind. I’m afraid he’ll be Called before—”

“Before the ship is done?” I asked with a squeeze in my heart that he should be still so preoccupied with his own dream.

“Exactly!” flashed Remy. “But I’m not thinking of myself alone. Sure I want the ship finished, and I want in it and out into Space. But I know Tom now and I know he’s only living for this flight and it’s bigger to him than his hope of Heaven or fear of Hell. You see, I’ve met his son-“

“You have!” I reached for his arm. “Oh, Remy! Really! Is he as-uh-eccentric as Tom? Do you like him? Is he-” I stopped. Remy was close to me. I should have been able to read his “yes” or “no” from the plainest outer edges of his thinking, but he was closed to me.

“What’s wrong, Remy?” I asked in a subdued voice. “Is he worse than Tom? Won’t he let you-“

“Wait and ask Tom,” said Remy. “He tells me every day. He’s like a child and he’s decided he can trust me so he talks and talks and talks and always the same thing.” Remy swallowed visibly. “It takes some getting used to-at least for me. Maybe for you-“

“Remy!” I interrupted. “We’re almost there and we’re still airborne. We’d better-“

“Not necessary,” he said. “Tom’s seen me lift lots of times and use lots of our Signs and Persuasions.” Remy laughed at my astonishment. “Don’t worry. It’s no betrayal. He just thinks I’ve gone to a newfangled school. He marvels at what they teach nowadays and is quite sure I can’t spell for sour apples or tell which is the longest river in South America. I told you he’s like a child. He’ll accept anything except the fact-” We were slanting down to the Selkirk.

“‘The fact-” I prompted. Then instinctively looked for a hiding place. Tom was waiting for us.

“Hi!” His husky, unsurprised voice greeted us as we landed. “So the sister got back? She’s almost as good in the air as you are, isn’t she? You two must have got an early start this morning. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

I was shocked by his haggard face and the slow weakness of his movements. I could read illness in his eyes, but I winced away from the idea of touching his fragile shoulders or cramped chest to read the illness that was filling him to exhaustion. We sat quietly on the doorstep and smelled the coffee he brewed for breakfast and waited while he worried down a crumbly slice of bread. And that was his breakfast.

“‘I told my sister about the ship,” Remy said gently.

“The ship-” His eyes brightened. “Don’t trust many people to show them the ship, but if she’s your sister, I trust her. But first-” His eyes closed under the weight of sorrow that flowed almost visibly down over his face. “First I want her to meet my son. Come on in.” He stepped back and Remy followed him into the shack. I bundled up my astonishment and followed them.

“Remember how we looked for an entrance?” grinned Remy. “Tom’s not so stupid!”

I don’t know what all Tom did with things that clanked and pulleys that whined and boards that parted in half, but the end result was a big black square in the middle of the floor of the shack. It led down into a dark nothingness, “He goes down a ladder,” whispered Remy as Tom’s tousled head disappeared. “But I’ve been having to help him hold on. He’s getting awfully weak.”

So, as we dropped down through the trapdoor, I lent my help along with Remy’s and held the trembling old hands around the ladder rungs and steadied the feeble old knees as Tom descended. At the bottom of the ladder, Tom threw a switch and the subdued glow of a string of lights lead off along a drift.

“My son rigged up the lights,” Tom said, “The generator’s over by the ship.” There was a series of thuds and clanks and a shower of dust sprinkled us liberally as the door above swung shut again.

We walked without talking along the drift behind Tom as he scurried along the floor that had been worn smooth in spots by countless comings and goings.

The drift angled off to one side and when I rounded the corner I cried out softly. The roof had collapsed and the jaggedy tumble of fallen rock almost blocked the drift. There was just about edging-through space between the wall and the heaped-up debris.

“You’d better Channel,” whispered Rainy.

“You mean when we have to scrape past-” I began.

“Not that kind of Channeling,” said Rainy.

The rest of his words were blotted out in the sudden wave of agony and sorrow that swept from Tom and engulfed me-not physical agony, but mental agony. I gasped and Channeled as fast as I could, but the wet beads from that agony formed across my forehead before I could get myself guarded against it.

Tom was kneeling by the heaped-up stones, his eyes intent upon the floor beside them. I moved closer. There was a small heap of soil beside a huge jagged boulder. There was a tiny American flag standing in the soil, and, above it on the boulder, was painted a white cross, inexpertly, so that the excess paint wept down like tears.

“This,” mourned Tom almost inaudibly, “is my son-“

“Your son!” I gasped. “Your son!”

“I can’t take it again,” whispered Remy. “I’m going on to the ship and get busy. He’ll tell it whether anyone’s listening or not. But each time it gets a little shorter. It took all morning the first time.” And Remy went on down the drift, a refugee from a sorrow he couldn’t ease.

“-so I said I’d come out and help him.” Tom’s voice became audible and I sank down on the floor beside him.

“His friends had died-Jug, of pneumonia, Buck, from speeding in his car to tell my son he’d figured out some angle that bad them stopped. And there my son was-no one to help him finish-no one to go out to Space with, so I said I’d come out and help him. We could live on my pension. We had to, because all our money was spent on the ship. All our money and a lot more has gone into the ship. I don’t know how they got started or who got the idea or who drew the plans or which one of them figured out how to make it go, but they were in the service together and I think they must have pirated a lot of the stuff. That’s maybe why they were so afraid the government would find them. I don’t hold with dishonesty and mostly my son don’t either, but he was in on it along with the other two and I think he wanted to go more than any of them. It was like a fever in his blood. He used to say, ‘If I can’t make it alive, I want to make it dead. What a burial! Blackness of Outer Space for my shroud-a hundred million stars for my candles and the music of the spheres for my requiem!’ And here he lies-all in the dark-” Tom’s whole body dropped and he nearly collapsed beside me.

“I heard the crack and crumble,” he whispered urgently. “I heard the roof give away. I heard him yell, ‘No! Not down here!’ and I saw him race for the ship and I saw the rocks come down and I saw the dust billow out-” His voice was hardly audible, his face buried in his hands. “The lights didn’t go. They’re strung along the other wall. After the dust settled, I saw-I saw my son. Only his hand-only his hand reaching-reaching for Space and a hundred million stars. Reaching-asking-wanting.” He turned to me, his face awash with tears. “I couldn’t move the rock. I couldn’t push life back into him. I couldn’t save my son, but I swore that I’d take his ship into Space-that I’d take something of his to say he made it, too. So I gave him the flag to hold. The one he meant to put where the other moon-shot, landed. ‘Litterbugs!’ he called them for messing up the moon. He was going to put this flag there instead-so small it wouldn’t clutter up the landscape. So he’s been holding it all this time-and as soon as Remy and I get the ship to going, we’ll take the flag and-and-“

His eyes brightened and I helped him-shielding strongly from him-to his feet. “You can come, too, if you bring one of those lemon pies!” He had paid his admission ticket of sorrow and was edging past the heap of fallen rock.

“We’ll save that to celebrate with when we get back,” I said.

“Get back?” He smiled over his shoulder. “We’re only going. We have a capsule to send back with all the information, and a radio to keep in touch as long as we can, but we never said anything about coming back. Why should we ever come back?”

Stunned, I watched him edge out of sight off down the drift, his sorrow for the moment behind him. I leaned against the wall, waiting for my Channeling to be complete. I looked down at the small mound of earth and the quietly drooping flag and cried in a sudden panic-“We can’t handle this alone! Not a one-way trip.”

I clasped my hands over my mouth, but Tom was gone. I hurried after him, the echo of my feet slipping on the jagged rocks canceling out the frightened echo of my voice.

As I followed Tom down the drift I was trying frantically to find some way out of this horrible situation. Finally I smiled, relieved. “We just won’t go,” I said aloud. “We just won’t go—”

And then I saw the ship, curving gently up into the darkness of the covered shaft. It was almost with a feeling of recognition that I saw and sensed the quiet, efficient beauty of her, small, compact, lovely, and I saw inside where everything flowed naturally into everything else, where one installation merged so logically and beautifully into another. I stood and felt the wonderful wholeness of the ship. It wasn’t something thrown together of tags and leftovers. It had grown, taking into itself each component part and assimilating it. It was a beautiful, functional whole, except for-I followed the unfinished feeling and found Tom and Remy where they were working together. Tom’s working consisted of holding a corner of a long sheet of diagrams while he dozed the facile doze of age and weariness. Remy had wound himself around behind some sort of panel and was making mysterious noises.

“Finally get here?” His voice came hollowly. “Take a look at the plans, will you? Tom left his reading specs in the shack. See where-” and his speech went off into visualization of something that was lovely to look at but completely incomprehensible to me. I gently took the sheet from Tom.

He snorted and his eyes opened. He half grinned and closed his eyes again. I looked at the sheet. Lines went all over it. There were wiggly lines bisecting other lines and symbols all over it, but I couldn’t find anywhere the thing Remy had showed me.

“He must have the wrong paper,” I said. “There’s nothing here like you want. There’s only-” and I visualized back at him.

“Why, it’s right there!” And he showed me a wiggly sign and equated it to the picture he had given me.

“Well, how am I to tell what’s what when it’s put down in such a mysterious way!” I was annoyed. Remy’s feet wiggled and he emerged backward.

“Ha!” he said, taking the sheet from me. “Anybody knows what a schematic diagram is. Anybody can see that this”-he waved it at me-“is this.” And he showed me mentally a panel full of complications that I never could have conceived of.

“Well, maybe anyone can, but I can’t,” I said. “When did you learn to read this? In school?”

“‘Course not in school,” said Remy. ”Tom showed me all the plans of the stuff that was left to do. He couldn’t figure them out, so I’m doing it. No sweat.”

“Remy,” I said, pointing to a cluster of symbols on the page. “What’s that?”

“Why, this, of course.” And he visualized back the things that were symbolized.

“Had you ever seen any of those parts before?” I asked seriously.

“No.” Remy put down his tools and his own seriousness matched mine. “What use would they be around The People? They’re things Tom’s son brought.”

“But you looked at all this-this-” I waved the page at him. “And you knew what went where?”

“Why, of course,” said Remy. “How could I help it when there the thing is before me, big as life and twice as natural. Anybody-“

“Stop saying ‘of course’ and ‘anybody,’” I said. “Remy, don’t you realize that to most people these marks are nonsense until they put in hours and even years of study? Don’t you realize that most people can’t see three dimensionally from something two dimensioned? Don’t you know even with study it takes a special knack to see the thing complete when you’re working with blueprints and diagrams? A special knack-” My voice slowed. “A special Gift? Oh, Remy!

“Special Gift?” Remy took the plan from my hand and looked at it. “You mean you can’t see this solid enough that you could almost pick it up off the paper?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just lines and odd marks.”

“And when we looked at the plans for the addition to the cabin the other night, couldn’t you see that funny little room sitting on the paper?”

“No,” I said, smiling at the memory. “Is that why you pinched at the paper?”

“Yes,” Remy grinned. “I was trying to pick it up, to show Father that it wasn’t quite right along the back wall, but he found the mistake in the plans and changed it. That straightened the back wall out okay.”

“Remy,” I caught his eyes with mine. “Maybe you do have a special Gift. Maybe this is what you’ve been looking for! Oh, Remy!”

“Special Gift ” Remy’s eyes were clouded with speculation. “Special Gift?”

I looked around the compartment where we were. “You changed some things, didn’t you?”

“Not much,” he said absently, still busy with his thoughts.

“A few minor shapings that didn’t look right-didn’t fit exactly.”

“That’s why it all goes together so wonderfully, now. Oh, Remy, I’ll bet you’ve found your Gift!”

Remy looked down at the paper. “My Gift!” His eyes glowed. “And it’s to take me into Space!”

“But not back?’ Tom’s shaken voice startled us. “Strictly a one-way trip. We’ve got a capsule-“

“Yeah, Tom, yeah,” said Remy, rolling his eyes at me.

“Strictly a one-way trip.”

I felt an awful cave-in inside me and my lips were stiff with fear. “Remy, you can’t mean that! To go into Space and never come back!”

“It’d be worth it, wouldn’t it?” he asked, beginning to crawl back behind the panel again. ”Tom, will you go get my yellow-handled screwdriver? I left it in the drift by the tool chest.”

“Sure, sure!” Tom scrambled to his feet and shuffled away.

“For Pete’s sake” hissed Remy, his eyes glaring around the end of the panel. “Go along with the gag! Don’t get into an argument with Tom. I tried it once and he nearly died of it-and so did I. He got his shotgun again. He’s going out to Space, like making a trip to the cemetery. He knows he’ll never make it back and he wouldn’t want it any other way.

All he wants is that little flag on the moon and his body somewhere out there. But he wants it so much we’ve got to give it to him. I’m not fool enough to want to leave my bones out there. Give me credit for a little brains!”

“Then it’s okay? There is a way to bring the ship back?”

“It’s okay! It’s okay!” Remy’s voice came muffled from behind the panel. “Hand me back the screwdriver when Tom gets here with it.”

So the days went, much too fast for us. We were working against the deadline of summer’s ending and the fatal moment when Father and Mother would finally question our so-long absence from the cabin. So far we’d skipped the explanations. So it was that I felt a great release of tension on the day when Remy put down a tool, wiped his hands slowly on his jeans, and said quietly, “It’s finished.”

Tom’s face went waxen and I was afraid he’d faint. I felt my face go scarlet and I was afraid I’d explode.

“Finished,” whispered Tom. “Now my son can go into Space. I’ll go tell him.” And he shuffled off.

“How are we ever going to talk Mother and Father into letting us go?” I asked. “I doubt that even with the ship all ready-“

“We can’t tell them,” said Remy. “They don’t have to know.”

“Not tell them?” I was aghast. “Go on an expedition like this and not tell them? We can’t!”

“We must.” Remy had put on a measure of maturity he had never showed before. “I know very well they’d never let us go if they knew. So you’ve got to keep the secret-even after we’re gone.”

“Keep the secret! You’re not going without me. Where did you get such a fool idea! If you think for one minute-” I was shrieking now. Remy took hold of my arm.

“Be quiet!” he said, shaking me lightly. “I couldn’t possibly let you go along under the circumstances. You’ve got to stay-“

“Under the circumstances,” I repeated, my eyes intent on his face. “Remy, is there a way to bring the ship back?”

“I said there was, didn’t I?” Remy returned my look steadily.

“To bring the Ship back under its own power?”

Remy’s hand dropped from my arm. “It’ll get back all right. Stop worrying.”

“Remy.” It was my turn to take his arm. “Have you the instructions for a return flight? Tom said-“

“No,” said Remy. His voice was hard and impersonal.

“There are no instructions for a return flight-nor for the flight out. But I’ll make it-there and back. if not with the ship, then by myself.”

“Remy! You can’t!” My protest crowded out of the horrified tumult of my thoughts. “Even the Old Ones wouldn’t try it without a ship and they have all the Signs and Persuasions among them. You can’t Motive the whole craft by yourself. You’re not strong enough. You can’t break it out of orbit-Oh, Remy!” I was almost sobbing. “You don’t even know all the things-inertia-trajectory-gravitational pull-it’s too complicated. No one could do it by himself! Not even the two of us together!”

Remy moved away from my hand. “There’s no question of your going,” he said. “You told me-this is my own little red wagon and I’ll find some way of dragging it, even if a wheel comes off along the way.” He smiled a little and then sobered.

“Look, Shadow, it’s for Tom. He’s so wrapped up in this whole project that there’s literally nothing for him in this life but the ship and the trip. He’d have died long ago if this hope hadn’t kept him alive. You haven’t touched him unshielded or you’d know in a second that he was Called months ago and is stubbornly refusing to go. I doubt if he’ll live through blastoff, even with all the shielding I can give him. But I’ve got to take him, Shadow. I’ve just got to. It-it-I can’t explain it so it makes sense, but it’s as necessary for me to do this for Tom as it is for Tom to do it. Why he’s even forgotten God except as a spy who might catch us in the act and stop us. I think even the actual blastoff or one look at the Earth from Space will Purge him and he will submit to being Called and go to where his son is waiting, just the Otherside.

“I’ve got to give him his dream.” Remy’s voice faltered.

“Young people have time to dream and change their dreams, but old people Like Tom have time for only one dream, and if that fails them-“

“But, Remy,” I whispered forlornly. “You might never make it back.”

“It is in the hands of The Power,” he said soberly. “If I’m to be Called, I’m to be Called.”

“I don’t think you’re right,” I said thickly, finding it difficult after all these years to contradict Remy in anything of importance. “You’re trying to catch the sun in a sieve-and you’ll die of it!” Tears were wet on my face. “I can’t let you I can’t-“

“It isn’t for you to say “no’ or ‘go,’” said Remy, flatly. “If you won’t help, don’t hinder-“

Tom was back, holding out his hands, bloodstained across the palms.

“Come help me,” he panted. “I can’t get the rocks off my son-“

Remy and I exchanged astonished glances.

“But, Tom-” I took one of his hands in mine to examine the cut flesh-and was immediately caught up in Death! Death rolled over me like a smothery cloud. Death shrieked at me from every corner of my mind. Death! Death! Rebellious, struggling Death! Nothing of the solemn Calling. Nothing of preparation for returning to the Presence. I forced my stiff fingers to open and dropped his hand. Remy had my other hand, pulling me away from Tom, his eyes anxiously on me.

“But, Tom,” he said into the silence my dry mouth couldn’t fill, “we’re going to take the little flag. Remember? That’s to be the memorial for your son-“

“I promised my son I’d go into Space with him,” said Tom serenely. “It cuts both ways. He’s going into Space with me. Only there are so many rocks. Come help me, you kids. We don’t want to be late.” He wiped his palms on the seat of his pants and started back down the drift.

“Wait,” called Remy. “You help us first. We can’t go anywhere until we fuel up. You’ve got to show me the fuel dump. You promised you would when the ship was finished. Well, it’s finished now-all but pumping the fuel in.”

Tom stopped. “That’s right,” nodded his head. “That’s right.” He laughed. The sound of it crinkled my spine. “I’m nobody’s fool. Always keep an ace in the hole.”

We followed him down another drift. “Wonder what fuel they have,” said Remy. “Tom either wouldn’t say, or didn’t know. Never could get a word out of him about it except it would be there when we were ready for it. The fuel compartment was finished before we ever found him. He wouldn’t let me go in there. He has the key to it.”

“It’s awfully far from the ship,” I worried. “How’re we going to get it back there?”

“Don’t know,” Remy frowned. “They must have had something figured out. But if it’s liquid-“

Tom had stopped at the padlocked door. He fumbled for a key and, after several abortive attempts, found the right one and opened the lock. He flung the door wide. There was a solid wall of metal blocking the door, a spigot protruding from it was the only thing that broke its blank expanse.

“Liquid, then,” whispered Remy. “Now, how on earth-“

Tom giggled at our expressions. “Used to keep water in here. ‘S’all gone now. Nothing but the fuel-” He pushed a section of the metal It swung inward. It had been cut into a rude door.

“There ‘tis,” cried Tom. “There ‘tis.”

At first we could see nothing because our crowding into the door shut out all the light that came from behind us; then Tom shuffled forward and the shaft of light followed him. He stopped and fumbled, then turned to us, lifting his burden triumphantly. “Here ‘tis,” he repeated. “You gotta put it in the ship. Here’s the key to the compartment. I’ll go get my son.”

Remy grasped and almost dropped the thing Tom had given him. It was a box or something like a box. A little more rectangular than square, but completely featureless except for a carrying handle on each end and a smooth, almost mirrorlike surface on the top.

“What is it?” I asked. “How does it work?”

“I don’t know.” Remy was hunkered down by it on the floor, prodding at it with curious fingers.

“Maybe it’s a solid fuel of some kind. It must be. Tom says it’s the fuel.”

“But why such a big fuel compartment if this is all that goes in it?” I had sensed the big empty chamber several times-padlock and all.

“Well, the only answer I have to that is let’s go put it where it belongs and maybe we’ll see.”

We carried the object between us, back to the ship and into the fuel compartment-at least what was so labeled on the plans. We put it down on the spot indicated for it and fastened it down with the metal clamps that were situated in just the right places to hold the object. Then we stepped back and looked the situation over. The object sat there in the middle of the floor-plenty of room all around it and above it. The almost mirror surface reflected cloudily the ceiling above. There were no leads, no wires, no connections, nothing but the hold-clamps and they went no farther into the structure of the floor than was necessary to hold them secure.

“Remy?” I looked at his mystified face. “How does it work? Do the plans say?”

“There aren’t any plans about this room,” he said blankly, searching back in his memory of the plans that were available. “Only a label that says ‘fuel room.’ There’s one notation. I couldn’t figure it out before. It says, ‘After clamps are secure, coordinate and lift off!!!!’ With four exclamation points. That’s all. You see, Tom had only the plans for finishing the ship. Nothing for the actual trip.”

“And you thought you could-” I was horrified.

“Oh, relax, Shadow,” said Remy. “Of course I could see how everything fitted into everything and what the dial readings meant after we got started, but-” His voice stopped and his thoughts concentrated on the plans again. “Nowhere a starter button or lever-” He bit his lip and frowned down at the object. In the silence we heard a clatter of rock and Tom’s voice echoing eerily. “Come on out, Son. It’s time to go! Rise and shine!”

Both of us listened to Tom’s happy chant and we just looked at each other.

“What’ll we do, Shadow?” asked Remy helplessly. “What’ll we do?”

“Maybe Tom knows more about this,” I suggested.

“Maybe we can get him to talk.” I shuddered away from the memory of his hand in mine.

So we went to Tom where he was clawing at the broken rock, trying to free his son, the tiny flag still standing upright in the little mound of earth. Tom was prying at a rock that, if he freed it, would bring half the slide roaring down upon him.

“Tom!” Remy called. “Tom!” And finally got his attention.

“Come down here. I need help.”

Tom scrambled awkwardly down the slope, half falling the last little way. And I let him stumble because I couldn’t bear to touch him again.

“Tom, how does that fuel work?” Remy asked.

“Work? Why just like you’d think a fuel would work,” said Tom wonderingly. “You just install it and take off.”

“What connects it to the engines?” asked Remy. “You didn’t give me that part of the plans.”

“What engines?” grinned Tom.

“Whatever makes the ship go!” Remy’s patience was running out rapidly.

“My son makes the ship go,” said Tom, chuckling.

”Tom!” Remy took him by his frail shoulders and held him until the wander-eyes focused on his face. “Tom, the ship’s all ready to go, but I don’t know how to start it. Unless you can tell me, we-can’t-go!”

“Can’t go?” Tom’s eyes blinked with shock. “Can’t go? We have to go! We have to! I promised!” The contours of his face softened and sagged to a blur under the force of his emotion. “We gotta go!” He took Remy’s hands roughly off his shoulders and pushed him staggering away. “Stupid brat! ‘Course you can’t make it go! My son’s the only one that knows how!” He turned back to the heap of stone. “Son!” His voice was that of a stern parent. “Get outa there. There’s work to be done and you lie there lazing!” He began tearing again at the jagged boulders.

We moved away from him-away from the whirlwind of his emotions and the sobbing, half vocal panting of his breath. We retreated to the ladder that led up to the cabin, and, leaning against it, looked at each other.

“His son’s been under there for months-maybe a year,” Remy said dully. “If he uncovers him now-” He gulped miserably. “And I can’t make the ship go. After all your fussing about making the trip, and here I am stuck. But there are engines-at least there are mechanisms that work from one another after the flight begins. I don’t think that little box is all the fuel. I’ll bet there was liquid fuel somewhere and it’s all evaporated or run off or something.” He gulped again and leaned against the foot of the ladder.

“Oh, Shadow,” he mourned. “At first this was going to be my big deal. I was going to help Tom find his dream-and all on my own. It was my declaration of independence to show Father and Ron that I could do something besides show off-and I guess that was showing off, too. But, Shadow, I gave that all up-I mean showing them. All I wanted was for Tom-” His voice broke and he blinked fast. “And his son-” He turned away from me and my throat ached with his unshed tears.

“We’re not finished yet,” I said. “Come on back.”

There was a silence in the drift that sounded sudden. Nowhere could we hear Tom. Not a stone grated against another stone. Not a cry nor a mumbled word. Remy and I exchanged troubled looks as we neared the jagged heap of broken reek.

“Do you suppose he had a heart attack?” Remy hurried ahead of me, edging past the rockfall.

“Remy!” I gasped. “Oh, Remy, come back!” I had Sensed ahead of him and gulped danger like a massive swallow of fire. “Remy!” But it was too late. I heard him cry out and the sudden triumphant roar of Tom’s voice. “Gotcha!”

I pressed myself against the far side of the drift away from the narrow passageway and listened.

“Hey, Tom!” Remy’s voice was carefully unworried.

“What you got that cannon for? Looks big enough from this end for me to crawl in.”

“‘Tain’t not a cannon,” said Tom. “It’s a shotgun my son gave me to guard the ship so’st you couldn’t kill him and keep the ship from taking off. Now you’ve killed him anyway, but that’s not going to stop us.”

“I didn’t kill.-“

“Don’t lie to me!” The snarling fury in Tom’s voice scared me limp-legged. “He’s dead. I uncovered his hand-my son’s dead! And you did it! You pushed all that stuff down on him to try to hide your crime, but murder will out. You killed my son!”

“Tom, Tom,” Remy’s voice was coaxing. “I’m Remy, remember? You showed me where your son lay. Remember the little flag-“

“The little flag-” Tom’s voice was triumphant. “Sure, the little flag. He was going to put it on the moon. So you killed him. But now you’re going to put it on the moon-or die in the attempt.” He laughed. It sounded like two stones being rapped together. “Or die in the attempt! Get going!”

“But, Tom-there’s no fuel!” protested Remy.

“You got what was in the tank room, didn’t you?” demanded Tom. “Well, then, get to flying. My son said it would go. It’ll go!”

And I heard their footsteps die off down the drift and Remy’s distress came back to me like a scarlet banner.

“Shadow! Shadow!”

I don’t remember racing back to the ladder or opening the trapdoor or leaving the shack. My first consciousness of where I was came as I streaked over the ridge, headed for home. The stars-when had night come? the treetops, the curves of the hills all lengthened themselves into flat ribbons of speed behind me. I didn’t remember to activate my shield until my eyes were blinded with tears.

I hit the front porch so fast that I stumbled and fell and was brought up sharp with a rolling crash against the front door. Before I could get myself untangled, Mother and Father were there and Mother was checking me to see if I was hurt.

“I’m all right,” I gasped. “But Remy-Remy!”

“Shadow, Shadow-” Father gathered me up, big as I am, and carried me into the house and put me down on the couch. “Shadow, clear yourself before you try to begin. It’ll save time.” And I forced myself to lie back quietly, though my tears ran hotly down into both my ears-and let all the wild urgency and fear and distress drain out of my mind. Then, as we held each others’ hands, our three minds met in the wordless communication of The People.

Thoughts are so much faster than words and I poured out all the details in a wild rush-now and then feeling the guidance of my father leading me back to amplify or make clear some point I’d skidded by too fast.

“And now he’s there with a madman pointing a shotgun at him and he can’t do a thing-or maybe he’s already dead-“

“Can we handle him?” Father had turned to Mother.

“Yes,” she whispered whitely. “If we can get there in time.”

Again the meteoric streaking across the dark hills. And Mother’s reaching out ahead, trying to find Tom-reaching, reaching. After an eternity, we swung around the shoulder of a hill and there was the Selkirk-but different! Oh, different!

A shiny, needlesharp nose was towering above the shack, the broken rock and shale had been shed off on all sides like silt around an ant hole. And the ship! The ship was straining toward the stars! Even as we watched, the nose wavered and circled a wobbly little circle and settled back again, out of sight in the shadows.

“Remy’s trying to lift it!” I cried. “A thing that size! He’ll never make it-And then Tom-“

We watched the feeble struggle as the nose of the ship emerged again from the shaft not so far this time-much more briefly. It settled back with an audible crash and Mother caught her breath. “There!” she breathed, clasping her hands. “There!” Slowly she drifted down toward the shack, holding firmly whatever it was that she had caught. Father and I streaked to the shack and down the ladder. We rushed along the drift, past the huddle of rocks, and into the shaft. It took Father a fumbling eternity to find how to get into the ship. And there we found them both-Tom sprawled across his gun, his closed eyes sunken, his face a death mask of itself. And Remy-Remy was struggling to a sitting position, his hand pushing against the useless box from the tank room. He smiled a wavery smile and said in a dazed voice, “I have a little Shadow That goes in and out with me-And what can be the use of her-I see, I see, I see.-“

Then he was held tight in Father’s arms and I turned my tears away only to be gathered into Mother’s arms. And Tom slept peacefully the quiet sleep Mother had given him as we had a family-type wallow in tears and sobs and murmurs and exasperated shakings and all sorts of excited explanations and regrets.

It was a much more solemn conclave back at the house later on. Tom was still sleeping, but in our back bedroom now. I think Mother was afraid to waken him for fear the shock of opening his eyes on Earth might kill him. She had experienced his gigantic, not-to-be-denied, surge toward Space before she had Slept him, and knew it for the unquenchable fire it was.

Of course by the time we finally reduced to vocal words, most of the explanations had been made-the incredulity expressed, the reprimands given, and the repentance completed-but the problem of Tom was still unanswered.

“The simplest way, of course,” said Remy, “is just to write ‘finis’ to the whole thing, wake Tom up, and then hold his funeral.”

“Yes,” said Father. “That would be the simplest.”

“Of course, Mother and Shadow will have to be ready to Channel instantly to bypass that agonized moment when Tom realizes he has been betrayed.” Remy was inspecting his jagged thumbnail and didn’t meet Father’s eyes.

“Bethie, what do you think?” Father turned to Mother.

She blushed pinkly-that’s where I get my too-ready coloring up-and murmured, “I think we ought to look at the ship at least,” she said. “Maybe that would help us decide, especially if we have Ron look it over, too.”

“Okay, tomorrow.” Father parted the curtain at the big window. “Today.” He amended as he blinked at the steely gray light of dawn. “Today we’ll get in touch with him and take a look. After all, the ship is finished.” And he turned away with a sigh, only a faint quirk at the corner of his mouth to betray the fact that he knew Remy and I were having a hard time containing our jubilation.

After lunch-even our frantic impatience couldn’t pry Mother and Father away from what seemed such minor matters-Ron finally arrived and we all went out to took the ship over. Remy and I streaked on ahead of the others and I laughed as I caught myself visualizing me dusting the ship frantically from end to end so it’d look its best for our visitors.

There it was! The shaft at least, with the concealing shale and rock shed away on all sides. When we arrived above it, we could see the gleam of the nose of the ship. In all the excitement the night before, we had forgotten to conceal it. But it didn’t matter now. Soon that bright nose would be lifting! Remy and I turned joyous somersaults as we shot down to the old shack.

The men I include Remy in that-were like a hunch of kids with a new toy. They toured the ship, their eyes eager and seeking, their manner carefully casual, their hands touching and drinking in the wonder of it. A spacecraft! Remy’s replies to their questions were clipped and practically monosyllabic. His containment surprised me and I wondered if this was a foretaste of what he’d be like as an adult. Of course, Ron’s being there-the head Motiver of the Group-may have awed him a little, but it wasn’t awe in his eyes, it was assurance. He knew the ship.

Mother took advantage of the preoccupation of the men to get in touch with Valancy and, through her, with Dr. Curtis, who hadn’t gone back Outside yet. I suppose they discussed Tom’s condition and what-if anything-could be done for him. Mother was sitting near a wall of the fuel room, to all appearances, daydreaming.

So again I was a Shadow. Not a part of the inspection team-not meshed with Mother. I sighed and wandered over to the fuel box where it sat lonesomely in the middle of the floor. I lay down on my stomach beside it and looked at the shining upper surface. It reflected softly the light in the room, but the reflection seemed to come from deeper into the box than just the upper surface. It had depth to it. It was like looking at the moon. I have never quite believed that the light of the moon is just a reflection of the sun, especially a full moon when the light seems to have such depth, such dimension. And now-and now-if the ship were found spaceworthy, we’d be able to see firsthand if the moon had any glowing of its own.

I caught my own eyes shadowed in the surface and thought, We’ll be going up and up and more up than anyone has ever been before-lifting, soaring, rising—

Mother cried out. Everything shook and moved and there was a grinding, grating sound. I heard the men shout from somewhere in the ship. Frightened, I rolled away from the fuel box and cried, “Mother!”

There was another scraping sound that shook the ship, and then a crunching thud. For a half second there was silence and then a clatter of feet as the men rushed into the fuel room, and Father, seeing us unhurt, was demanding, “Who lifted the ship!”

“Lifted the ship?” Remy’s jaw was ajar. Father’s eyes stabbed him. “Did you, Remy?”

“I was with you!” Remy protested.

“Bethie?”

Mother colored deeply and her eyes drifted shyly away from the sternness of Father’s face. “No,” she said, “I’m not a Motiver. I was talking with Valancy.”

I scrambled to my feet, my eyes wide, my color rising as Mother’s had. “Father, I’ll bet I did it!”

“You bet you did it?” Father was annoyed. “Don’t you know?”

“I’m-“I’m not sure,” I said. “You know I’m not even as much a Motiver as Mother is. I still have to struggle to lift the pickup, but-but I was looking at the fuel box and thinking. Father, I’ll try it again. You and Ron had better stand by, just in case.”

I lay down beside the box again, my eyes intent on the surface, and consciously lifted with all my might.

There was no grinding, grating this time. There was a shriek of metal on stone, a gasp from Mother as her knees buckled under the sudden upthrust, and Father’s voice came clear and commanding, “Let go, Shadow. I’ve got it.”

Light was streaming into the ship from windows we’d hardly noticed before. We all exchanged astonished looks then rushed to look out. We were hovering above the Selkirk-hundreds of feet above the gaping shaft visible off to one side. The scraping on its walls had thrown us sideways.

Father turned to Ron and said, “Take over and maintain, will you?” Then he knelt beside the little box, prodding it with his fingers, smoothing it with his palm. Then he said, “Release to me,” and, kneeling there, he brought the nose of the ship down so we lay horizontal to the ground. We all started sliding down as the floor slanted, but we lifted and waited until a wall became a floor, then Father moved the ship to an open flat below the Selkirk and brought it down gently on its side.

We all gathered around him as he stood looking at the box that was now head-high on the wall. We all looked at it and then Father’s voice came slow and wonderingly, “It’s an amplifier! Why, with that, it wouldn’t even take a Motiver to make it to the moon. Three or four people lifting, coordinating in this, this amplifier, could do it, if they didn’t tire.”

” ‘Coordinate and lift off!’” cried Remy. “Four exclamation points!”

Father had laid the ship on its side so we could find what damage had been done by Remy and me when we churned the poor thing up and down in the shaft. Mother and I went back home to check on Tom and to ready things for the voyage. No one needed to say we’d go. We all knew we’d go. The men were busy repairing the beat-up undercarriage or whatever you’d call that part of the ship, and we brought a picnic supper out to them a little while before sunset.

We all sat around on the flat. I sat on an anthill first and moved in a hurry. We ate and feasted our eyes on the ship. Remy had come out the other side of ecstasy and was serenely happy. Father and Ron were more visibly excited than he. But then they hadn’t lived with the ship and the idea as long as Remy had.

Finally a silence fell and we just sat and watched the night come in from the east, fold by fold of deepening darkness. In the half light came Ron’s astonished voice.

“Why, that’s what it is! That’s what it is!”

“That’s what what is?” came Father’s voice, dreamily from where he lay looking up at the darkening sky.

“The ship,” said Ron. “I’ve been trying all afternoon to remember what it reminds me of. Now I know. It’s almost the same pattern as our life-slips.”

“Our life-slips?” Father sat up slowly. “You mean the ones the People escaped in when their ships were disabled entering Earth’s atmosphere?”

“Exactly!” Ron’s voice quickened. “It’s bigger and it’s cluttered with a lot of gadgets we didn’t have, but basically, it’s almost identical! Where did those fellows get the design of our life-slips? We didn’t keep any. We don’t need to with our Group memory-“

“And it’s motive power.” Father’s voice was thoughtful.

“It’s the power the People use. And Tom’s son was supposed to know how to make it go. Did you suppose Tom-“

“No.” Mother’s voice came softly in the darkness. “I Sorted him after we took him to the house. He’s not one of Us.”

“His wife then, maybe,” I said. “So many of us were scattered after the Crossing. And their son could have inherited-” My voice trailed off as I remembered what his son had inherited-the darkness, the heap of stones, and no chance ever for the stars, not even a reflection of them.

“We could rouse Tom and ask?” offered Remy questioningly.

“Tom is past remembering,” said Mother. “He’s long since been Called and as soon as we waken him, he will be gone.”

“Well,” Ron sighed, “we don’t need to know.”

“No,” I admitted. “But it would he fun to know if Our Own built the ship.”

“Whoever did,” said Father, “is Our Own whether he ever knew the Home or not.”

So we went, the next day.

But first, Ron and Father spent a quiet hour or so in the drift and emerged bearing between them a slender pine box with a small flag fluttering atop it. By now the ship was upright again and Remy, Mother, and I had provisioned it. When we were ready to go, we all went back to the house and got Tom, still and lifeless except for the flutter of a pulse faintly in his throat and a breathing that seemed to stop forever after each outflowing sigh. We brought him, cot and all, and put him in the ship.

And then, our Voyage Prayer and the lift-off-not blastoff. No noise pushed us on our way nor stayed behind to shout of our going.

Slowly, at first, the Earth dropped behind us, alternately convex and concave, changing sometimes from one to the other at a blink of the eyes. I won’t tell you in detail how it all looked, I’ll let you find it all new when you make your first trip. But I will say my breath caught in a sob and I almost wept when first the whole of Earth outlined itself against the star-blazing blackness of space. At that point, Ron and Father put the ship on maintain while they came and looked. We had very little to say. There are no word patterns yet for such an experience. We just stood and worshiped. I could feel unsaid words crowding up against my wonder-filled heart.

But even a wonder like that can’t hold the restlessness of a boy for long, and Remy soon was drifting to all parts of the ship, clucking along with the different machines that were now clucking back at him as they activated to keep the ship habitable for us. He was loving every bolt and rivet, every revolution and flutter of dial, because they were his, at least by right of operation.

Mother and I lasted longer at the windows than Remy. We were still there when Ron and Father finally could leave the ship on maintain and rejoin us.

I’m the wrong one to be telling this story if you want technical data. I’m an illiterate for anything like that. I can’t even give you the time it took. Time is the turning of the Earth and we were free of that tyranny for the first time in our lives.

I know that finally Father and Ron took the ship off maintain and swung it around to the growing lunar wonder in our windows and I watched again that odd curve and collapse sequence as we plunged downward.

Then we were there, poised above the stripped unmovingness of the lunar landscape. We landed with barely a thud and Father was out, testing his personal shield to see if that would be sufficient protection for the time needed to do what we had to do. It was. We all activated our shields and stepped out, closing the door carefully behind us to safeguard the spaced gasping of Tom.

We stood there looking up at the full Earth, losing ourselves in its flooding light, and I found myself wondering if perhaps it wasn’t only the reflection of the sun, if Earth had its own luminousness.

After a while we went back in and warmed ourselves a little and then the men brought out the slender pine box and laid it on the pumicey crunch of the ground. I stirred the little flag with my fingers so that it might flutter its last flutter.

Then inside the ship they lifted Tom to a window. Mother Went-in to him before she woke him completely and told him where we were and where his son was. Then she awakened him gently. For a moment his eyes were clouded. His lips trembled and he blinked slowly-or closed his eyes, waiting for strength. He opened them again and looked for a long moment at the bright curve of the plain and the spangled darkness of the sky.

“The moon,” he murmured, his thin hand clenching on the rim of the window. “We made it, Son, we made it! Let me out. Let me touch it.”

Father’s eyebrows questioned Mother and her eyes answered him. We lifted him from the cot and, enveloping him in our own shields, moved him out the door. We sustained him for the few staggering steps he took. He half fell across the box, one hand trailing on the ground. He took up a handful of the rough gravel and let it funnel from his hand to the top of the box.

“Son,” he said, his voice surprisingly strong. “Son, dust thou art, go back to dust. Look out of wherever you are up there and see where your body is. We’re close enough that you ought to be able to see real good.” He slid to his knees, his face resting against the undressed pine. “I told you I’d do it for you, Son.”

We straightened him and covered him with Mother’s double wedding ring patchwork quilt, tucking him gently in against the long, long night. And I know at least four spots on the moon where water has fallen in historical time-four salty, wet drops, my own tears. Then we said the Parting Prayers and returned to the ship.

We went looking for the littering that had annoyed Tom’s son so much. I found it, Sensing its metal from miles farther than I could have among the distractions of earth. Remy wanted to lift it right back out into Space, but Father wouldn’t let him. “It wouldn’t change things,” ha said. “It did get here first. Let it stay.”

“Okay, then,” said Remy, “but with this on it.” He pulled a flag out of his pocket and unfolded it. He spread it carefully as far as it would go over the metal and hid a chunk of stone on each comer. “To keep the wind from blowing it away,” he grinned, stepping back to look it over. “There, that takes the cuss off it!”

So we took off again. We made a swoop around behind the moon, just to see what it was like, and we were well on our way home before it dawned on me that I hadn’t even got one pebble for a souvenir.

“Don’t mind,” said Mother, smiling as she remembered other rock-collecting trips of mine. “You know they never look as pretty when you get them home.”

Now we’re back. The ship is stashed away in the shaft. We may never use it again. The fire of Remy’s enthusiasm has turned to plans and blueprints and all things pertaining to his Gift, his own personal Gift, apparently the first evidence of a new Gift developing among us. He’s gone in so much for signs and symbols and schematic diagrams that he’d talk in them if he could. Personally I think he went a trifle too far when he drew a schematic diagram of me and called it a portrait. After all! Mother and Father laughed at the resultant horror, but Remy thinks if he keyed colors in he might have a new art form. Talk about things changing!

But what will never, never change is the wonder, the indescribable wonder to me of seeing Earth lying in space as in the hollow of God’s hand. Every time I return to it, I return to the words of the Psalmist-the words that welled up in me unspoken out there half way to the moon.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him-

Zoltan 1.0