A Mirror for Observers

Accept, Drozma, assurance of my continuing devotion. For reasons of safety I write in Salvayan instead of the English you prefer. This report was begun in greater leisure than I now have, and it follows a humanly fashionable narrative form: I had your entertainment in mind, knowing how you relish the work of human storytellers, and I only wish I had their skill. I have blundered, as you will see. The future is clouded, my judgment also. If you cannot approve what I have done and what I still must do, I beg you will make allowance for one who admires human creatures a little too much.

1

The bars are genial in Latimer in 30,963. A warmer life fills the evening streets than on my last visit to the States seventeen years ago. People stroll about more, spend less time rocketing in cars. It was a June Saturday when I reached Latimer, and found the city enjoying its week end snugly. There was peace. A pine-elm-and-maple, baked-beans-and-ancestors, Massachusetts sort of peace, to which I am partial. Getting born in the Commonwealth would help, if one had to be a human being.

Latimer is too far from Boston to be much under the influence of what Artemus Ward called the “Atkins of the West.” Latimer can make its own atmosphere: five large factories, a population over ten thousand, a fairly wealthy hill district, a wrong side of the tracks, two or three parks. The town was more populous a few years ago. As factories become cybernetic they move away from the large centers; the growth is in the suburbs and the countryside. Latimer in this decade is comfortably static — yet not quite comfortably, for there is a desolation in boarded-up houses, a kind of latent grief that few care to examine. In Latimer the twentieth century (human term) rubs elbows with the eighteenth and nineteenth in the New England manner. There is a statue of Governor Bradford half a block from the best movie theater. A restored-colonial mansion peers across Main Street at a rail-bus-and-copter station as modern as tomorrow.

I bought a science-fiction magazine in that station. They still multiply. This one happened to be dominantly grim, so I read it for laughs. Galaxies are too small for humanity. And yet, sometime…? Was our own ancestors’ terrible journey thirty thousand years ago only a hint of things to come? I understand men will have their first satellite station in a very short while, four or five years. They call it “a device to prevent war.” Sleep in space, Salvay — sleep in peace…!

No. 21 Calumet Street is an old brick house on a corner, two stories and basement, not far from the inevitable Main Street, which travels from right to wrong side of the tracks. No. 21 is on the wrong side, but its neighborhood is not bad, a residential backwater for factory workers, low-pay white-collars, transients. Five blocks south of No. 21, Calumet Street enters a slum where dregs settle to a small Skid Row, no less pitiable than the massive human swamps in New York, London, Moscow, Chicago, Calcutta.

I found a “vacancy” card in the basement window. I was admitted by the one whose life I was to meddle with. I knew him at once, this golden-skinned boy with eyes so profoundly dark that iris and pupil blended in one sparkle. Perhaps I knew him then as well as I ever shall, in that mild moment of appraisal before he had even spoken or given me more than a casual friendly glance. When we admit that the simplest mind is a continuing mystery, what height of arrogance it would be to say that I know Angelo!

He was carrying a book, his finger holding a place, and I saw he was lame, with a brace on the left ankle. He led me into a basement living room to talk with his mother, whose body, like a disguise, billowed over a rocking chair. She had been mending the collar of a shirt that sprawled as if alive on the mountain of her lap. I noticed in Rosa Pontevecchio her son’s disturbing eyes, broad forehead, sensuous mouth. “Two rooms free,” she told me. “First-floor back, running water, bath one flight up. There’s a second-floor back, but it’s smaller, maybe not so quiet — well, it’s that awful copter noise, I swear they try ’n’ see how close they can skim the roof.”

“First floor sounds all right.” I indicated a portable typewriter I had bought on impulse in Toronto. “I’m writing a book, and I do like it quiet.” She was not inquisitive nor obsequiously impressed. The boy spread his book face down. It was a paperback, selections from Plato, opened near the front to the Apology or Crito. “My name is Benedict Miles.” I kept my phony autobiography simple, to lessen the nuisance of remembering details. I had been a schoolteacher, I said, in an (unspecified) Canadian town. Thanks to a legacy, I had a year of leisure for the (undescribed) book, and wanted to live simply. I tried to establish an academic manner to go with my appearance of scrawny middle age. A shabby, pedantic, decent man.

She was a widow, I learned, managing the house alone. Its income would clearly be inadequate to pay for hired help. She was about forty, half her tiny lifetime gone. The latter half would be burdened by hard work, the gross discomfort of her flesh, many sorts of loneliness; yet she was cheerful in her chatter, outward-looking and kind. “I don’t get around too good.” Her lively hands spoke of her bulk in humorous apology. “Doing the place mornings is my limit. Angelo, you show Mr. Miles the room.”

He limped ahead of me up a narrow, closed-in stairway. This house was built before Americans fell in love with sunlight. The first-floor back was a large room and would be relatively quiet. Two windows overlooked a yard, where a pudgy Boston bulldog snoozed in the last of June daylight. When I opened a window Angelo whistled. The dog stood on her hind legs to waggle clumsy paws at him. “Bella’s a show-off,” Angelo said with unconcealed affection for the pup. “She doesn’t bark much, Mr. Miles.”

One never knows how a dog will react to the Martian scent. At least they never object to the overriding scent-destroyer. Namir had no destroyer…. “Like dogs, Angelo?”

“They’re honest.” Commonplace, but not a twelve-year-old remark.

I tested the one armchair and found the springs firm. The impress of other bodies was appealing, and gave me a sense of sharing human qualities. I tried to consider Angelo as another human being might. Two things seemed plain: he lacked shyness, and he lacked excess energy.

His father was dead, his mother not strong nor well. Premature responsibility could account for his poise. As for his quiet — I watched him as he moved about softly, drawing away a curtain in a corner to show me the hand basin and two-ring gas stove, and I changed part of my opinion. There was surplus energy, probably intense, but it was a steady burning, not dissipating itself in random muscular commotion or loud talk. “Like the room, Mr. Miles? It’s twelve a week. We rent it as a double sometimes.”

“Yes, I like it.” It resembled all furnished rooms. But in place of the customary tooth-and-bosom calendars and prints there was only one picture, an oil in a plain frame, a summer landscape of sunlit fantasy. You would as soon expect a finished emerald in the five-and-dime. “I’ll take it for a week, but tell your mother I hope to be here longer than that.” He took the money, promised to bring keys and a receipt. I tried a wild shot: “Have you done many paintings like that, Angelo?” A flush spread on his cheek and throat. “Isn’t it yours?”

“It’s mine. A year ago. Don’t know why I bother.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

“Waste of time.”

“I can’t agree.” He was startled, as if he had been braced to hear something else. “I admit it wouldn’t please the modern cults, but so what?”

“Oh, them.” He recovered, and grinned. “Sissy though. Kid stuff.”

I said: “Nuts.” And watched him.

He fidgeted, more like a twelve-year-old now. “Anyway I don’t think it’s very good. I don’t hear that birch tree.”

“I do. And the grass under it. Field mice in the grass.”

“Do you?” Neither flattered nor quite believing it. “I’ll get your receipt.” He hurried, as if afraid of saying or hearing more.

I was unpacking when he returned. I let him see my clutter of commonplace stuff. The hair dye to keep me gray passed for an ink bottle. The scent-destroyer was labeled after-shaving lotion and would smell like it, I understand, to a human nose. The mirror was wrapped. The flat grenades were next to my skin of course. Angelo lingered, curious, willing to get acquainted, possibly hurt because I volunteered nothing more about his painting: bright as he was, he wouldn’t have outgrown vanity at twelve. He asked innocently: “That typewriter case big enough for your manuscript?”

Too smart. When I decided that Mr. Miles was puttering at a book I neglected to pick up anything but the typewriter and packages of paper still unopened. “Yes, it is for the present. My book is mostly here.” I tapped my head. I knew I should dream up some mess of words, and soon. I didn’t think he or his mother would poke among my things, but one tries to avoid even minor risks. Fiction? Philosophy? I sought the armchair and lit a cigarette (again I recommend them to Observers deprived of our thirty-hour periods of rest: smoke is no substitute for contemplation but I believe it softens the need). “School finished for the year, Angelo?”

“Yeah. Last week.”

“What year are you? Shut my mouth if it’s none of my business.”

A smile flashed and faded. “Sophomore.”

The average age in that class would be around sixteen. He would be holding himself back, I knew, in self-defense. “You like the Crito?”

Alarm was obvious in the studied blankness of his face. “Ye-es.”

Certainly it would be difficult to convince him that I was not talking down, not making secret fun of his precocity. I tried to be idly conversational: “Poor Crito! He really tried. But I think Socrates wanted to die. In the reasoning to prove he should remain, don’t you think he was talking to himself more than to Crito?”

No relaxation. Strained youthful courtesy: “Maybe.”

“He could have argued he owed Athens nothing; that an unjust law may be violated to serve a greater. But he didn’t. He was tired.”

“Why?” said Angelo. “Why would anyone want to die?”

“Oh, tired. Past seventy.” (What should I have said?) It was enough for the moment, I thought, or too much. At least it was an attempt to let him know I honored his intelligence, and it might help me later. It would have been easier if I had been required to hold a soap bubble in my clumsy hands, since a soap bubble is only a pearl of illusion and if it bursts that’s no great matter. More like snuffy Mr. Miles, I said: “Wonder if my typing will bother the other tenants? It’s a noisy old machine.”

“Nope.” Angelo was plainly relieved at the prosaic turn. “Mr. Feuermann’s bath and closet are between the rooms. Room over you is vacant, and the folks upstairs — the old ladies and Jack McGuire — they won’t hear it. We won’t downstairs. This is above the kitchen. Don’t give it a thought.”

“Not even if I split an infinitive?”

He stuck a finger in his mouth and snapped it to make a pop like a cork out of a bottle. “Not even if you treat a spondee as an iambus.”

“Ouch! Wait till I get educated, can’t you?” He grinned sweetly and fled. And that, I thought, is the child whom Namir wants to corrupt. This was the moment, Drozma, when the enigma of Namir himself truly began to torment me, as it still does. I must accept fact: it is possible for a being, human or Martian, to see something beautiful, recognize it as beautiful, and immediately desire to destroy it. I know it’s so, but I don’t, I never shall, understand it. One would think the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.

I fussed about, as a human creature should in a new nest. I reviewed Observers’ Rules. The risk that has always worried me worst is that some trifling injury might reveal the orange tint of our blood. I am prone to bark shins and bruise hands. Our one-to-the-minute heartbeat is not only a risk but a source of regret. It annoys me that I must be cautious in all physical contact, and it’s too bad having to avoid doctors — they could be interesting. Observers’ work must have been more entertaining as well as safer (except for the horse problem) in the old days when magic and superstition were cruder and more crudely accepted. And I turned the package of the bronze mirror over and over in my hands, wondering at some of your meanings, Drozma. I did not unwrap it. I wish that I had, or that I had examined it in Northern City. Doubtless you supposed I would, but there were many last-minute errands, and I have studied so many human antiquities that my curiosity was dulled. I did not learn its nature until a time when it caught me unprepared. That evening I put the package in the bureau under some clothes, and wandered out to explore the city.

And I met Sharon Brand.

My immediate objective was butter, bread, and sliced ham, though I had it in mind to do any Observer’s work that might turn up as a by-product of my mission. A delicatessen on Saturday evening can be a listening post. People lounge, linger, cuss the weather, and talk politics. I found one at once, by drifting toward the grimier end of Calumet Street. It was a tiny corner shop three blocks from No. 21, and the sign said EL CAT SEN.

No one was in it but a girl about ten years old, sitting almost hidden behind the counter with a comic book. Her left foot was on another chair. Her right leg was wrapped around her left in a sort of boneless abandon that might have been experimental or just comfortable. I examined the cases, waiting for signs of life, but she was far away. The wooden shaft of a lollipop protruded from her mouth with a sophistication that went well with a pug nose and dark shoulder-length hair. “All by yourself?”

Without looking up she nodded and said: “Uh. Oo i owioffsh oo?”

“Yes, I do rather.” It wasn’t baby talk. She just didn’t find an immediate need to take out the all-day sucker, but wanted to know if I liked lollipops too.

But then she glanced at me — startling ocean-blue eyes, inescapably appraising — and waved at a box, and gradually got her wide mouth unstuck, and said: “Well, pick one. Heck, they’re only a penny, heck.” She reversed legs, wrapping the left around the right. “You couldn’t do that.”

“Who says I can’t?” There was a third chair behind the counter, so I got into it and showed her. With our more elastic bones, I had an unfair advantage, but I was careful not to exceed human possibility. Even so she looked slightly sandbagged.

“You’re pretty good,” she admitted. “Inja-rubber man. You forgot your lollipop.” She tossed me one from the box, lemon variety. I got busy on it and we have been friends ever since. “Look,” she said. “Heck, could this autothentically happen, I mean for true?” She showed me the comic book. There was a spaceman with a beautiful but unfortunate dame. The dame had been strapped to a meteor — by the Forces of Evil, I shouldn’t wonder — and the spaceman was saving her from demolition by other meteors. He did it by blasting them with a ray-gun. It looked like a lot of work.

“I wouldn’t want to be quoted.”

“Oh, you. I’m Sharon Brand. Who are you?”

“Benedict Miles. Just rented a room up the street. With the Pontevecchios, maybe you know ’em?”

“Heck.” She took on a solemn glow. She threw away the comic, and unwound and readjusted her skinny smallness. Now she was sitting on both her feet, and had her elbows hung over the back of the chair, and watched me for a time with eyes ten thousand years old. “Angelo happens to be my best boy friend, but you better not mention it. It would be most unadvisable. I would be furious.”

“I never would.”

“I’d probably cut your leg off and beat you over the head with it. If you detonated.”

“Detonated?”

“Aren’t you educated? It means shoot off. Your mouth. Some people call him stuck-up on account he’s always reading books. You don’t think he’s stuck-up, do you?” Her face said urgently: Better not detonate.

“No, I don’t think he is at all. He’s just very bright.”

“I’d probably turn a ray-gun on you. Tatatata-taah. He happens to’ve been my boy friend for years and years, but don’t forget you promised. Heck, I hate a rat…. You know what?”

“No, what?”

“I started piano lessons yesterday. Mrs. Wilks showed me the scale. She’s blind. Right away she showed me the scale. They’ve fixed up to let me practice on the school piano for the summer.”

“Scale already, huh? That’s terrific.”

“Everything is terrific,” said Sharon Brand. “Only some things are terrificker than others.”

2

Later (I hoped my friend Sharon was asleep, but somehow I had an image of both those children turning on furtive night lights, Sharon with her spacemen, Angelo wandering critically through the intricacy of Plato’s dreams) I went out to taste the city’s middle evening again, going through the railroad underpass to the “right” side of the tracks, drifting with other masks past shop-windows, poolrooms, dance halls. I played the watching game with myself: “One I’d like to know, a gleam of intelligence…. Ah, the Face that Foreclosed the Mortgage!… A face of bitterness, member of the weasel totem…. A genuine dish…. Gracious with age…. Savage with age…. A schoolmarm (?) — a pickpocket — a plainclothes cop — a salesman — a possible bank teller…” In that game you have their voices too, never finished: “So he gets his gun on this other guy, see, only the Ranger’s behind the bush—” “I told her, I said, if I don’t know my own size in girdles by this time—” “I wouldn’t believe him if he had brass knucks—”

I followed a street uphill. Separate houses with lawns, somber men being walked by small dogs. At the crest one looked down at city lights fantastically calm. My night vision, better than human, allowed me to see beyond them to distant fields and woods, delicately secret even in daylight with lovable small life in the grass and bushes. The moon was rising. I strolled in that placid region, admiring some of the houses, reflecting that the owners used the same type of aspirin as their neighbors downtown. I returned to the business district by another route, wondering if it could be true that someone was following me.

A sly footstep never quite heard, a shadow never quite seen against hedge or doorway. Oh, I had been fretting more than I realized, about Namir. That was all, I thought — that and fatigue.

The movie theaters were closed. The crowd had thinned and changed: fewer of the cheerful, more of the predatory. I bought a late newspaper and shoved it in my pocket after a glance at the headlines. The present seems to be an interlude of relative calm, but now human beings are too shrewd to suppose that the volcanoes under the surface are dead. They were fooled that way, I recall, in the ’880s and ’890s. They have learned a few things since then. The United States of Europe is functioning rather well if creakily, though everyone is afraid of the logical next step of Atlantic Federation, and the One World Government boys and girls are clouding the issue as usual with well-meant enthusiasm. There are three Iron Curtains now: Russia’s, China’s, and the curious new one, growing higher each year ever since the death of Stalin, between Russia and China themselves. But the seven or eight major civilizations of the world are cohering; except for those two eclipsed by ancient despotism, the civilizations may be feeling their way to an enduring compromise. One doesn’t look for the small promises of an ethical revolution in the headlines: the ocean’s currents do not derive from the ocean’s tempests…. Eisenhower’s successor appears to be a reasonable man: I gather that few seriously dislike him, though it’s hard to fill such a pair of shoes. The trend is likely to be against him in ’964, with the customary jump a little too far left. That doesn’t worry me.

Back on the wrong side of the tracks, I entered a park up a side street near Calumet. It was mere leftover space created by an angling cross street. Brick walks too bumpy for roller skates, patches of stubborn grass. Two old men were playing checkers under a park lamp. I rested on a bench in the moon-shadow of a maple, wondering if this might be the park where Observer Kajna had overheard a certain conversation.

A hundred yards away were two clusters of benches, deserted except for a gaunt fellow, head bowed in his hands. Drunk, sick, or derelict, I thought. Two soldiers and their girls sat down near him and he got up and lurched away, on a path that would bring him past me. He did not pass me, and I looked again. He was stumbling off in the other direction, crossing grass as if to avoid the checker players’ lamp.

My bench was deeply shadowed. He could hardly have made me out with drunken human eyes. I caught no Martian scent, but the breeze was wrong. My own scent-destroyer was fresh, but I had made no change in my face since Namir saw me in Northern City.

Dismissing uneasiness, returning to the now indolent night life of Main Street, I entered a bar (not my first that evening) and listened to the long gush of words, variations on the silly, wise, obscene. That was restful. It spoke well for my manner and appearance that nobody gave the skinny rye drinker a second glance until I invited it, rambling into an argument with a plumber over the future of the world’s fuel supply. It has become fashionable to fret about that. We bought three rounds. I said solar energy, wind, water power, and alcohol, but in the end I let him have his atoms, what the hell.

“Thing is,” he said, “you got to hitch to a star. When I think of the things my kids’ll see! You figure there’s life on Mars?”

“No atmosphere,” said a fat man the plumber called Joe.

“Now it stands to reason,” said the plumber, and pounded a puddle on the bar and apologized for splashing me. “They see green in the telescopes, don’t they? How about that?”

“Lichens,” said Joe. “Meant to say not enough atmosphere, see?”

“You can take your lichens,” said the plumber, “and — well, it stands to reason, and anyway why couldn’t they live underground, seal in the atmosphere, what the hell?”

“Not me,” said Joe. “I’d get this now clusterphobia.”

“All the same you can take your lichens—”

I was back at the lodging house before midnight, happy about moonlight on square quiet houses, happy about someone plinking a mandolin late and gently behind drawn curtains, happy about our Salvayan capacity for alcohol. My plumber had gone home under convoy of Joe and another, the three of them operating rather like a minesweeper with a one-eyed pilot.

There was a night light in the hall, and more light from the open door of the first-floor front. That would be Mr. Feuermann, I remembered, and I saw him, a white-haired old gentleman in an armchair, his feet up on a stool. He was cherishing a horse-head meerschaum. Purposely I tripped. He cleared his throat and came stumping out. “All right?”

“Yes, thanks — turned my ankle a bit.”

We examined each other with the furtive measuring of human strangers. He was obviously lonely. “Too bad,” he said, and studied the carpet with some hostility, plainly worried about trouble for Mrs. Pontevecchio. “It looks all right.”

“It wasn’t the carpet. Fact is I had one too many.”

“Oh.” A solid old man, though tall and not stout. “Sometimes,” he said, “if you make the hair on a long-haired dog a mite longer…?”

So I went into his room and he broke out a pint of bourbon and we discussed it for an hour. He claimed he’d left the door open to clear away stale smoke, but then admitted he was always hoping someone would drop in. He had been a railroad engineer until twelve years ago, when he retired, because of age, because Diesels were hooting the end of steam and he was too old for new techniques. He had been a widower for six years; his only child, a daughter, was married and living in Colorado. Once his work had taken him all over the States. He spoke warmly and poetically of that wandering on steel pathways, but Latimer was home and he would not leave it again.

I did not try to steer the talk to the landlady’s son: the old man did so himself. Jacob Feuermann had lived in that house since his wife died. I understood, without words, that the Pontevecchios had become an adopted family for him. Their troubles were his, and perhaps he knew that there was on him a reflected glow of Angelo’s strangeness.

He remembered Angelo as a huge-eyed six-year-old, not talkative but intensely observant, given to fierce fits of temper — caused, Feuermann believed, by frustrations that would not have badly troubled ordinary children. In retrospect, Feuermann took a sort of proprietary pride in those tantrums. Angelo had never been a naughty child, he said. Angelo took punishments with good grace and rarely repeated an offense; but a toy out of reach, a tumbling block house, a missing jigsaw fragment could turn him blue in the face. “Even now, when he’s got over that, you couldn’t call him a happy kid, and I don’t think,” Feuermann said, “the bad leg has much to do with it….” When Feuermann first came to the house, Rosa had been bearing a private crucifixion of despair over those temper fits, her mind approaching and skittering away from the word “insanity” (that fog-word, Drozma, still terrorizes any human being who has learned no discipline of definition). She had confided much in Feuermann. He also remembered her husband in the flesh.

Silvio Pontevecchio seems to have been a baffled alcoholic marshmallow. Intelligent, Feuermann considered him, but unable to profit by it. Silvio had tried a dozen or more ventures, taking his dozen or more failures with the same meek surprise and a few quick ones. Even before Angelo’s birth, Feuermann deduced, it was Rosa’s work with the lodging house that supported them. Silvio did manage the furnace, but carrying ashes bothered his back. And so on. In the end (just as humbly and mildly, maybe) Silvio fell on the ice in front of a skidding truck, after drinking up money intended for a life insurance premium. “Poor bastard,” said Feuermann with genuine pity — “couldn’t even die right.” That happened when Angelo was seven. Angelo had loved his father, who told good stories and was kind in small matters. A year after Silvio’s death Rosa told her friend Feuermann how Angelo had said to her: “I will not, repeat not, lose my temper again.” And kept his word. She quit worrying about his mind and worried instead about his small size and his impatience with the tedium of school. (“Enforced play” — but that was a term Angelo himself used, to me, and much later. )

“He skipped three grades in secondary school,” Feuermann told me. “They didn’t like it. The kid drove ’em, Miles — talked ’em into a position where they had to let him take the examinations, which were nothing to him. Made ’em look silly, so they went to fussing about his ‘manner’ and ‘attitude’ and — what’s the word? — social adjustment, some damn thing. Brrah! Boy’s bright, that’s all, but wasn’t bright enough then to hide how bright he was.”

“Genius?”

“You tell me what that is — I dunno.”

“Supernormal ability generalized, let’s say.”

“That he has.”

“I sometimes wonder what the schools aim at nowadays.”

He made a business of refilling the meerschaum, sensing that I honestly wanted his opinion. “My Clara — it’s almost twenty years since she was in high school. I remember beating my brains about her schooling. They never seemed to want to teach her anything except how to be like everybody else. When she finished — bright, you know, nothing stupid about Clara — she could add a column of figures after a fashion, read a little if she had to. Hated books, still does. Always been a heavy reader myself, be lost nowadays if I wasn’t. Damned if I know what she did learn. Self-expression before she could have anything to express. Social consciousness, whatever that is, when even now she hasn’t enough command of language to tell you what she thinks society is. Scraps of this and that, no logic to hold ’em together. Everything made easy — and how are you going to make education easy? You might as well try to build an athlete by keeping him in a hammock with cream puffs and beer. Why, Miles, I’ve put in seventy years trying to get an education, and only done a half-baked job of it. I guess Angelo’s school is about the same. Only, bless your heart, he’s learned by now to treat it as a joke, and damn well keep the joke to himself.”

“Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Oh,” said the gentle old man, “I wouldn’t say that, Miles. I believe they try.” He added, with I think no trace of humorous intent: “Maybe if they started by educating teachers it would help. And there still are a few with high standards — I found that out when it was too late to do Clara any good…. Anyway Angelo’s a good boy, Miles — nice” — he was fumbling for words himself — “clean, goodhearted. Mean to say he’s no damn freak. If it wasn’t for his peewee size and that poor little game leg…”

“Polio?”

“Yes, at four. Happened before I came here. Gets better as he grows. Doctor told Rosa he might be able to drop the brace after his teens. It shuts him out of a lot. But he never seems to mind that much.”

“Might’ve helped him develop his brains.”

“Might.” We left it there, for my friend was suppressing yawns. I sought my own room, went to bed lethargically like a tired human being.

I woke in a fog to a sound of snoring; my wrist watch said four-thirty. It was never my way, nor the way of any Salvayan, I should think, to wake with a thick head. The snoring was on the first floor, had to be Feuermann, but was unreasonably loud. I was aware of a nasty sweetish stench and my forehead was a block of dull pain. Something tumbled from my pillow to the floor, and another smell fetched me furiously wide awake: the Martian scent, individualized as it always is and certainly not my own.

I snapped the light on. The thing fallen from my pillow was a wad of cotton, still foul with common chloroform.

I thought at first that nothing was missing. Then I snatched up my bottle of scent-destroyer. Two thirds gone.

My door was ajar. Out in the hall, I learned the snoring was loud because Feuermann’s door was open too. A street lamp showed me his bed. No chloroform here. I made sure the old man was unharmed, his sleep natural though noisy. Back in my room, I saw that my clothing, hung on a chair, was disarranged. The bronze mirror in the bureau was safe. My wallet was too, the money intact, but a note had been shoved in among the bills. A note in our tiny Salvayan script, which looks to human eyes like random dots. It was unsigned and casual:

Please observe that I play fair. Your S-D bottle is not quite empty.

Nothing so artless as a human-style burglary had occurred to me. But Namir was only following the oldest Observers’ Rule: Act human. I stopped laughing when I considered one non-human element: I could not drive Namir into the grip of the police without betraying our people. He would exploit that fact and never lose sight of it. It was like yielding a handicap of two rooks to a chess player no weaker than myself.

One window was more widely open than I had left it. Namir had come in there from the back yard. A ladder rested against the wall short of my window sill, an easy climb. I had noticed it on its side yesterday by the fence, likely left over from a recent paint job on the window casings. And what about that bulldog? Sunrise was not far away. The wooden back-yard fence had a blank door to the side street — Martin Street. A pile of rags near it troubled me because I couldn’t recall seeing it before.

I returned sniffing to the hall, a bathrobe over my pajamas. I heard a fuzzy murmur of another snore upstairs. No scent. Namir would surely be gone. He would not waste the scent-destroyer, but would wait till he could strip and dab it on the scent-gland areas. I tried the second floor. The bathroom was empty, and the vacant room over mine. The two tenants’ doors were open a crack. From the room in the middle came that cozy snoring and a whiff of sachet. No chloroform. Angelo had mentioned old ladies. They were probably safe. I looked in the front room.

Here I did smell chloroform. I flipped on the light, snatched the pad away from the young man’s pillow, and shook him. He struggled up and grabbed his head. “Who in hell are you?” Jack McGuire was built to ask such questions, a fine mountain of man, mostly shoulders. Redheaded, blue-eyed, and sudden.

“Moved in yesterday, first floor. Prowler broke in, but nobody—” Mac was into his pants and barking about the old ladies before I finished, and then out in the hall shouting: “Hey, Mrs. Mapp! Mrs. Keith!” Nice boy. Plain-spoken. He’d have the house steaming in three minutes. Meanwhile I gave his room a photographic glance. Decent poverty, self-respecting. A work shirt with oil stains — mechanic? Glamor photograph on the bureau, a cute wench with a heart-shaped face; another beside it of a muscular lady unquestionably Mom. Razor, toothbrush, comb, and towel laid out as if for Saturday inspection by a second lieutenant. I shoved the toothbrush into a comfortable diagonal to please myself, and withdrew to a sound of screaming.

They were nice old ladies in a hugely cluttered nest. A double window overlooked Martin Street. That would be their headquarters in normal times, but now the thin one was standing up in bed and screaming while the fat one asked her if everything was all right. Mac said it was. Having touched off the eruption, he was shoving the lava back, barehanded. I liked Mac.

Agnes Mapp was stout, Doris Keith lean. I learned later that they were from New London, and had a low opinion of Massachusetts, where they had been living on widows’ pensions for twenty-six years; this burglary was the first occasion when the Commonwealth had snapped back at them. Mrs. Keith subsided to the horizontal, and Mrs. Mapp took over the screaming, waving at the bureau. “It’s all upsettled!” In that mass of furniture, corsets, work-baskets, china ornaments, and, yes, antimacassars, I wondered how she knew. “We never let the red vahz set next the pink hairbrushes, never! Oh, Dorrie!” she wept. “Look! He’s stolen our album!”

I mumbled I’d call the cops. Mrs. Keith was recovering, and demanding in a severe baritone that Mac explain. He and I contemplated each other in a sympathy bridging the Salvayan-human gap. I went downstairs.

I met Angelo limping up from the basement in yellow pajamas. Feuermann, roused by the screaming, padded after me. I asked him to call police and he ducked back to the hall telephone without fuss. Angelo was muttering.

“Save Mama climbing the stairs.”

“Sure. She needn’t. Come back down with me. Just a prowler, maybe got away with a few dollars. Ladder under my window. Chloroform.”

“Oops!” said Angelo, catching some normal pleasure of excitement. “But Bella—” He forgot Bella, hurrying to his mother as we entered the basement living room. She was in her rocker, gray-faced, clutching a blue wrapper. I wasn’t sure she could get up. I tried to be stuffily humorous and soothing in the account I gave her.

“Never had nothing like this happen, Mr. Miles — never—”

“Mama,” Angelo urged, “don’t fret. It isn’t anything.”

She pulled his head against her. He drew free gently, and rubbed her aimless-wandering hands. Her color improved. Her breathing was almost right by the time Feuermann joined us. Reassuringly important, he said the police would be along shortly, meanwhile we’d better see what was missing. His common sense was golden, his Jovian fussing over Rosa more useful than my efforts. Angelo mumbled about Bella and slipped out. I spoke of the old ladies’ missing album.

“Funny,” said Feuermann. “If they say it’s missing it is — couldn’t misplace a pin in that room. They won’t even let Rosa dust. Got a notion my own is missing. Remember, Miles, I showed you a snap of old 509 when she was new out of the yards, and one of me and Susan and Clara when she was twelve. Where’d I put that album when we were done with it?”

“Top of your bookcase.”

“Right. Always do. Seems to me it was gone when I put on the light. Now what would a burglar want of pictures? Huh?”

I wondered if I knew….

The others missed the small cry outside. My Martian hyperacusis is sometimes a burden: I hear too much I’d rather not. But it can be useful. I don’t recall running. I was just there, in the back yard, in light from the kitchen window, with Angelo. He was kneeling by that pile of rags. It partly covered Bella, whose neck was broken. “Why?” said Angelo. “Why?”

I helped him to stand, frail in his rumpled pajamas. Come on back in the house. Your mother might need you again.”

He didn’t cry or curse. I wished he would. He squinted at the ladder and the ground between it and the fence. Earth and paving tones were dry, unmarked. Angelo said: “I’m going to kill whoever did that.”

“No.”

He wasn’t listening. “Billy Kell might know. If it was the Diggers—”

“Angelo—”

“I’m going to find him. I’m going to break his own neck for him.”

3

“Angelo,” I said, “stop that.” And I searched my fair memory of the Crito. “’And will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be destroyed, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice?’”

He recognized it, and remembered. His stare turned up to me, foggy and sorrowful but at least becoming young. He tried to curse them, and it changed to crying, which was better. “The damn — oh, the damn—”

“All right,” I said. “Sure.” I held his forehead while he tried to vomit and couldn’t. I steered him back into the kitchen, made him splash cold water on his face and comb his wild hair with his fingers.

There was a new bumbling voice in the living room, a broad-beamed cop getting the story from Feuermann and being nice to Rosa. His prowl-car partner was upstairs conferring with Mac. I took him outside to look at the ladder, and showed him Bella. “Why, the damn dirty—”

The difference was that Angelo had spoken from inner flame. Patrolman Dunn merely resented violence and disorder. He didn’t talk about breaking necks. Nor read the Crito. I learned from his comments that the job had the trademarks of someone named Tea-shop Willie — the back-yard approach, carefully non-lethal use of chloroform. Teashop would have an alibi, Dunn said, and it would be a pleasure to bust it over his think-box.

“Does he specialize in lodging houses?”

“Nup,” said Dunn, not liking me much. “And this ain’t a money neighborhood, Lord knows. But it’s got the marks. You missing anything?”

“Haven’t really looked,” I lied. “My wallet was under my pillow.”

Dunn went back in the house, murmuring: “Known the missus here ten years. People’re mighty fond of Mrs. Pontevecchio, mister.” There was warning in it, but only because I was what New England calls a foreigner.

They used up an hour or so, and sent for a fingerprint team. Teashop Willie rated that, as a favorite old offender; I suppose Dunn would have been startled if they’d found anything. I could have told him the burglar was wearing gloves. We were not grafting finger tips when Namir resigned in 30,829. The stolen photograph albums tormented Dunn. I think he decided Willie had gone whacky under the stress of a demanding profession. Feuermann and Mac had both lost a little money. The old ladies kept their cash in what Mrs. Keith referred to as a safe place, and she invited no deeper inquiry, implying indirectly that all policemen were grafters, Cossacks, and enemies of the poor. I thought: “Hoy!” Dunn and his pal left us at six-thirty with kind wishes. My only recollection of Dunn’s partner is that he was a modest man with a modest wart, who told me personally that no stone would be left unturned. We never heard any more from them about it, so I picture him as still somewhere in the broad uncertainties of the world, turning stones. With all deference to Mrs. Keith, I think policemen are a very decent lot, and I only wish human beings wouldn’t make things so tough for ’em.

The evening before, after an enjoyable half hour of space travel, Sharon Brand had keyed herself up to selling me such items as coffee and bread. Her mother had been in the back room with a Headache, Sharon said, and Pop had gone to a lodge meeting. Sharon enjoyed minding the store. She had dealt competently with the two or three other customers who had interrupted our interstellar activities. Now opening my packages for breakfast reminded me of her, if I had needed any reminder.

I called it a justifiable preoccupation. If she was Angelo’s (self-appointed?) Girl Friend, she ought to be studied for the sake of my mission. Then I stopped fooling myself. I admitted she had made me lonely for my own daughter in Northern City. I suppose Elmaja and my son will be living four or five hundred years from now, when nobody at all remembers little Sharon Brand. The one year’s flower and the oak — it isn’t fair of course.

Still the seed lives, and the flowering of individual selves can be glorious even in the niggardly threescore and ten.

I admitted more. Sharon as a person had reached me somehow, touched me in almost the way that Angelo had done. She lacks his precocity, she may lack his blazing intellectual curiosity. But you put me on my own, Drozma. Observer Kajna did not learn of Sharon. If she had…?

From my window I saw Angelo and his mother go down Martin Street before nine o’clock, nicely dressed, to Mass. Rosa was walking with weariness, Angelo too spindling-small to help her much. I went out too, and strolled down Calumet Street the other way. The morning was muggy, sun pressing through windless haze, a tropical day, a day for the lazy, a day to make me remember the palms of Rio or a warm ocean dreaming against the beaches of Luzon, where I lived once — but that was a long time ago.

I heard trouble before I reached EL CAT SEN: Sharon’s voice, cold, tight, and terrified, from the recessed entrance of a boarded-up house next door to the shop. “Don’t, Billy! I’ll never say it — don’t!”

I hurried, but my steps must have made noise. Nothing seemed to be happening when I arrived. Sharon was leaning stiffly against the nailed-up door, almost hidden from me by a big-shouldered boy who drew away from her as I appeared. Her right hand was behind her. I had an impression the boy had just released it, and he turned a blond head to stare at me. Much taller than Sharon, thirteen or fourteen and blocky, handsome but blankly so as if he were already expert at wearing a mask. Well, human beings are sometimes good at that. Sharon grinned feebly at me. “Hello, Mr. Miles!” The boy shrugged and moved away.

I said: “Come back here!” He only turned to stare again, hands in his pockets. “Were you bothering this girl?”

“Nope.” He was unalarmed, unashamed. His voice was adult, no adolescent croak. He might have been older than he seemed.

“Was he, Sharon?”

Barely audible, Sharon said: “Nuh-nuh-no.” She had a red rubber ball on an elastic string, and bounced it thoughtfully. I noticed she used her left hand for that. “Sharon, may I see your other hand?”

Reluctantly she held it out. I saw nothing wrong with it. When I looked up the boy was gone, around the corner. Sharon poked at a wet eyelid with annoyance. She said in a manner too ornate for the Court of St. James’s: “Mr. Miles, how can I ever adequately thank you?”

“Think nothing of it. Who’s the yellow-haired phenomenon?”

That helped. She nodded in acknowledgment of a valuable word. “Just Billy Kell. He is, heck, indeed a phenomenon.”

“’Fraid I don’t like him. What did he want?”

Her mouth went tight. “Nothing.” She bounced the ball with desperate concentration. “He’s a mere phenomenon, think nothing of it.” In need of small talk, she added politely: “I hear you had a burglary.”

“Yeah. News does get around.”

“Heck, I stopped by your house this morning before Angelo had to dress up for church. He says Dogberry will never abdiquately get to the bottom of it, and so phoo on Dogberry, don’t you think so? By the way, do you swear never to tell if I happen to show you something?”

I said swearing was a serious matter; but she knew that. She studied me a nerve-twisting while, and made up her mind. She peered up and down the street, and darted down to the basement areaway. The lower entrance was half hidden under the front steps, only one board nailed to its wooden door. “You have to swear, Mr. Miles.”

I examined conscience. “I swear never to tell.”

“You have to cross your heart if it’s going to be legal.”

I did that, and she lifted away the loose board with slight effort, using her left hand. But she was not left-handed: I notice such things. I followed, closing the door behind us as she ordered, and we were in a hot dingy gloom, musty and vague, with a smell of rats and old damp plaster. I assured her I could see my way, but she gripped my thumb to guide me through a wilderness of empty crates and nameless litter, to a back room that had been a kitchen before the house was abandoned. There are too many such houses in Latimer, and the drift of population to the countryside may not be quite enough to explain it. I wonder sometimes if human beings have begun, a little, to hate the cities to which they have given such effort.

A large flimsy structure loomed in this kitchen, something knocked together from old crates, a house within a house. Sharon said: “Wait.” She ducked into the contraption and struck a match. Two candles glowed. “You can come in now.” As I squeezed in, she was hushed and solemn, the sea-blue of her eyes lost in enormous black. “Nobody ever did before, except me…. This is Amagoya.” With obvious second thoughts and fear that I might not deserve the trust, she said: “Of course it’s unequibblical make-believe.”

It was and it wasn’t. There was an altar here, the upturned bottom of a box. On a makeshift shelf above it was what some might have taken for a rag doll. “Amag,” Sharon said, nodding to him. “Just merely a representation, used to be a doll. Dolls are so childish, don’t you think so?”

“Maybe, but make-believe is real. The inside of your head is real. Things outside are a different kind of real, that’s all.” The objects on the box-altar were flanked by the candles. A boy’s cap, frayed at the brim, a penknife, a silver dollar. “Am I really the only one to see this, Sharon? Not even Angelo?”

“Oh no!” She was shocked. “Amagoya is me when I’m alone. And now you, is why I had to make you swear. Well, because you don’t laugh only at the right times.” A pity, Drozma, that I had to live 346 years before receiving a compliment of such magnitude. “The dollar, He got that for a school prize and gave it to me for a luck piece. The penknife because I wanted one and He said keep it.” You could hear her capitalize the pronoun. “The cap He just threw away.” There was no room for polite comment even from a Martian, and Sharon wanted no comment. I looked respectful and that was sufficient. She changed the subject with relief, saying apropos of nothing and with a gusty sigh: “Pop came home drunk from lodge meeting. I veritably couldn’t sleep, with them fighting. He hit the lid lifter against the stove just to make a noise, busted it to hell square off, frankly you wouldn’t believe the things I put up with, frankly…”

“Look, Sharon — that Billy Kell. I think he did hurt your hand. You could tell me about it.”

“I couldn’t permit you to beat him up. Frankly I couldn’t take the responsibility.”

“I don’t beat people up, but I might scare him a little.”

“He don’t scare, anyway I’m not afraid of him. He didn’t really push my finger back, just pretended he would.” She had no real resources of deception; I took advantage of that, by simply waiting. “Well, he was trying to make me say — something I wouldn’t, was all. About me and Angelo. Billy can go drown. He is a mere phenomenon, Mr. Miles….”

“And the finger?”

“Honest, it’s all right. Look, this is how you play a scale.” She demonstrated, on the floor. I saw, not only that her hand was unharmed, but that her thumb already knew how to pass under the fingers in clean precision. After only one lesson. Slow, of course, but right. You yourself, Drozma, have spoken kindly of my ability as a pianist. But I know that we can never equal the best human players, and not merely because our artificial fifth fingers are dull. Do you think it might be because human beings live only a little time, and remember this in their music?

“I’m puzzled, Sharon. This morning Angelo said something about Billy Kell. As if they were friends, or so I thought.”

She said with adult bitterness: “He does think Billy’s his friend. I tried to tell him different, once. He wouldn’t believe me. It’s because he thinks everybody is good.”

“I don’t know, Sharon. I don’t think anybody who wasn’t would fool Angelo very long.”

Well, that was good doctrine, and seemed to make her feel better. She again changed the subject delicately: “If you want to, we could make Amagoya a space ship. I do that sometimes.”

“Sound idea.”

There was nasty furtive scampering somewhere in that dead kitchen. “Think nothing of it,” said Sharon. “You see, when I leave here I cover up everything with that other box, to keep off the phenomenons….”

Handsomely dressed, Angelo met me on the front steps when I returned from the space ship, and transmitted an invitation to stop downstairs for a little coffee. Feuermann was already there. Rosa’s idea of a little coffee included pizza and half a dozen other items, all tempting. Rosa herself, in Sunday clothes, looked wilted from something more than the heat of the morning. She reminded me ruefully: “You wanted peace and quiet, Mr. Miles.”

“Oh, call me Ben.” I tried to relax without losing the primness of Mr. Miles — which had never had a chance to get established, with Sharon. We kicked around the question of photograph albums, Feuermann returning obsessively to the main point: what could a burglar want of them?

“We aren’t missing any down here,” Angelo said. “I looked.”

Later Feuermann said hesitantly: “Angelo, Mac told me he’d — Well, dig a place. In the yard. If you want him to.”

Angelo choked on a mouthful. “If it’d make him feel better.”

“Dear,” Rosa muttered. “Angelo mio — please—”

“Sorry, but can’t somebody tell Mac I don’t wear diapers nowadays?”

“Why, son,” Feuermann said, “Mac just thought—”

“Mac just didn’t think.”

In the raw silence I suggested: “Look, Angelo — have patience with the human race. They try.”

He glared across the pretty kitchen table, hating me. The hatred softened and vanished. He seemed only puzzled, perhaps wondering who and what I was, what place I had in his secret widening world. He apologized with not much difficulty: “I’m sorry, Uncle Jacob. Glad to have Mac do that. I was mad because I can’t manage a spade with my damned leg.”

“Angelo, don’t use those words — I’ve asked you—”

He turned beet-red. Feuermann intervened: “Let him, this time, Rosa. I would too if Bella’d been mine. A damn never hurt anybody.”

“Sunday morning,” Rosa whimpered, “only an hour after Mass… It’s all right, Angelo, I’m not cross. But don’t do it. You don’t want to sound like those tough kids down the street.”

“They aren’t so tough, Mama.” He fooled with his food. “Billy Kell puts on a show but it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Tough talk makes tough thinking,” said Feuermann, and Angelo seemed not to resent that.

When I made my manners Angelo followed me to the basement stairs and asked without warning: “Who are you, Mr. Miles?”

His way, to fetch up the hardest questions — and I don’t mean I was worried about the Martian angle: I wasn’t. I disliked having to fence with him. “A not very exciting ex-teacher, as I told your mother. Why, friend?”

“Oh, you sort of understand things, maybe.”

“Don’t lots of people?”

His Latin shrug dismissing that was desperately mature. “I dunno…. I met an old man in the park, month or so ago. Maybe he did. He said he’d lend me some books, but then I never saw him again.”

“What were the books, remember?”

“Somebody named Hegel. And Marx. Well, I tried to get Marx out of the public library, but they threw a whingding.”

“Said mere children don’t read Marx?” He looked up quickly, with some incredulity. “I could get those for you if you like.”

“Would you?”

“Those and others, sure. You can’t study out a thing for good or bad if you don’t go to the source. But look, Angelo: you scare people. You know why, don’t you?”

He flushed and scraped his shoe tip on the floor like any small boy. “I don’t know, Mr. Miles.”

“People think in fairly rigid patterns, Angelo. They think a twelve-year-old boy is just thus and so, no argument. When one comes along who thinks ahead of his age, well, they feel as if the ground shook a little. It scares ’em.” I put my hand on his shoulder, wanting to say what words could not; he didn’t draw away. “It doesn’t scare me, Angelo.”

“No?”

I tried to imitate his very fine shrug. “After all, Norbert Wiener entered college at eleven.”

“Yeah, and had his troubles too. I read his book.”

“Then you know some of what I was trying to say. Well, other books. What do you like to read?”

He abandoned caution and said passionately: “Anything! Anything at all….”

“Roger!” I said, and squeezed his shoulder and started upstairs. I am not sure, but I think he whispered: “Thanks!”

4

Early that afternoon I had my feet up in my own room, frustratedly trying to guess what Namir’s next move might be. Feuermann wandered in, spruced up but not solemn. He said he had a date with his wife. At his age I suppose one needn’t be portentous about a Sunday afternoon visit to the cemetery. He was taking Angelo along for the drive and invited me to join them.

His “jalopy” was a ’58 model. I marveled at the swooping lines of some ’62s and ’63s that Angelo pointed out as we purred down Calumet Street. He and the old man talked automobiles, somewhat over my head. I was the only one who noticed a gray coupe sticking behind us as we worked through town and out on a splendid country highway. “The cemetery isn’t in Latimer?”

“No, Susan’s people were Byfield folks. She wanted to be buried out there. About ten miles. Susan Grainger she was — been Graingers in Byfield since 1650, they say. My papa, he came over on the steerage.”

“So’d my grandfather,” said Angelo. “Anybody care nowadays?”

Feuermann glanced at me over the small brown head and drooped an eyelid and smiled. I said: “One world, Angelo?”

“Sure. Isn’t it?”

“One world and a good many civilizations.” He looked bothered.

“Well now,” said Jacob Feuermann, “I kind of like the idea of one world government.”

“I’m afraid of it,” I said, watching Angelo. “Too easy for it to turn monolithic, for individualists to kill individualism without knowing it. Why not seven or eight federations corresponding to the major civilizations, under a world law recognizing their right to be unaggressively different?”

“Think we could ever get such a world law? And where’s your guarantee against war in that, Miles?”

“There can’t be any except in human ethical maturity. A sensible political structure would help enormously, but there’s going to be risk of war so long as men think they can justify hating strangers and grabbing for power. Human hearts and minds are basic — the rest is mechanics.”

“Pessimist, huh?”

“Not a bit, Feuermann. But scared of the wishful thinking I sometimes do myself. In politics, wishful thinking just gives the wolves a license to howl.”

“Mm.” The old man squeezed Angelo’s bony knee. “Angelo, you figure Miles and me are old enough to sweat out these things?” Angelo might have disliked that gentle sarcasm from anyone but Feuermann. He chuckled and flung a make-believe punch at Feuermann’s shoulder, and we pushed it around on that more comfortable level all the way to Byfield. That gray coupe stayed behind us and I didn’t mention it. This was a well-traveled road. My imagination could be overheated. Still, Feuermann drove with slow caution and many other cars whooshed by us impatiently. When we pulled into a parking lot near the cemetery the gray car speeded up to hurry past, the driver bending down with averted face.

Angelo had been here with Feuermann before. I would have gone all the way with Jacob to the grave, but Angelo shook his head and led me to a green bank overlooking the most ancient part of the graveyard — quite ancient in the American-human sense, for some of the crumbling stones dated from three hundred years ago when I was a boy. Angelo pointed those out to me, not snickering as most youngsters would have done at the labors of a long-dead stonemason who symbolized angels by eyed circles with a few gouges for hair. “Guess all they had was that sandstone or whatever it is.”

“Yes, marble would have done better by a few centuries.”

“Sure.” He did laugh then. “Sure, what’s a few centuries?” He sat on the bank, chewing a grass blade, swinging his feet. Jacob Feuermann was fifty paces away, seeming on his island of contemplation more distant than he was, full of stillness, with sunlight on his white head. He looked down at whatever truth he saw in that modest swell of earth, and then away toward summer clouds and eternity. In a younger man it might have appeared morbidly sentimental, at least to human beings, always swift with labels for the quirks of others. But Feuermann was too solid, too tranquil inwardly, to worry over labels. Later he sat on the ground, chin in hand, unconcerned about dampness or creaky aging joints, and Angelo murmured to me: “Every Sunday rain or shine. Sure, even if it’s raining, though maybe he doesn’t sit on the grass then. Winter too.”

“I suppose he loved her, Angelo. Likes to be here where nothing much comes between him and the thought of her.” But I was losing myself in shadow. My mind smelled chloroform, saw that blank-faced young Hercules looming over Sharon in the doorway, glimpsed a gray coupe that should not have hung behind us. Small things. Nothing ugly had happened except Bella’s death; the warm sweetness of this day made it seem absurd that any more ugliness could happen. But even in a sunlit hush of jungle you may see some distant fluid motion of black and orange stripes in the grass, or hear the whisper of a leaf no wind disturbs. I produced a yawn and hoped it sounded comfortable, lending a phony casualness to my question: “You go to church, Angelo?”

“Sure.” Though mild, his face became too watchful. Probably he knew the question was not casual, knew I was groping for his thoughts and wondered whether to grant me the right to any such exploration…. “I even sang in the choir last year. Kid in front of me had ears like an aardvark. Threw me off pitch.” He hummed, a clear contralto with a curious effect of distance: “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam—” he spat out the grass blade and smiled off at nothing.

“And has he made your youth joyful?”

Angelo chuckled. “Now you sound like that man I talked with in the park. He said religion was a fraud.”

“I don’t consider it a fraud, though I happen to be agnostic myself. Matter of individual belief. You should go anyway, if only on your mother’s account — at least I suppose she’s devout, isn’t she?”

He sobered quickly. “Yes….”

“Tell me something about Latimer.” I watched his feet swinging, the finely shaped one, the twisted one with the brace. “Keep thinking I might decide to settle here.”

He spoke doubtfully: “Well, there isn’t much. People say it’s kind of gone to seed. I dunno. Lot of empty houses. Nothing much ever happens. The country’s nice, like here, when you get out in it — Cheepus, I wish I could! You know: just walk all day, climb hills. I go a mile and then it’s pain up the back of the leg, have to quit.”

“Think I’ll get a car. Then we could go out in the country a bit.”

“Cheepus!” He lit up from inside. “Spend a whole day in the woods maybe? I could go for that…. You know, that painting, the one in your room, it wasn’t any place I ever really saw. I’ve seen places like it — birches — Uncle Jacob takes me for drives sometimes. But when I want to get out and walk he has to come along and worry about my leg instead of letting me worry about it and quit when I’m ready to…. I like animals. You know? The little things that — I’ve read, if you sit still in the woods a while they’ll come around and not be afraid.”

“That’s true. I’ve often done it. Most of the birds don’t mind if you do move a little, in fact they prefer it, looks less suspicious. I’ve had orioles come pretty close. Red-wing blackbirds. Fox almost blundered into me once. I was sitting in one of his favorite paths. He just looked embarrassed and made a detour…. Met a friend of yours, by the way. At the delicatessen. Sharon Brand.”

His mind was still in the woods. He said absently: “Yes, she’s a nice kid.”

“You sort of grew up with her?”

“Sort of. Four-five years anyway. Mama — doesn’t like her too much.”

“Oh, why? I think she’s swell.”

He picked a fresh grass blade. He said carefully: “Sharon’s people aren’t Catholics….”

“Is Billy Kell Catholic?”

“No.” He looked puzzled. “Billy? When did I—”

“This morning, Angelo. When we found Bella. You said: ’Billy Kell might know.’”

“Oh. Did I?” He sighed uncomfortably. “Cheepus…!”

“You said something about the Diggers too. What are they? A gang?”

“Yeah.”

“Round about your age?”

“Yeah. Some older.”

“Tough?”

He grinned in a way I hadn’t seen, as if he were trying out toughness to see how it felt. “They think so, Mr. Miles, to hear ’em bat the wind.”

“Sounds as if you didn’t like ’em.”

“They’re a bunch of—” He stopped, weighing me, I think, and wondering if I’d tolerate an obscenity from a twelve-year-old, and deciding against it. He said mildly: “Nobody likes those bastards.”

“What all do they do?”

“Oh, they fight dirty. Some stealing, I guess, fruit-stand jobs or stuff off the back of a truck. Billy says some of the older ones are muggers, and some of ’em carry shivs — knives, I mean.” I didn’t like his smile: it was a dissonance in the character I thought I was beginning to know. “Most of ’em come from the sh — the crumby end of Calumet Street, the south end…. Got a cigarette?”

I gave him one, and lit it for him. Feuermann wasn’t looking, and I suppose I could have argued it with Feuermann anyway. “Don’t the Diggers have any competition, Angelo?”

He hesitated, only a little. “Sure. The Mudhawks. That’s Billy Kell’s gang.” He was smoking casually, inhaling without coughing. “You know, I saw Billy crack a walnut once, just putting it against his biceps and closing his arm. Nobody tangles with Billy Kell.” He said as if trying to convince himself of something that mattered: “The Mudhawks are all right.”

“Can you talk with him? With Billy Kell?”

He knew what I meant, but said uneasily: “How do you mean?”

“When I first saw you, yesterday, you were reading the Crito. I just meant, things like that.”

He said evasively: “Books aren’t everything…. He’s good in school, straight A’s all the time.”

“How is the school? Pretty fair?”

“It’s all right.”

“But you have to put on an act, is that right?”

He rubbed out the cigarette against a stone. He said presently: “They play around an awful lot. Maybe I do. Some of the time. I’m no good in mathematics. Or manual training — honest, you should see a birdhouse I tried to make, looks like a haystack in a blizzard.”

“What are you good at?”

He made a face at me, enjoying it. “The things they don’t teach. All right — like the Crito, Mr. Miles. Philosophy.”

“Ethics?”

“Well, I got a college text on that, out of the library. I didn’t think it got down to cases very much. They’ve got Spinoza there. I didn’t try it.”

“Don’t.” I took hold of his good ankle and hung onto it a moment. “You’re way ahead of your class, my friend, but you’re not ready for Spinoza. Not sure I ever was myself. If you can take him all in at one gulp, I suppose it’s good, but let it wait…. History was my subject when I used to teach school. How about that?”

“They just don’t teach it, not to say teach. Formula stuff. They tell you one thing, and you get something out of the library that says just the opposite, so who’s right? I mean, the teacher dishes it out the way he sees it, and then you’re supposed to wrap it up and give it back to him the same way. Or you’re wrong: E for effort. Schoolbook says we broke away from England in 1776 because British imperialism was strangling the colonies economically. Declaration of Independence says we did it for political reasons. Really both, wasn’t it?”

“Those were two of many reasons, yes.” I can never be reconciled to our deception, Drozma. How I should have loved to tell him that afternoon of the way I saw the French fleet come into the Chesapeake before Yorktown! I remember the early autumn storm too, that came up when the poor devils of redcoats were trying to get across the river — I suppose I might not have wanted to describe that to him completely. Or I might, I don’t know…. “History frustrates all teachers,” I said, “simply because it’s too endlessly big. There has to be selection, and the best of teachers can’t escape his own bias in making that selection. But of course they ought to keep reminding you of that difficulty, and I suppose they don’t.”

“No, they don’t. The Federalist Papers don’t explain everything with economics either. I said I’d read ’em. Wasn’t supposed to. I don’t mean she gave me hell or anything. She said it was fine that I should make such an effort, only she was afraid they were a little over my head. And besides, although the Federalist Papers were ‘quaint and interesting,’ they weren’t part of the course, and wouldn’t I try to be a little more attentive in class and show a better all-around attitude?”

“You mean, Angelo, some days it just don’t pay to get up?”

He liked that, and blew out a grass blade in a puff of laughter and pulled another one to chew. “Level bevel, Mr. Miles.” In the teen-age argot of 30,963, that means you’re all right. Angelo uses that cant very seldom, being far more at home in the precision and beauty of normal English than any adults I have met on this mission.

“Are you a member of that gang you told me about? Billy Kell’s? Not that it’s any of my business.”

He looked away, all pleasure gone. “No, I’m not. I guess they want me to join. I don’t know….” I waited, which was not easy. “I couldn’t let Mama know about it if I did.”

“Joining would mean agreeing to a lot of things, wouldn’t it? It usually does.”

“Maybe so.” He got down off the bank, lounging with his hands in his pockets. I didn’t see again that flash of phony, half-experimental toughness. But I did realize presently that I had intruded on a matter in which he would accept no counsel, and that he wasn’t going to answer the unspoken question. He had taken on a look not distant but almost sleepy; he was hidden in the thousand-colored privacy of a mind I’d never know, yet not far away. At that moment and at others I remember, he reminded me of that slumbrous creature of heaven who leans on the shoulder of another in Michelangelo’s “Madonna, Child, St. John and Angels.” (I bought a fair print of that painting and still have it; sometimes it seems more like him than a snapshot, which is supposed to tell the truth. )

“Any car I get,” I said, “will have to be a jalopy. How were the ’56 Fords?”

“Good, I guess.” He smiled brilliantly, thinking of my promise, and held up circled thumb and forefinger in that American gesture which appears to mean that everything’s jake. “Any old wheeze-on-wheels, you won’t be able to get rid of me.” He limped to the nearest of the graves and rubbed a finger on the eroded carving. “Here’s a guy who ‘sought his reward August 10, 1671, a servant of Christ.’ Name of Mordecai Paxton. Must’ve figured he was pretty sure what reward.” He started to brush a cobweb from the slanted, half-submerged stone, but his hand fell. “Nah, she’d only build it up again, and besides…”

“She and Mordecai get along. Might even be descended from a spider who knew Mordecai personally.”

“Might be. Other people are neglecting Mordecai though.” Angelo picked a few saucy dandelions and tucked them around the stone. “Him and his whiskers.” He glanced up with shyness. “Kind of thing Sharon’s always doing. Looks better, huh?”

“Much.”

“Gaudy whiskers, I’ll bet.”

“A caution to the heathen.” We pushed Mordecai around, I said ginger whiskers, but Angelo claimed Mordecai was roly-poly, with black cooky-brushes, and had been tempted by Satan in the form of a pork chop. We quit when Feuermann returned, not that the old man would have minded laughter.

I thought I saw that gray coupe behind us on the way home. It shot by, again too quickly, when we stopped at a roadstand, where Angelo consumed a forbidding quantity of pistachio ice cream. Back in the car, he burped once, said: “Ah, hydrogen chloride!” And fell asleep.

I was in danger, since he drooped against me. But his head was not directly on my chest; he was too sound asleep to notice that my heart beat only once in sixty seconds. What are we, Drozma? More than human, when we observe them; less, when we batter our wings against the glass.

5

The following week is, in my mind, a kaleidoscope of small events:

Waking late, when Sharon and Angelo were installing a bit of paving stone to mark Bella’s grave in the back yard. If I had not witnessed Angelo’s earlier resentment I should have thought he was enjoying it, until he happened to step behind Sharon and his face abandoned pretense, becoming patient, puzzled, tender like that of any adult watching make-believe, himself remembering the forests and plains and deserts of maturity. Later they strolled down Martin Street into the city’s jungle…. Sitting empty-brained before my typewriter, deciding at length that Mr. Ben Miles would be convincing enough as a guy always on the point of writing a book but never doing it…. Visiting EL CAT SEN with Angelo (Tuesday that was) and finding not Sharon but a harassed little chap, Sharon’s father, who became determinedly hearty talking baseball with Angelo; he didn’t look like a smasher of cast iron…. Meeting Jack McGuire in a bar after his day’s work at a garage. We started with the burglary but wound up with Angelo. “Ain’t healthy,” Mac said. “Nose all the time in a book. Couldn’t ever be an athalete with that bum leg, but all the same it ain’t healthy, irregardless. He’ll grow up lopsided or queer. Soon put a stop to it if he was my kid, but what can you do?” I didn’t know….

Nothing that week made me suspect the presence of Namir.

I saw Billy Kell again, from my window, playing catch with Angelo in Martin Street, and I wondered if my bad first impression of him could have been distorted. Had Sharon been at fault too? He had been tormenting her, but maybe she had goaded him to it. In that ball game Billy was a different person. He was throwing so that Angelo would not have to run much, yet he contrived to make Angelo work for it. There was no air of condescension or pulling punches, nothing patronizing in Billy’s shouted comments. He was taking a lot of unboyish trouble to give Angelo a good time. When they tired of it they sat on the curb, blond head and dark in some amiable conference. It was all casual: Billy did not seem to be urging or arguing anything. When Rosa called him in for supper, Angelo exchanged some parting gesture with his friend — turn of the wrist and upraised palm. I remembered that Billy Kell led the Mudhawks. But Angelo had also said that he hadn’t yet joined the gang….

I had Thursday evening dinner with the Pontevecchios, the old ladies present. Rosa’s cooking was from the heart. She was light on her feet in front of the stove, or bringing a dish to us. I wondered how much of her tiny income was lavished on that sort of thing. It was not waste: Rosa was a giver, hospitality as necessary to her as oxygen. When she could break out a fresh handsome tablecloth and stuff her guests with kindness, Rosa came glowingly alive, and then I saw not a tired worried fat woman but the mother of Angelo.

Mrs. Doris Keith, majestic with white hair, gray silk, amethyst brooch, tended to glare — daring me to remember that when I first met her she was in several yards of cotton nightgown and screeching. She stood six feet and must have been rugged when she was on the warmer side of seventy. Mrs. Mapp would always have been soft and poky, in youth a charming valentine. Yet it was Mrs. Mapp who had once taught school — she “gave” art and music at a girls’ finishing school — while Mrs. Keith had never attempted any career but housewifery and rather defensively told you so. When their husbands quit the struggle years ago these two had worked out a symbiosis plainly good for the rest of their lives. I hoped they’d be lucky enough to die at the same time. “Angelo,” said Mrs. Keith, “do show Agnes your latest work.”

“Oh, I’m not doing much of anything.”

She labored graciously to treat him as an adult. “One can’t advance without expert criticism. One must avoid getting in a rut.”

“I just horse around.” But he was petted and hectored into bringing two paintings. On his way to get them the little devil winked at me.

Three mares in a high meadow, heads lifted to the approach of a vast red stallion. Colors roared like mountain wind. A meeting of wind and sunlight, savage and joyful, shoutingly and gorgeously sexual. Angelo should have been spanked. The other painting was a mild dreamy landscape.

I had to admit to myself that the ladies were desperately funny as well as pathetic, in their painstaking comments on everything but the obvious. “The color,” said Mrs. Mapp daringly, “is — uh — quite extravagant.”

“Yes,” said Angelo.

“This leg is a trifle long. You lacked a model, I presume.”

“Yes,” said Angelo.

“Masses. Learn to balance your masses, Angelo.”

“Yes,” said Angelo.

“Now this—” Mrs. Mapp took up the landscape with enormous relief. “This is — uh — not bad. This is lovely, Angelo. Very lovely.”

“Yes,” said Angelo.

Rosa laughed. Totally unaware of embarrassment because there was none in herself, full of nothing but warmth and admiration, she couldn’t keep her hands out of his curls as he took the paintings away. Nor was she much aware of them as paintings: just as Angelo’s books were unknown country, so Rosa could not imagine that a twelve-year-old’s work might have meaning for the world outside, or that his almost contemptuous virtuosity had achieved what most adult painters only struggle for. The shield of her kindly ignorance could have its uses.

While those two helped Rosa with the dishes, Angelo showed me his room. I did not try to stay angry with him, or to explain that dazzling and shocking little Mrs. Mapp was a shabby victory. He knew it, and was already sick about it.

The room was a tiny oblong, one grudging window at the level of Martin Street, hardly space for more than his cot bed, a bookcase, an easel. It was also the studio which had produced certain triumphs that were undervalued even by himself. He selected another painting from a stack against the wall. It was simple, technically unfinished, but he was right in not wanting to do any more with it. A hand curved to shelter what it held, and what it held was a tiger, fallen, mouth curled in a snarl of uncomprehending despair at the javelin in its side. “Evidently you do believe in God, Angelo.”

He looked annoyed. “Hand could symbolize human pity, couldn’t it?” But it seemed to me that his mind abandoned the picture in the moment when I offered my half-baked interpretation. He slumped on the cot, chin in hands, woebegone. “I better apologize?”

“Not necessarily.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Might just embarrass her worse. Why not let it go? And remember for the future that nice old ladies and randy stallions don’t mix too well. Matter of empirical ethics.” I watched: old man “empirical” didn’t worry him. He knew the word without even finding it unusual.

He thought it over and sighed: “Okay.” Relieved but not satisfied. It went on bothering him. I suppose that was why soon afterward he gave the soft landscape to Mrs. Mapp with sentimental flourishes, and took it like a gentleman when she kissed him and thanked him too much.

The next Sunday came in with warm persisting rain. I spent the morning reading the Sunday paper. It was difficult to evaluate the news when I so badly needed more light myself. After a week I had no plan worth the name. I knew something of the environment; something of Rosa and Feuermann and Sharon, scarcely anything of Billy Kell. I had shopped around for a cheap used car the day after our talk in the cemetery, but found nothing safe, so I put through a call to Toronto. A justifiable expense, Drozma, if only to let Angelo discover the woods — at any rate I have been in most of the temples and cathedrals of the world, and the peace I sometimes found in them was never more than a small substitute for what there is under the arches of the leaves. I had no clue to Namir’s whereabouts and intentions. With the stolen photographs, scent-destroyer, and Martian skill in disguise, he might be planning a masquerade. Or did he only want to make me afraid of that, so that I would distrust Feuermann and others, wasting my strength in pointless suspicions? To make me turn my own ignorance and weaknesses against myself, to make me stumble from my own blindness, to make Angelo do the same — that would be Namir’s way, and his pleasure. In intelligent life, human or Martian, maybe there has always been a genuine division between those who honor the individuality of others and those who are driven to control and pervert it. A shifting division, I admit, since some of us, confused, may have a foot in both camps at times, and some spirit-killers may reform, and some of the generous may be corrupted.

From the front page I deduced that the new government of Spain would join the United States of Europe before long. That could be of profound human importance, but I let the paper sag on my knees, contemplating Angelo’s birch tree and the other painting, the wounded tiger, which he had blandly given me. I read, too, about the projected satellite station. In 1952, said the article, it had been thought that ten years would do the job — ten years and some small change amounting to four billion dollars. It seems it will take a mite longer than that, and a billion or so more. Exhaustive tests simulating conditions of outer space had hinted at possible long-term damage to the human system, which early briefer experiments could not reveal. Nothing too serious. Candidates would have to be even more critically screened, that was all. Nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, maybe, or ’68. We could have told them a little, from our ancient history, but I recognize the wisdom of our law: we must let them alone with their technological problems. It was all right to help some of the early tribes find the bow and arrow the way we did, but times have changed.

In the afternoon Feuermann came in to see me. He was visiting the cemetery again. Rain was still gray and whispering, and I spoke of it. He smiled at wet window glass. “Sun’s up beyond it somewhere.”

“Jacob” — we were on first-name basis now — “do you know anything about this Digger-Mudhawk business? Hate to see Angelo mix into that.”

“Kid stuff, I guess. Hard to get him to talk about it.”

“Seems the Diggers include older boys, some of ’em tough.”

“So?” He was concerned, but not seriously. “I figure a boy’s pretty much a wild animal. They work it out of their systems. Not that I’d favor it for Angelo. But that Kell kid seems to be all right.” I still wondered. “Where does he live, do you know?”

“South Calumet Street neighborhood somewhere, the crumby section. I believe his parents are dead. Lives with a relative, guess it’s an aunt.” Jacob had found my discarded newspaper, and was forgetting Billy Kell. “Or some woman who adopted him, I don’t know. They get sort of casual in the south end. He’s in Angelo’s class in school, supposed to be a good student, so I hear…. Hey, did you see this? Max is in jail again.”

“Max?” I recalled a front-page item. It was a New York City paper, with the usual random mass of political maneuverings, speeches, oddities, personalities, disasters. One Joseph Max had been arrested for causing a near riot with a handful of followers at a meeting addressed by some senator. There was a write-up on Max himself, but I had not followed its continuation on an inner page.

“An heir of Huey Long.” Feuermann was reading intently “Missed my paper this morning. Long, and Goat-gland Brinkley and the Ku Klux, with a dash of communazi to flavor the brew… Ach, they never die!”

“One of those? Don’t think I’ve heard of Max before.”

“Maybe the Canada papers didn’t bother with him. All he needs is a special-colored shirt. He turned up first in 1960, I think, with — now wha’d he call it? — Crystal Christian League, some damn thing, made capital of the word ‘Christian.’ Christian like a snapping turtle. You know how the freak parties always emerge in a presidential year. Froth on the pond.”

“Yes, they thought Hitler and Lenin were froth, for a while.”

“Well, I tell you, it’s the damn human way, not to look at what scares us. Max dropped out of sight for a couple years, started making headlines again a year ago. ‘Purity of the American race.’ It says here. We never learn.”

“That’s Max’s line?”

“Yeah, but it looks as though he’d chucked some of the fantastic stuff. He’s formed something he calls the Unity Party. Claims a million of the faithful, nice round number. ‘Right will prevail!’ says he on his way to the clink after busting a few heads. Hope they don’t make a martyr of him — what he wants, naturally.”

(I believe it might be worth a full-time Observer, Drozma, if one has not already been assigned.) “You think he might become big-time?”

Feuermann sighed. His good engineer’s hands knotted and relaxed in his lap. “I sit around too much, Ben, and think too much. I’d give an awful lot to be out on the rails again; 509 and me, we were sort of friends” — he was shy about — “you understand? Active all my life, hard to get it through your head you’re old. Maybe I imagine things. Sitting around… no, likely Max is just froth. Ought to be enough common sense in the country to sort of disinfect him before he gets a-going. Wouldn’t you think, all the time we’ve had, troubles we’ve seen, we could do a little better, Ben? Use more love and less pride? Hang onto your own self but treat the other guy like he had one too? Do unto others… Care for a drive to Byfield?”

He was lonely, but I declined, blaming the rain. He left me, with a characteristic, openhearted smile on his face that I never saw again….

The rain ended in late afternoon. I found Angelo and Billy Kell on the front steps, lazy in the moist warmth. Probably the quality of their talk altered when I appeared and fussily spread a newspaper on the top step to sit on. It was my second face-to-face meeting with Billy. Angelo introduced us formally, and Billy gave no open sign of remembering me. He was polite, as a fourteen-year-old can readily learn to be. Ironically, I thought. He offered a skillful imitation of grown-up small talk — Canada, baseball, this and that. He had an unlimited fund of it, and I couldn’t isolate any one part of it to call it mockery.

Sharon appeared on the other side of the street in what I believe was a new pink dress. She looked small and lonesome as well as starchy in the waning sunlight, studiously tossing her red rubber ball on its elastic string. Angelo called: “Hey, kid! C’m’on over!” She turned her back. Angelo poked Billy’s ribs. “One of her moods.”

“Deep bleep,” said Billy Kell. A teen-age formula, I guess.

Having made her point, Sharon did approach. She marched up the steps with no recognition for the boys, and addressed me in brittle dignity: “Good evening, Mr. Miles. I wondered if I’d find you here.”

I gave her some of my newspaper to sit on. “The steps are still damp, and that looks to me like a new dress.”

“Thank you, Mr. Miles.” She accepted the paper with absent-minded queenliness. “I am glad to know one’s efforts are not wholly unappreciated.”

Angelo’s ears turned flame color. I was in the cross fire and saw no way to get out of it. Billy Kell was enjoying it. Angelo mumbled: “Time for some catch before supper — huh?”

“I oughta be on my way,” said Billy Kell.

“Mr. Miles, have you ever noticed how some people are always persistently changing the subject?”

I attempted sternness: “I might change it myself. How have the lessons been going this week, Sharon?”

That reached through her thin-drawn politeness. She talked of the lessons with pleasure and relief, not forgetting, of course, to use the conversation as a saw-toothed weapon, but nevertheless enjoying it. The lessons were terrific and getting terrificker all the time. Mrs. Wilks was going to give her a real piece to memorize Monday. She could almost stretch an octave, Sharon said — anyhow by rolling it a little; it was true that her fine fingers were long in proportion to her size. Angelo suffered in silence, and in spite of his remark Billy Kell was lingering. At length Sharon ran down and began to repeat herself. Angelo turned, not smiling at all. “Sharon, I’m sorry.” He put his hand on her shoe tip. “Now tell me, what should I be sorry for, huh?”

She ignored her own foot, allowing it to remain where it was. She addressed an imaginary Mr. Miles somewhere on the rooftops across the street: “Mr. Miles, have you any idea what this child is talking about?”

“Oh, bloop,” said Angelo, and Billy Kell guffawed. I sought myself for a change of subject, asking whether Mr. Feuermann usually stayed in Byfield as late as this.

Angelo pulled his mind from the exasperations of the eternal feminine. I’m not entirely sure what Sharon was mad about that evening, besides his failure to notice the dress. I think it was Billy’s mere presence when she wanted Angelo to herself: a grown-up jealousy in a ten-year-old frame that could hardly bear it. Angelo began to be puzzled about Feuermann too, and worried. “No, Ben no, he doesn’t.” Billy murmured: “Isn’t that his car now?”

It was. The white-haired man waved as he drove around the corner, headed for a garage down Martin Street. Angelo was still having woman trouble when Feuermann returned on foot, swinging his door keys, smiling at the children, noticing me and nodding — stiffly. Something was wrong with Jacob Feuermann. He halted on the bottom step and said, apparently to Angelo: “Nice out there in spite of the rain.” His voice was tense.

I needed to hear that voice again. I said as if idly: “Doesn’t seem to’ve cooled things off much.”

He would not look at me, and he spoke with a note of sober slyness not natural to the Feuermann I thought I knew: “Doesn’t ever get this hot in Canada, I guess?”

I thought then: Namir has met him. Namir has dropped a whisper, to make him think I am not what I seem. Of course. Namir would know all the uses of scandal and innuendo and half-truth. Strange weapons, so easy to take up, the stain indelible on user and victim. I had tried to foresee other methods of attack, and stupidly overlooked this one, so natural to any creature who believes that the end can justify the means. Now I would have to find out somehow what the whisper had made of me — Asiatic spy, anarchist, escaped criminal. It could be anything: the whole field was open, and when I traced down one lie to kill it, another would replace it. I said: “Why, yes, sometimes it does. Not apt to be as damp as this, inland.”

“That so? You remember it pretty well?”

Angelo looked merely puzzled, Billy Kell blank. And Feuermann had parted with me in such a friendly way only a few hours before! “Not very long since I was in Canada.”

“No? Your mother in, Angelo?” Not waiting for an answer, he went around to the basement entrance. To avoid passing near me.

6

The money came from Toronto the following day.

I acquired a pretty fair one-lunged ’55 job with a cauliflower fender, and during the next two outwardly quiet weeks Angelo learned a little about the woods. Or perhaps a great deal, because there was no need to teach him how to listen. He met the living quiet of the woods with a wonderful receptive quiet of his own, and we didn’t trouble much with words. Under the trees his normal boy’s restlessness disappears: he can sit still, and wait, and watch, so rather than make any stuffy effort to teach him about what he saw, I kept quiet and let the earth speak for itself. We had four such expeditions, about thirty miles out of town into the piny foothills of the Berkshires — two full days and two afternoons. Since talk would have been intrusive, I can’t say that it advanced my knowledge of him, but that doesn’t matter: he was happy, and learning things with all five senses that Latimer could not show him. Rosa trusted me, and seemed glad to have him with me.

Not so Feuermann. On the evening of that rainy Sunday I visited his room. He was unwilling to face me, brusque to my small talk; he dreamed up an outside errand for himself to get rid of me. I didn’t comment on the change — humanly speaking, I didn’t know him well enough. But there was a false note in it. Reading this far unbiased, Drozma, you have probably seen the truth. I didn’t, then. I only thought that if he suspected something ugly about me the Feuermann I had known would have investigated, or put his suspicion in open words. Sulky withdrawal wasn’t properly in character.

It was nearly two weeks after that day when Rosa bared some of her worries to me. She was cleaning my room, on another muggy morning. Her color was poor, her breathing labored; when I urged her to rest, she took the armchair gratefully. “Aie! — if I can ever get up again…. Ben, when you were a boy, did you ever get into one of those, you know, kid gangs?”

I by-passed my own youth. “I don’t think Angelo will do that.”

“No?… You’ve been good for him. I appreciate it.” I remember thinking it strange that she was still friendly, if Namir was using the poison knives of whispers. “Well, I almost married again, just on account he needs a father so bad. Wouldn’t’ve worked, I can see now.” She mopped her kind face, round, sad, shining under the towel she used to guard her hair. “He sure enough told you he wouldn’t join up with Billy Kell’s gang?”

“Well, no. But maybe the gang isn’t so bad, Rosa.”

“It’s bad. They get into fights, I don’t know what all. And I never can figure out what’s best for him. All I can do to add up a grocery bill. How’d I ever come to have such a boy? Here I’m common as mud—”

“Far from it.”

“You know I am,” she said, and not coquettishly. “Well, Father Judd (he’s dead now) he christened him Francis, that was Silvio’s idea. For, you know, the blessed Francisco di Assisi, so that’s really his name, Francis Angelo, the Francis never stuck. When he wasn’t a year old yet he looked so — so — anyway I had to use the name I picked…. Ben, would you sort of talk to him, about not joining that gang? You could say things that I — that I—”

“Don’t worry. Sure, I’ll talk to him about it.”

“If he joins maybe I won’t even know.”

“He’d tell you.” Her face said bleakly that there was much he never told her. “By the way, Rosa, is Mr. Feuermann sore at me?”

“Sore?” She was astonished, then adding two and two in some private hurried way. “Oh, it’s the hot weather, Ben. He feels it bad. Hardly seen him myself all week.” She pushed herself upright and finished her work….

That afternoon I took out my car — Angelo and I had named it Andy after Andrew Jackson because it’s always quarrelsome with body squeaks — and drove past EL CAT SEN when I knew Sharon would be on her way to a practice hour at the empty school. She accepted the lift with gracious calm. “Seems to me you ought to have your own piano at home, Sharon.”

“Mom has Headaches,” she said politely. “And besides.. It’s a good piano at the school. Mrs. Wilks told ’em they hadta. Mrs. Wilks is terrific. I love her beyond comprehemption.”

“Like to meet her sometime.”

“She’s blind. Looks at your face with her fingers, all kind of feathery. I memorized the first piece in two tries, no mistakes.”

“That is terrific.”

“I get terrific sometimes,” said Sharon, preoccupied.

At the school we were admitted by the janitor, a dim-eyed ancient who took my word for it that I was a friend and shuffled off into his forest of cold steampipes: no protection there. The piano was in the assembly hall — too big a place, too empty, but in a yard under the windows teen-age basketball practice was going on, and I noticed two young women working in an office we passed. I shoved aside the worried parent in me, and paid attention to a half-expected miracle.

Not music, naturally: beginner’s stuff, the five-finger, the scale of C major, a kindergarten melody with plimp-plump of tonic and dominant in the left. That didn’t matter. Touch was there, and a hunger for discipline and self-discipline. Left hand and right were already partners, after a scant fortnight of lessons. Yes, touch. Call it impossible: I heard it.

I tiptoed down into the auditorium and slumped in a seat with my mouth open. A shaft of sunlight was making her brown hair luminous in a haze of gold. Certainly she was the Sharon of Amagoya, of the red rubber ball on a string, but I could see the woman too. I saw her as beautiful, even if she retained the pug nose — likely she wouldn’t. The gown for her debut ought to be white, I thought, and she would not be really tall, but would seem so, alone under the lights, a massive black Steinway obedient to her. It was real to me. For her, there should be that transitory dazzling of crowds they call fame; there should be the greater achievement to which contemporary fame is a thin echo. But even if the end was in black frustration, Sharon was a musician and could never escape it. I would have to meet blind Mrs. Wilks: we could talk.

I ought to have heard the soft opening of the door at the back of the hall, but I was intent on Sharon, and on shutting out the basketball squeals, until I caught faint motion at the edge of my field of vision. I was slouching in shadow; he must have been unaware of me until I jerked up to look around. Then he was retreating quickly, face averted, head low. Even with a glimpse of yellow hair I could not be certain it was Billy Kell. The door clipped shut gently. He was gone.

I could try to dismiss it. Some boy wandering in, not knowing the assembly hall was in use. Some harmless playmate of Sharon’s who became shy at seeing an adult. But the hurried retreat had been furtive, ratlike. I felt that coldness in the throat — the human equivalent is what they call goose flesh.

From one of the windows I studied the basketball crowd. I didn’t see Billy, and he didn’t rejoin the handful of spectators down there. But that meant nothing.

A glance at my wrist watch amazed me. Sharon had been working a full hour. Perhaps I was partly in Martian contemplation but I don’t think so. I think it had been a one-way communication, her toiling fingers holding me, compelling my mind to share the effort, the promise, the small but mighty victories. She had stopped now, and was observing me out of her sunshine. “Heck, do you play?”

“Some, honey. Want to rest?” She gave me her seat, and I did as well as I could. For a school piano it wasn’t bad, though it hardly reminded me of the three Steinways we so painfully brought and reassembled for Northern City a few decades ago. It was more like an elderly Bechstein I once played in Old City. They like things mellow in Old City, and the voicing of this school piano was over-mellow, the bass tubby and disagreeable. But it would serve. I played as much as I could cleanly remember of the Schumann “Carnaval.” Sharon had no objections, but asked for Beethoven, I suggested “Für Elise.”

“No. Mrs. Wilks’s played me that. Something bigger.” Heaven forgive my stupid fifth fingers, I played the “Waldstein.” I may have hoped (in vain) that by associating the sonata with Sharon I could displace a deep memory. Drozma, perhaps you recall my tour of the Five Cities in 30,894? For me the “Waldstein” must always create again the auditorium in City of Oceans, its windows dreaming into the heart of the sea, windows fashioned with such effort, so long ago — they told me there that some of the builders’ names were lost. It is hardly strange that our people in City of Oceans were always a little different from the rest of us. When I played there that year, honestly I believe I approached the level of the modern human masters, and if so, the reason was in City of Oceans itself, not in any new virtue of my hands or heart. The long motion of the seaweed beyond those windows, always and never the same, the flicker and change and passing and returning of the fishes in scarlet and blue and green and gold — I see that now, and cannot help it. And of course everyone there was more than kind to me. They listened from within the music, and treated me as though they had wanted my visit for a century. It was later, as you know, that the study of human history became my necessity. The necessity is genuine and enduring; but the reason why I shall never make another tour is that I would remember City of Oceans too much. Drozma, what hideous blindness of chance, that our far-off ancestors should have chosen an island so near Bikini! Well, at least it was ours for twenty thousand years, and we must be glad there was warning enough so that some of our people could escape. And there may be another City of Oceans in some century after Union is achieved….

Sharon was a nearby buzz, suggesting: “Now some Chopin?”

“Oh, darling, I’m tired. And out of practice. Some other time.”

“By the way, I love you beyond comprehemption.”

And that really broke up the meeting so far as I was concerned, though I was able to bumble something or other from behind the facade of Mr. Miles. She was tired too and we adjourned.

The door had been opened again, harmlessly, by those office workers who wanted to hear my thunderings. I was suitably flattered. Sharon went on out to the car while I had a word with them. I spoke of someone sneaking in while Sharon practiced and hurrying out at seeing me. I suggested the hall was too lonely. Probably just another kid, but — etc. One of the girls wanted to practice sweet eyes on a real live pianist, but the other caught on, and promised me that henceforth the janitor would find a way to keep busy in the corridor during the practice hour. The bothered parent in me was soothed.

Partly. Until, after letting Sharon off at EL CAT SEN, I saw a familiar blond head down the street, not hurrying exactly. I crawled a block in the car, and parked when I was out of Sharon’s sight. Then I followed Billy Kell on foot. Mainly, I told myself, to find out how much I remembered of the difficult art of shadowing. Oh sure.

Small streets branch off from the southern end of Calumet, twisting like cowpaths. The houses are mostly detached, old frame buildings stooping from neglect. The district may have been better before so many families moved to the country, abandoning what had never been much loved. There were still children, cats, dogs, pushcarts, a few drunks, but these scarcely lightened the burden of desertion and loneliness. In spite of the still clustering life there was the smell of desolation. Boarded windows, or unboarded windows broken and gaping like missing teeth in an abused face. Litter. Broken glass and grayness. A rat watched me with pert lack of fear before oozing through a crack in a foundation wall. Human beings have never been very adult about cleaning up after themselves. A panhandler put the bite on me for a dime and got it. That was on the side street that Billy Kell had taken, turning off Calumet, and when I was rid of the beggar I saw Billy cross that street rather abruptly, a block ahead of me.

Half a block beyond Billy there was a junk-wagon horse hitched at the curb — ribby, scabby, drooping in the heat. Automatically I crossed the street myself to avoid walking near him, although my scent-destroyer was fairly fresh. It ought to have occurred to me then, to wonder why Billy Kell had done the same thing; perhaps I may be excused, for without scent-destroyer no Martian could have passed in that narrow street without scaring the poor old plug into a tantrum. Even as it was, with my scent suppressed, the horse tossed his head when I passed and cleared his velvet nostrils in discomfort.

Farther on Billy Kell stopped to chat with a group of ten or twelve youngsters who were lounging against the fence of a discouraged-looking churchyard, perhaps waiting for him: he had the air of a leader or counselor. I found a handy empty doorway. They were giving Billy the flattery of shrewd attention, admiring stares, laughter at his jokes. Boys and girls both wore that cocky tam-o’-shanter which seems to have replaced the zoot suit as a teen-age badge. The voices were squeaky and vague and loud, using a gabbling argot of transposed syllables and made-up words — I could not follow much of it. When Billy left them I saw again that motion of turned wrist and raised palm….

He took several turnings in those patternless streets and at length entered a frowzy two-story shack, but just before that I learned what I should have understood earlier. I was half a block behind him, strolling, my hatbrim lowered. As he mounted the shabby steps a breeze lifted and dropped a scrap of wastepaper near me. I barely noticed the slight sound; but Billy, half a block away, heard it. His head snapped about with the speed of an owl’s. A swift stare identified the source of the noise and swept over me, whether with recognition or not I couldn’t tell. He passed indoors, unconcerned.

I have seen human beings with muscular responses as rapid as ours — Angelo’s are extremely rapid at times. I never knew one whose hearing approached our Martian acuteness. I had to remember then: Namir has a son. As I write this, I still have no definitive proof. He could have turned his head for some other reason; his avoidance of the horse could have been accidental, or caused by a human aversion for the animals. But I think I am right: other Observers ought to be warned.

There was no good place for me to hide and linger, nor any reason why Mr. Ben Miles shouldn’t wander in this sorry region if he chose. I walked past the house, as a storm of squalling abuse broke out in there. A woman’s monologue, so blurry with drink that I caught only a few words: “No-good jerk” — a gust of whining profanity — “try ’n’ be a mother to you, what’s the use — get out! Don’t bother me! I ain’t well….”

I glanced back in time to see Billy come back out, after the smash of a bottle splintering on wood. He ambled around a corner without haste. On impulse I returned. I pounded on the door until I heard dreary cursing and a shuffle of slippers. I said: “Fire Department survey.”

“Yah?” She blocked the doorway with beefy arms. She was blinking, red-eyed, vague, not really old — fifties perhaps — and not badly dressed. Hostility in her face dissolved in a silly simper, and her breath was fearsome. Over her shoulder I saw a dingy front room filled with dressmaker’s gear. She was certainly human — after all, a Salvayan practically can’t get drunk. I think that sober she might have been quite different, perhaps grimly respectable and hard-working — the dressmaking equipment looked professional. The drink would be an addiction, an escape from smothering hardship and frustrations, and the years of it had beaten her down like a disease, leaving her frightened, peevish, isolated, old: so much was written on her face in coarse print. The bottle (empty) had crashed against the doorframe, scattering shards everywhere; I guessed that Billy would have been safely clear of it before she let it go. “Had lil accident,” she chuckled. “It’s the hot weather, I ain’t well exactly.” She struggled with a wandering strand of gray-brown hair. “And what have I the honor do f’you, mister?”

“Routine survey, ma’am. How many live here?”

She lurched away from the door. “Me and the boy is all.”

“Oh — just you and your son, ma’am?”

“’Dopted — that be any damn business yours? I pay taxes, no offense of course, ’m sure.”

“Just routine. May I look over the wiring?”

She waved and patted her lips. “Anybody stopping you?”

I left her making futile passes at the broken glass, and took a swift trip through the house, unopposed. There were only two rooms upstairs, the neat one obviously Billy’s; sorry and rather ashamed, I did not linger in the other bedroom. Billy’s room told me nothing, unless the very absence of boy’s trinkets meant something. A military-looking cot, a pile of schoolbooks noticeably unmarked, though Feuermann and Angelo had said he was supposed to be a good student. If there was any Martian scent it was so faint I could not separate it from my own; but the absence of it would not be negative proof, for Namir had stolen enough destroyer to take care of two users for a long time. At any rate Billy could not be Namir himself, since even the Abdicator’s skill in disguise could not make him convincingly square-bodied and a foot shorter.

The woman was painfully apologizing as I left. Hot weather, she said. She’d offer me a lil drink only there wasn’t a thing in the house, though ordinarily she liked to keep some on hand for her digestion, so’s the food wouldn’t all the time rift up on her. We parted friends.

If I am right about Billy Kell, I suppose he talked and charmed his way into some makeshift unofficial relation with this woman, playing on her loneliness and thwarted maternity, to give himself a temporary name and a screen of human association. In calling him “adopted” her manner had displayed truculent fear of authority. Legal adoption, I believe, is hedged about with formalities that neither he nor she could have satisfied. When her usefulness to him is ended, no doubt Billy Kell will vanish — without conscience or pity or any debt of loyalty if he is the son of Namir.

7

Back at the lodging house, I wanted to make good on my promise to talk with Angelo. More reason than ever now, after seeing the human background of Billy Kell. But there were difficulties in any direct approach.

Angelo was fond of me, I felt sure. He listened if I spoke. The interludes in the woods were a delight for him: he wanted to say so, and managed to do it, with an adult’s command of words and a boy’s shyness. I had bought books for him, and drawn others from the library. He was very handsome with his thanks for that too. (One was Huck Finn, which he had disgracefully never read.) Somehow we got into no really satisfying discussion of those books. He wallowed in Mark Twain and Melville; I knew he was startled by Dostoevski, and amused by the thin wind of fallacy that blew through the unsanitary beard of Marx. But there were reservations: whole regions of his thought and feeling blocked off by invisible signs: NO TRESPASSING. He didn’t seek me out in unhappy moments, though I knew he had many. So — grandfatherly advice against joining the gang, such as Feuermann might already have given him? The gentle barrier of Angelo’s humor made that absurd. Stern advice then? When actually I go in fear of his sleepy smile? If he were Martian I might have known what to do. I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them.

I slouched tired in the warm hallway, still seeing the bloated, vulnerable face of Billy Kell’s “adopted mother,” presently hearing Feuermann’s voice behind the closed door of his room. Its meaning reached me slowly. “Any experience is useful. Maybe the Mudhawks are tough — can you get anywhere in this world without toughness? You have to fight back. Can’t afford not to, with your intelligence. People hate intelligence, didn’t you know?”

“Depends on what it does to ’em, doesn’t it?”

“Not so much, Angelo. Dream up a new gadget, they’ll be grateful for a while,” said Feuermann’s voice. “It’ll be only the gadget they love, not the brain that made it — that they fear. They may have enough superstitious dread to worship it — devil-worship — but never will they respect it except superstitiously. I haven’t talked to you this way before because I wasn’t sure you could take it. But I guess you can.” I heard a thing like Feuermann’s kindly, wheezy laugh. “Of course, the superstitious awe of your brains that people will have — that can be used.”

“How d’you mean?”

“Oh, that’ll take care of itself.” I heard an old man’s sigh. “Anyway, remember it’s gadgets they want. Gadgets, simple ideas that seem to explain but leave basic prejudices untouched. They’ll pay a price if the gadget or idea is shiny enough. I know ’em, Angelo.” It just wasn’t Feuermann. Feuermann wouldn’t have spoken disparagingly of gadgets. In his sober way he was as much a gadget-lover as any other American of the ’960s. Hadn’t most of his life been spent in service of a mighty gadget that altered the face of the earth? “No, you have to fight all the way, all the time, with any weapon you can grab. I’m old, son. I know.”

“Oh,” said Angelo lightly, “I can battle my way out of a damp paper bag. But if you don’t go for fighting for the sake of fighting—”

“Then you lose. Sometimes you must even do evil — oh, so that good may come of it, but it’s all tooth and claw, devil take the hindmost.”

So I began to know, Drozma, that Jacob Feuermann was dead.

I knocked and entered. Hardly prepared at all, driven to intervene as some human beings are, when they sense danger to those they love. I recaptured Mr. Miles in time to close the door peacefully and light a cigarette. It was only Mr. Miles whom Angelo saw from his lazy perch on the window seat. I did not care what was seen by that other in the room.

He was in the armchair with his feet on the hassock which Feuermann had worn threadbare. He was even smoking the horse-head meerschaum. That added illogically to my wrath: I may have made one of those human identifications with the inanimate which we are warned to avoid. “Hope I’m not intruding,” I said as I intruded. “Had a hankering for the consolations of philosophy.” I couldn’t have cared less about philosophy. “Throw me out if the spirit moves.” I straddled a chair near the window. He would have had to throw chair and all, and he couldn’t have done it. It was at least some comfort to have no physical fear. “That’s a beautiful meerschaum, by the way. You must be a fancier of horseflesh, is that a fact?”

I saw his eyes. When a human being is startled, the pupils may dilate, never the whole iris; I believe the entire structure of the eyeball is subtly different. My last doubt was gone. He said careless-carefully: “Oh yes, in a way…. Philosophy, huh?”

“Ah, philosophy!” Angelo chirped. “Here’s where we dish it out, Ben. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and state your problems in words of less than one syllable. Feuermann and Pontevecchio, brought here at enormous expense, will solve it in the merest flick of a hysteron proteron: they walk, they talk, they crawl upon their bellies like a rep-tyle. For a nominal fee, they look into the past, the future, even the present, your money back if not satisfied. Why, ladies and gentlemen, it was these seers, these incomparable counselors of the unseen world” — he was warming to it, and as friendly as a puppy chewing my shoe — “who recently unscrewed one of the most inscrutable riddles of suffering humanity, namely, who put the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.”

I asked him who did.

“Divil a soul,” said Angelo. “They fell in when she lost her temper, and Mr. Murphy entirely in them at the time.”

The image of Feuermann didn’t speak or smile. I said: “Try the future, Prophet. Andy’s got valve trouble, or maybe it’s the carburetor. So, how long before petroleum gets so scarce we go back to — horses?” Under my breath I added the Salvayan word for “horses,” so seldom used among us and always with the jar of indecency. It is onomatopoetic enough so that to Angelo it must have sounded like throat clearing. Namir’s Feuermann-face remained frozen in calm.

I cannot evade blame for that stupid error, Drozma. I might well have hidden the fact that I recognized him. I tossed away that clear advantage because of an anger for which no Observer can be excused.

“Now that’s a very good question,” said Angelo, and fingered an imaginary beard at his round chin. “I would say, sir, that the extrapolated eventuality will eventuate in the due course of events, not before.” I tried to listen to his nonsense, knowing that somewhere a warmhearted, harmless old man must be lying dead — hidden; buried, I supposed — solely because his death was useful to one who hated his breed. I wondered if Namir still possessed the dissolution-grenade he must have had when he resigned so long ago. Even the old style is quiet enough, and I know of no reason why it wouldn’t disintegrate a human body as easily as one of ours. If Namir had used that, human law would never catch up with him. And it must not, as I knew. What had seemed almost funny at the time of the burglary was so no longer. Americans are not casual with prisoners, who must submit to physical examinations and are autopsied after execution, I believe. Human criminals occasionally obliterate their fingerprints by surgery. From where I sat I could see that Namir had not done so: his fingers were, Martianly speaking, normal; that alone would start a blaze of curiosity, the moment our unlooped angular ridges appeared on a police record. And if he were cornered — Drozma, I cannot share your feeling that he would be deeply inhibited against betraying us.

He has become like a creature of no race, a law to himself, past reach of reason, loyalty, or compassion. What other sort of being could have gone through with the murder of Feuermann? (At the time I write this I have proof. I had none that afternoon, but a sickening certainty took the place of it, and proof, when I did find it was only a bloody period to a sentence already written.)

I tried again to listen to Angelo, who was bubbling merrily along like a little fountain in the sun: ” — and this invention, this crowning triumph of the Feuermann-Ponteveechio genius, is a simple, simple thing. Allow me to sketch the reasoning which led to the blinding consummation. Earthworms love onions. They are alliotropic, a term derived (as every schoolboy knows) from Allium, the botanical genus embracing the common or garden onion. Alliotropic — five dollars, please. We propose therefore to design light carts — ain’t flat-out done it yet on account we ain’t got the capital — for hitching to the rears of a calculated sufficiency of earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris). An onion will be supported on a pole in advance of the worms, which crawl in pursuit of it, applying traction to the cart. In the event of a halt one need only jump from the cart (assuming it is not moving at excessive speed), dig a hole in the ground, lower the onion into it. The worms will then go underground after it, but their harness will be so contrived that they can never reach it, thus obviating any replacement of the onion — but of course a good team of worms must be properly fed and cared for at all times. And whereas their strength will be insufficient to pull the cart underground, their efforts to do so will provide a gentle braking action and the cart will eventually come to rest. Why be old-fashioned? Why wear yourself out with uneconomical, unreliable, dangerous horses? Why suffer from horsemaid’s knee, when a trip to your nearest dealer will put you in possession of the streamlined, fur-lined, underlined, air-conditioned, trouble-free Feuermann-Ponteveechio wormobile?”

“Have you incorporated?”

“Not yet, Ben. We could let you in on the ground floor with a very nice proposition — and where’ve you been all day?”

“Listened in on Sharon’s piano practice. She has talent, Angelo.”

“So?” Sharon had been nowhere in his thoughts. “Can you tell?”

“The way she goes at it. The touch. She seems — dedicated. There aren’t so many things that call for that. The arts, the sciences. Politics, though not by the man in the street’s definition. Religion — again only if you have an intelligible definition of it.” Namir-Feuermann was deep in abstraction, the pipe gone out. “The study of ethics.”

“Dedication to the study of ethics,” said the old man’s voice. “Sounds like a formula for the care and feeding of prigs.”

“Why?” said the boy.

Namir faked a cough, and in the breathy noise I heard a whispered Salvayan word, the one best translated by the more polite English “Get out!” Then the image of Feuermann was smiling in kindly deprecation. “You’re not far enough along, Angelo. Wouldn’t beat my brains too much if I were you. Likely to make yourself introverted.” Namir was making a mistake there, and I could rejoice at it, seeing Angelo’s face veil itself in the resigned quiet that said: “Okay, sonny, I’m twelve.”

“Get around more, Angelo. Enlarge experience. As I was saying a while ago, everything is struggle. You’ll need to be out there in the middle of it more and more, not locked up in an ivory tower.” Well, the old railroad engineer had probably been familiar with that phrase. I decided that Angelo was not bothered by the change in him because conversation with the real Feuermann had probably never been very penetrating. The real Feuermann had offered undemanding affection and tolerance, but could hardly have treated Angelo as a mental adult. Now the old man’s attitude would seem to Angelo to be only a grown-up shift of mood. The physical disguise was perfect of course: trust Namir for that. He had even reproduced a tiny white scar at the hairline which few human eyes would ever have noticed.

I asked Angelo: “Would you say Beethoven was fighting anybody when he wrote the ‘Waldstein’?”

“Not prezactly.” Angelo was off his perch. “Grocery errand — the mighty brain just remembered.” I got up too, nodding politely to the one I intended to kill.

I justify this intention by the law of 27,140 — “harm to our people or to humanity.” I needed only proof of Feuermann’s death, then I could act. I would find a means to draw Namir away from human surroundings, and would use the extra grenade Supply gave me. Afterward I would sleep well. So I thought. I allowed myself no backward look as I closed the door and caught up with Angelo, expecting to find him still full of fun and unworried.

He wasn’t. He had started downstairs but came back before I spoke, and glanced at my door uneasily. “Could I stop in a minute?”

“Sure. What’s cooking, friend?”

“Oh, just ham and eggs.” But there wasn’t any laughter in him. He fidgeted around my room. In a comic way he had, he pulled down his upper lip with thumb and finger and pushed it from side to side. “I dunno…. Maybe everybody feels like two people, sometimes.”

“Sure. Two or more. Many selves in all of us.”

“But” — he looked up, and I saw he was genuinely frightened — “but it shouldn’t be — sharp. Should it, Ben? I mean — well, there in Uncle Jacob’s room, it was like—” He fussed with trifles on my bureau, to hide his face maybe; added miserably: “Wasn’t any errand at the store. I just wanted out…. I mean, Ben, there’s a me that likes it here — everything: living here, Sharon, Bill, the other kids, even school. And — well, especially the woods, and — oh, talking with you, and stuff….”

“And the other one would like…?”

“Chuck everything,” he whispered. “Just every damn thing and start fresh. In there, in that room, I was like — like cut down the middle. But that’s whacky, isn’t it? It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t really want to go anywhere else. If I could…”

“I think it’ll pass,” I said, finding no better words than these weak ones that could hardly help him.

“Oh, I guess.” He started to go.

“Wait a minute.” I took the wrapped mirror from the back of a bureau drawer. “Something you might like to look at. I brought it from Canada. When I taught history, Angelo, it was ancient history mostly. This thing was given me by a friend who knows his archaeology, who—” Drozma, I think I had been afraid of that mirror. That may be why I had never unwrapped it until this poorly chosen moment. Is it a product of accident or a lost art? Some subtle distortion in the bronze that compels many truths to cry aloud? I saw the young Elmis, the almost-good musician, the scatterbrained youth whom you taught so patiently, the persistent student of history, the absent-minded lover and husband, the clumsy Observer, the inadequate father. How can this be, in a poor frail artifact of the long-dead Minoan world? At other shifts of the mirror — oh, let that escape words. It is one thing to know, with the mind only, that one will be old, that one has different faces for victory, shame, death, hope, defeat; another thing to watch it brilliant in the bronze. I was lost there, seeking for what I was once at City of Oceans, when I heard Angelo say: “What’s the matter?”

“No, nothing.” I did not want to show it to him now, but it was passing from my silly fumbling fingers into his innocent brown ones, and I went on talking somehow: “It’s Minoan — anyway, came from Crete, likely made before Homer lived. You see, the patina’s been kept away — I mean, taken away, polished off, so it’s still a mirror as it was—”

He wasn’t hearing me. I saw him shaking, his face crumpled and twisted as if in nightmare. “Here, let me take the damn thing — I hadn’t looked in it before, myself. I didn’t know, Angelo. But it’s nothing to be afraid of—”

He twitched it away when I would have taken it, forced to stare in spite of himself. “Cheepus, what a—” He started laughing, and that was worse. I took it out of his hands then and flung it on the bureau.

“I ought to be kicked. But, Angelo, I didn’t know—”

He pulled away from my hand. “Look out — I’ll prob’ly erp.” He ran for the stairs. When I followed, he glanced back up out of the well of darkness and said: “It’s all right, Ben. I get whacky, that’s all. Forget it, will you?”

Forget it?

8

That night I could neither sleep nor enter contemplation. I heard humanlike sounds from my enemy next door. If Namir had gone out I would have followed him. If the grenade’s disintegration were complete, I might have destroyed him that night, in his room. But there would have been some noise, even if I caught him asleep. There would have been the stains, the purple glare, the reek of gases, handfuls of rubbish to clear away.

I did not go to bed but sat dressed near my window, and was rewarded by a moonrise I could not enjoy. At midnight a copter-bus thundered, the last until six in the morning. Smaller human sounds persisted: late footsteps, a girl laughing behind a curtained window, a few cars whispering by on Calumet Street but none on Martin, which ends blindly at a lumberyard three blocks east. A baby fretted till someone hushed him. Past one o’clock I heard the Chicago-Vienna jet liner, far and high and lonely.

The opening of the door in the back-yard fence was a ghost of noise. The moon had climbed; no light touched my face. It was near two in the morning. I watched him slip in, fog-footed, pale-haired, dangerous. He had to pass through moonlight, then scratched on the kitchen screen delicately as an insect’s wing. He was aware of my open windows, but I was in darkness.

Angelo came out. They did not talk. They faded across the yard, Angelo moving in spite of his lameness as softly as Billy Kell.

I let them gain some distance down Martin Street, then eased the screen out of a window and jumped. Only fifteen feet, but I had to be cautious of sound. They did not look back. I found moon shadow, and they were stealthy in that shadow too, gliding toward the lumberyard like embodiments of a mist that was making dampness on the walks, aureoles around the street lamps. From my window I had hardly noticed the mist. Now I breathed it. It was all around me, wandering, melancholy, less bewildering than the cloud in my mind. Earth can weep too, my planet Earth.

As I sneaked into the lumberyard after them I heard suppressed muttering of a dozen voices, most of them treble, a few mature like Billy Kell’s. A tall stack of two-by-eights loomed black in front of me, and I knew the gang was on the other side of it. With luck I could climb that stack in silence and look down. The voices became individual. I heard Billy Kell’s: “You passed all the other tests, you won’t fluff this one.” And some small excited whiny voice encouraged: “He’s nothing but a damn dirty Digger, Angelo.” A shuffling of feet lent me a covering noise. I mounted the stack and wormed across it to peep over.

A thin lad was tied by the waist to a timber of the next stack. His hands were bound behind him, his shirt hung in rags over the cord at his middle, his face and chest were begrimed. He was the only one facing me. His head drooped forward; even if he looked up he might not see the blot of my head against the greater dark. He was cursing mechanically, sounding rugged, contemptuous, and not in pain. I supposed I could jump down if I had to and break it up in time to prevent major disaster. Meanwhile I had to try to understand.

Billy Kell was embracing Angelo’s shoulder, urgent and coaxing. He drew Angelo away from the others and near to my hiding place. The cricket-voices of the other boys ceased to exist for me. “Angelo, ’tisn’t as if we were going to do him any real harm, see?” Billy Kell’s whisper was smooth and soft. I could watch him smile. “Look—” and he was showing Angelo a knife, turning it to catch the wan light, which gave me Angelo’s face too, a dim battlefield of terror and excitement, fascination and revulsion. “Just a five-and-dime gimmick,” said Billy Kell. “It’s plastic. Look.” He jabbed the knife at his own palm, so realistically that I winced before I saw the blade curl harmlessly at the tip.

“Just scare the pants off him, that it?”

“Sure, Angelo, you get it. Poke it to him without touching, see, and then a jab — oh, at the shoulder or somewheres. But listen: the other guys think you think it’s a real knife, see? I’m giving you a break because, hell, you’re my friend, I know how you feel. You couldn’t use a shiv. I understand, see, but they don’t. So put on an act for us, huh?”

“I get it. And that other thing you told me about him—”

“Oh, that was real. He did the burglary all right. We been giving him the works. He squealed. He sang, fella. He did it on a dare from the Diggers, had to take something from each room, only he went chicken about the money, just took a little and then grabbed the pictures and stuff instead — chicken. He was supposed to keep away from your apartment too. Know why? To make it look like you’d stolen from the tenants.”

“Oh hell, no!”

“Fact, kid. And he killed the pup. We made him sing, I’m telling you. He chunked her a bit of hamburg and busted her neck….”

“Mr. Miles didn’t lose anything, and that was the room—”

“May say he didn’t. Listen, Angelo: one of these days I’ll tell you a couple-three things about your Mr. Miles.”

“What d’you mean? Miles is a good guy.”

For this relief much thanks….

“Think so? Never mind — later sometime, kid. Here, take this.” And Angelo reached for the knife. There was fumbling. Billy dropped it, and stooped, searching in the dark. Then they were moving away from me, and Angelo had the knife in his hand, and the others crowded close to watch, a rabble of goblins in a confusion of troubled night. So I blundered again, Drozma. I ought to have guessed.

Angelo’s voice was thin now, thin to the cracking point: “You killed my dog? You killed my dog, you dirty Digger?”

The thin boy spat at Angelo’s foot without answering. But his nerve was crumpling, and he whimpered, watching the blade. He cringed as Angelo’s little hand lashed out with it. But he was not the one who screamed when that knife bit flesh — I saw it — and blood jumped from the bony shoulder to splash Angelo’s fingers. It was Angelo who screamed. Screamed and flung the knife away ripped a handkerchief from his hip pocket and tried to stop the blood before the others had done more than gasp and giggle. “Damn you, Billy — damn you—”

“Shut up, kid — what’s a little blood?” Billy shoved Angelo away. Swiftly and competently, Billy untied the thin boy, motioned two others to hold him, and wiped the wound to examine it. “A scratch,” said Billy, and that was true, in a way. The wounded one was Angelo.

I saw Angelo nauseated and shivering. His stained hand made abortive motions toward his mouth, and dropped. Dreamily he groped for the handkerchief Billy had discarded, and made feeble efforts to clean his fingers with it, and threw it down, and retched.

Billy twitched the captive around and kicked him. “You ain’t hurt. Now run, Digger, run! Run and tell your drips we’ve burned the wax.”

The thin boy reeled away from him, clutching a fragment of his shirt against the cut. “You wha-at?”

Billy chuckled. “We burned the wax. We’ll meet your guys any time.”

The thin boy ran. The goblins snickered. Billy Kell grabbed Angelo’s wrist and held it up. “A full member of the Mudhawks! And is he all right?”

“He’s all right,” they said. A spooks’ chorus.

“Listen, studs, you know what? He switched knives when he guessed the other was a phony. He didn’t wanta, but he did, because he knew it was right. Now there’s a real Mudhawk. I knew it, when he put his blood on the stone for the first test.”

They swarmed around then, with hugging and jittery laughter and naïve obscenities and praise for Angelo, who took it all with a sick smile, with submerging shame and hidden contempt and swelling pride, with unwilling acceptance, as if now he were making himself believe Billy’s lie. Because the lie was good politics? I couldn’t know. “Well,” said Angelo, “well, he killed my dog, didn’t he? Cheepus…”

Fog was swallowing Billy Kell’s covine one by one, with turned wrist and raised palm. Too deep a fog: I can’t pretend to understand these children. I wish I were old enough to remember four or five hundred years ago.

There is a lost quality, a vagueness in them, which I did not find in the gangs that I studied a little when I was in the States seventeen years back. The gangs of that day were, on the surface, much more vicious and noisy and difficult, motivated more by wordless resentment of the grown-up world and by obvious material hungers — sex and money and thrills. These waifs (in a sense, they are all orphans) have reverted to more primitive fantasies. Their witchcraft — in some modern dress and slanguage but still witchcraft — suggests that the mental and moral desertion by their elders has progressed to the stage of genuine indifference. It may or may not be due to the decay of the cities. South Calumet Street is a backward eddy in the stream, and I might find matters very different in the suburbs or the countryside — I don’t know. But it is hardly strange that this desertion, this adult delinquency, should occur, in a culture which has not yet learned to replace the antique religious imperatives with something better.

It is transition — I think. The force of the ancient piety was lost in what they call the nineteenth century, and millions of them, in the hasty human fashion, tossed out the baby with the bath. Such concepts as discipline, responsibility, and honor were discarded along with the discredited dogmas. With the prop of Jehovah removed, they still don’t want to learn how to stand on their own feet; but I believe they will. I see twentieth-century man as a rather nice fellow with weak legs, and a head in bad condition from banging against a stone wall. Perhaps fairly soon he will cut that out, get sense, and go on about his human business, relying on the godlike in himself and in his brother.

Billy and Angelo were the last to leave. I followed them back to No. 21. Before Angelo went in I saw him bend his wrist and raise his palm, a full member of the Mudhawks. I dreaded for him the pain that would assume shapes of unclean horror in his dreams, if he could sleep. I shadowed Billy Kell down Calumet Street. When he was a block beyond EL CAT SEN I overtook him and swung him around. I spoke in Salvayan: “Son of a murderer, are you proud?”

He watched me with a baby-face human stare, undismayed, then permitting a human fear to show. Naturally or by calculation? He stammered in English: “Mr. Miles, what the hell, you sick or drunk or something?”

I said wearily in English: “You understood me.”

“Understood? Thought you was choking. You taking H on the main line or something? Get your hands offa me!”

I had grabbed his shirt. I knew my intention. I intended to rip his shirt away, and though that fog-blind moonlight would not have been strong enough to show me the tiny scent glands on his lower chest (if they were there) I could have ground my hand across them and smelled my hand. He knew it. Or else he was human, terrified in a human way. “Where did your father find surgery for you? The Abdicator Ronsa had the art — is he still living, for his sins? Answer me!”

He wrenched his shirt free — he was strong — and stumbled back from me. “You cut that out! Let me alone!”

But I went on, in Salvayan, quite slowly and plainly: “By tomorrow night I shall have proof of what your father did. Finished, child. He’ll have to die, I think, and I know that you will be taken — by other Observers if not by me — for judgment and help to the hospital in Old City—”

“Goda’mighty, you’re really high! Want me to call copper? I will if I got to. I’ll yell, mister.”

And he would have. (But would a human hoodlum have made that particular threat? To a menacing adult, yes, maybe.) He could have roused the neighborhood and brought police on the double. Then I would have been an ugly, outsize, not very well dressed man, accused of roughing up a defenseless boy. Rather, before that could happen, before the prowl car was abreast of me, I would have had to pull the key on my grenade. There would have been the brief purple flare, the heap of trash on the sidewalk, the nine days’ wonder in Latimer — my mission over, Angelo deserted, undefended against those who seemed to be his friends. I snarled in English: “Oh, go to hell!” I walked back up the street as swiftly as I decently could.

When I was passing EL CAT SEN, and heard a whispered “Hey!” above me, I had to glance back and make sure that Billy Kell had gone, before I dared look up to the pale flower that was Sharon’s face in a second-floor window. “Hello, honey — too hot to sleep?”

“Yeah, heck.” I could see her arms on the sill, and darker flowers that would be her eyes. “The moon was all smoky round the rim, Ben. Well, I might come on down the rainspout, but frankly I haven’t got anything on, frankly.”

“Some other time.”

“Were you chasing Billy?”

“Was that Billy? I didn’t notice. No, just out for a breath of air. Maybe you’d better go back to sleep in time to wake up.”

“Think I better? By the way, I drew a keyboard on my bed table, only I couldn’t fix anything to make the black keys stand higher.”

“I’m going to figure out something better than that.”

“Huh?” It was the blank puzzlement of a child not accustomed to expecting much unqualified good from anyone. Having met her peevish little father, I wondered how even the money for the lessons had been forthcoming. Some probably transitory pressure from the mother with Headaches, I guessed: it wouldn’t see Sharon through, on the steep road I knew she had to travel. I made up my mind, and found comfort in doing so.

“I’m going to talk with Mrs. Wilks. I think I can arrange better practice time than you can get at the school…. Ter?”

“Rif,” Sharon sighed. “Can you? Oh, rif!”

I did not see Angelo that morning or afternoon. I went downstairs in the late morning, but Rosa told me he was under the weather; she was keeping him in bed and thought he was asleep. A cold, she guessed. She was not worried: he had them rather often. That alone informed me that he had said nothing to her about the gang. A cold!

In the afternoon I did accomplish one thing. I have committed us, Drozma, to an obligation which I think our little department of finance in the Toronto enclave will be pleased to honor. The money required is not much, and I can think of it as something good achieved even if my mission should end in failure. I went to see Mrs. Wilks, who used to be Sophia Wilkanowska, and as I had anticipated, it was not difficult to establish a meeting of minds. She is a genuine teacher — that is to say, a lover of her own kind uncorrupted by the pressures of every day: they beat upon her as they do upon everyone, but without destroying her spirit.

She is tiny, porcelain-pale, with a deceptive look of fragility. She lives on a quiet street just barely on the right side of the tracks (I have sent the address to the Toronto Communicator) with a sister who has scant English but is not blind. They manage. Sophia’s English is adequate. When I spoke Polish she was happier, and friendship was easy from that moment on. These two escaped from blighted captive Poland in 30,948, when Sophia was already fifty, her sister forty-eight; I thought it better not to ask how Sophia’s husband died. They both dye their hair brilliant black, and they have a few other gentle vanities, and music is in Sophia like the fire in a diamond, indestructible.

We talked about Latimer, which is not indifferent to music in this fairly leisured decade. Prematurely, because there were many other pressures on my mind, I suggested expanding their studio into a small school. They said: “But — but—”

“I’m an old man. I have money — Canadian securities, other resources which I can’t take with me. What better monument?” I pointed out that the house next door to them was vacant. There could be a partnership, perhaps, with one or two other Latimer teachers — and free practice rooms for promising students like Sharon Brand. Sophia Wilkanowska was not displeased to notice that cat coming out of the bag. She knew what Sharon was: if she had not, she would not have been the teacher I wanted for the child. I would buy and equip the house, I said, my part in it strictly anonymous. I would deed it over, guarantee upkeep for ten years; the rest was up to them. For an hour or so I let the idea develop in their disturbed, not quite believing, but essentially practical minds, as we sat about and talked Polish and drank wonderful coffee from tiny transparent cups which had somehow made that dark journey with them fifteen years before. Sophia was pleased to call me a good pianist after I played a Polonaise to her restrained satisfaction. I was an expansive, eccentric, aging gentleman, vaguely Polish-American with money in the background, who wanted a little unlabeled monument for himself. It made sense gradually. More to me than to them, but at length I “confessed” — told them I had happened to get acquainted with Sharon and hear her practice. I had learned that she could not have a piano at home and I was angry. I loved her, I had no children of my own, and anyway I still wanted that monument.

They took it from there. “It is dangerous,” said Sophia, “to have that little one’s hunger. Before her first lesson I had thought my own hunger was — do you know? — hammered away under the fingers of little brats who — never mind. But what is there for her, Mr. Miles? School or no school? In this world or any other?”

“Trial. Victories, defeats, maturity. The worst cruelty would be to protect her from the pain of struggling.”

“Oh, dear God, true enough. And we accept your offer, Mr. Miles.”

This much is done.

9

I finished that chapter a week ago, in my stuffy room, the evening after meeting Sharon’s teacher. I was waiting there for the gradual coming of summer darkness. Tomorrow I shall not be dead, but Benedict Miles will be. I am writing now in haste, Drozma, to complete my report, to convey to you a resolution from which not even you, my second father, can swerve me.

When darkness came that evening I took Andy out of the garage on Martin Street — seeing there the neat car that had been Feuermann’s — and drove to Byfield. I parked off the highway, cut through a small patch of woods, clambered over the cemetery fence. Moonrise had not yet come.

I could always find peace among the human dead. They are surely our kindred here at least: our five or six hundred years make no more ripple in eternity than the comic hurry of a second hand. I found the bank where Angelo and I had waited on Jacob’s ritual, and fumbled at Mordecai Paxton’s headstone for traces of the dandelions. They were still somewhat more than dust. I went to the grave of Susan Feuermann.

It was ten days since Feuermann had gone to Byfield and only an image of him returned. That had been a day of rain; none had fallen since. They are tender of their memorials here. The grass is trimmed; I saw fresh decorations on many stones. There are other places, away from this modern part, where nature has been allowed to shelter the fallen in her own fashion, and grass is tall, with here and there a few of the unimperious flowers that men call weeds.

I searched for signs of a tragedy darker than any of the deaths commemorated here: Jacob Feuermann had died not from age, or chance, or in the witless attack of illness, or through any fault or quality of his own, but, like a child in a bombed city, had been arrogantly shoved out of life in a conflict not of his making.

In ten days the grass had fairly righted itself, patiently following its own privilege of life, but still leaned enough for me to discover where something had been dragged to an area of lower ground behind a screen of willows. In that hollow Namir had covered his traces casually: it might cheat the uncritical eye of whatever attendant cared for the graveyard. On this ever-shaded ground the turf was thin and mossy. Namir had rolled some of it back, scattering surplus earth with scant effort at concealment. Replacing the turf, he had joined the edges: I could find them.

Kneeling in the unremembering dark, I could look across ten days and see that rain-drenched afternoon as it must have been. Feuermann had said: “Sun’s up there somewhere.” Few would have thought of that. No human being at all would have visited this small cemetery on such a weeping day, except the old man. He did. He stood in the rain for whatever harmless consolation it gave him, and the thing came on him out of the grass.

I ran my thumb through earth where there should have been a network of grass roots and was not. Behind me — oh, moonrise was still far off — behind me, Namir said: “He’s there. You needn’t undo my grubby work.”

He watched from the higher ground, a killing animal with the face of Feuermann and glints of our blue night-fire in his eyes. You reminded me, Drozma, that he is a creature always in pain. He seemed so, tight-mouthed, head thrust forward on wide shoulders. But I think the pain of those who live with evil becomes something other than pain. I think they come to love it, as a victim of heroin bitterly loves his affliction. How else explain the desperate recidivism of so many criminals, the persistent fury of a fanatic with the black dog of one idea on his back, the mountain of corpses around a Hitler? It was no simple hysteria when the witches of other recent centuries boasted of coupling with the devil.

His very pose was tigerish. But a tiger is innocent, merely hungry or curious at the wriggling of smaller life. I said: “Do you care to tell me how you justify it to yourself?”

“Justify? No.”

“Explain, then?”

“Not to an Observer. Some will honor what I am, in the future.”

“You have no future. But you still have a choice.”

“I make my own choices.” I saw the simple long-bladed knife come into his hand. “Sometimes with this.” He did not see the round stone I took from Feuermann’s burial place before I stood.

“Is that how Feuermann died?”

“Yes, Elmis, if you want to speak of anything so definite as death after the mean half-life of his tribe.”

“He had no chance to defend himself?”

“Should he have had? Why, Elmis, he even smiled. He said: ‘Here, you don’t want to do that, I haven’t done you any harm.’ You see? His small mind simply couldn’t imagine that anyone could regard his life as of no importance. He said: ‘What’s the gag?’ And held out his hand for the knife as if I were a naughty boy — I! Then he saw that his face was already mine, and it confused him. He said: ‘Does every man have another self? I’m dreaming this.’ So I ended the dream for him, and now for you.”

“Nothing to you, that my blood on the grass would be orange blood?”

“Nothing. Why let it worry you? If they find you in time for autopsy, you’ll be back on page three as soon as there’s a livelier murder with a sex angle.”

“You’re only a small devil, Namir. Back of me there are thirty thousand years on Earth, my planet Earth.”

“Then defend yourself with your thirty thousand.” And he came down the slope, stumbling in haste, panting as if he suffered. The stone caught him on the cheek, jarring the true skullbone under his artificial flesh, half stunning and toppling him. The knife leaped away into the dark. He rose immediately and closed with me, hands at my throat and mine at his, his face straining toward me as if he loved me but loved the thought of my death a little more. I broke his clutch on my windpipe and gripped his shoulders over the subclavicular nerve clusters where a Martian should feel pain, but he was hard to down.

We swayed and struggled so for a longer time than I can measure. It may have been only seconds, since the moon had still not risen when it was over. Once I heard him gasp: “Do you yield, Elmis? Do you now?” Later, when I had forced him back to the broken turf of Feuermann’s grave, he choked on other words, sensing the shadow of his own death as a weasel might know the shadow of sudden wings: “I am old — but I have a son….” He felt uneven ground under him, and raised his knee to foul me with it, but I had been waiting for that. My foot wrenched his other leg and he went down at last on the soft ground; his arms were straws and with his body he ceased fighting. He groaned: “I am one of many. We live forever.”

I found his knife and slipped it under my belt. “There’s still a choice. The hospital in Old City, or this.” I showed him the grenade. “I have another. Perhaps you still have one of your own you’d rather use?”

“Little snot-nose cousin of the angels — no, I have none.”

“When was yours used?”

“In Kashmir.” He fumbled aimlessly at the grass, his eyes a blue blaze of memory and some laughter. “Maybe a century ago — want to hear?”

“I must.”

“Oh yes, your precious duty. What a milky vanity! Well, there was a little chap with something of the Buddha in him. Rather like Angelo. I taught him a while, but he abandoned me. He might well have been another Buddha. I had to dispose of him. He’d already begun preaching, you see. I didn’t want his body turned into holy relics, so I used the grenade in such a manner that he is still a vaguely remembered devil, Elmis, in two or three illiterate villages. Peace, he was saying; magnify the inner light by honoring the light of others — dreadful stuff, you know the style, and he only a beginner. He liked to quote the last words of Gautama, and other fools had started to listen. ‘Whosoever now, Ananda, or after my departure, shall be to himself his own light, his own refuge, and seek no other refuge, will henceforth be my true disciple and walk in the right path—’ and so on and so on, with little additions of his own.”

“And for that you found it necessary to destroy—”

“Yes, give me credit for nipping at least one tiresome religion in the bud. I was fond of him, too. He was quite like Angelo, who was sneaking down toward South Calumet Street, by the way, when I left the house to follow you—”

“How’s that?”

“South end. War, you know.” He smiled up at me, not looking at the grenade. “The Diggers are meeting the Mudhawks tonight Angelo and Billy Kell — that’s quite a boy, Billy.” He could not quite control the slyness with which he glanced away, and that may be one more grain of proof for what I suspect about Billy Kell. “Well, they had a council of strategy, on which I eaves. dropped. Angelo had some very sound ideas. One in particular making use of rooftops, appealed to me. The Mudhawks will occupy the roofs on Lowell Street, where the Diggers have to pass on their way to the prearranged engagement, which is to be in Quire Lane. I believe both armies use what they call gleep-guns. Instead of bullets they shoot twenty-penny nails, variation of the arbalest. You might get the best view from the corner of Lowell and Quire Lane, if it isn’t all over when you get there — don’t let me detain you!” Some of his laughter may have been genuine. “Ah yes, the choice! Elmis, I wish you could know how funny you look. You imagine you can destroy me?”

“An instrument of my people and others. Hospital or grenade?”

“Grenade of course.” And he ceased laughing.

“Only twelve Salvayans in all history have died by execution. They took the grenade with unbound hands. I’d like to respect that tradition, if I thought I could trust you…. Do you respect it?”

“Of course. A signal honor: No. 13.” He stretched his arms above his head and spoke with real sorrow, although I heard no overtone of regret. “I am Salvayan too, Elmis. Also old and tired.”

I set the grenade at his waist and stood back.

He taught my foolish mind, then, what 346 years had never quite taught me: there is no such thing as hearing truth from those who despise it. He snatched the grenade and flung it in a great arc. It missed me, struck a willow, filled the graveyard with a second’s purple brilliance as sap and new wood of the lower trunk dissolved. The treetop plunged toward me in a long whispering and rushing. I had to jump like a fool to save myself. Namir’s high laughter snarled back from among the graves: “Explain that to your adopted people!”

I could not assume that what he had told me of the gang war was a lie. I cleared the fence behind him, though not pursuing him now. Seeing his knife in my hand, he swerved into the woods, his one backward look a mad smile. I shall see him again, if I don’t die first of my own hesitating stupidity. His car — Feuermann’s car — was parked behind mine. I slashed its front tires, and drove in my own car back to Latimer.

I parked Andy well beyond No. 21. After killing the motor I could hear something, a distant squealing, more like steam in a kettle than anything else. The dark clutter of houses muffled and shut it away. The moon had risen at last while I was driving back from Byfield, but gave poor help as yet in these blind-faced streets. Lowell Street branched from Calumet two blocks beyond EL CAT SEN; I did not quite know Quire Lane. The houses on Lowell Street were not detached but all one mass, making the narrow street resemble a New York City canyon. When I turned the corner the vicious clamor was no longer far off, but doubled in volume. A breathless running man bumped into me. “Hey, mister, don’t go that way! The gangs—” He caught my arm to steady himself. “Sent for cops, ain’t come, damn it, always the way when you want ’em — thought I’d try ’n’ find the beat cop on Calumet—”

“Anybody hurt?”

“Kids with busted heads — there’ll be worse. Mister, you better—”

“I’m alright. I live down that way.”

“Well, stay inside, I’m telling you. Little bastards chunking rocks off the roofs, right here on Lowell. Hit a little girl — she wasn’t with ’em just running after ’em—”

“Where? Where is she?”

“Huh? Oh, some woman grabbed her, took her into a house—”

“My daughter—”

“My God! Don’t borrow trouble, bud, could be any kid. Anyway, she wasn’t bad hurt, wasn’t even knocked out, see, and this woman—”

“Which house?”

“Other side, second from the next corner.”

I squeezed his arm for thanks and ran.

A stone hit the pavement behind me. Just one (Angelo’s idea?) and the bang of its fall was nearly drowned by the yelling from what must be Quire Lane ahead. My mind declared it could not be Angelo who threw it — not now, not at a single grownup, after the Diggers had already passed by that block. Part of me still insisted on that as I burst into the house.

It was Sharon. They had her on a bed in the front room, two women, one cleaning the gash on her head, the other fluttering. Sharon stopped whimpering when she saw me. I abandoned all Observers’ Rules, kissing and scolding her. “What were you trying to do?” I suppose my irises were gray soup plates, but she wouldn’t have noticed. It was all right, as people say: the bleeding had nearly ceased, and Sharon’s rescuer had the wound properly cleaned. “Sharon, Sharon, what—”

“I wanted to make them stop it. Will you make them stop it?”

“Sure, I’m on my way. It’s all right, Sharon.”

She relaxed partly, and sighed, and wiped her nose with an angrily competent sweep of her whole arm. “Frankly, Ben, you always turn up when I want you, frankly.”

“It’s all right, Sharon. I’ll make ’em stop it.” The women crowded me away then, one of them wanting to know what I meant by letting my little girl run around in the streets. I escaped by saying she wasn’t mine, damn it, I just knew where she lived, and would come back presently and take her home. I ran out in search of a war, and found it.

Quire Lane was a foul alley, a dead end, bordered by two warehouses, ending at the blank rear wall of a third. Later, from the police, I learned what the Mudhawks’ strategy had achieved. The Diggers had stormed up Lowell Street, expecting a prearranged fracas in the relative seclusion of Quire Lane. The idea was simply to see how much mayhem could be dealt and received before the sirens sounded off. Probably the Diggers didn’t exactly understand, when the rocks fell in Lowell Street. They themselves had gone to the trouble of smashing the street lamp at Lowell and Calumet. One boy was killed outright. Police found another afterward, in an areaway, with a broken shoulder. The dead child must have been somewhere in shadow when I was running down that block…. After passing the shower of stones, the Diggers sighted a small detachment of Mudhawks who staged a phony retreat into Quire Lane. Then the main force of Mudhawks closed the trap, swarming out of their hiding places in doorways and up the street, reinforced by the stone throwers from the roofs — by all but one of them, that is. Billy Kell has not been seen since, by myself or by the police, and he was not in the brawl in Quire Lane. Careful of his orange blood?

It seems to be necessary for me to believe that Billy Kell was alone on the roofs after the Diggers had gone by.

The Mudhawks forced the Diggers back to the blind end of the alley, with fists, stones, knives, gleep-guns. By the time I reached that smeared corner of Quire Lane and Lowell, the Diggers understood matters very well and were fighting back with total fury. A certain loathsome moonlight had reached the alley then. I could see plainly. I could not find Angelo.

Some of the boys had flashlights that shot a writhing illumination when they were not being used as clubs. While I was yelling futile things that nobody heard, a Mudhawk — I knew him by his black tam-o’-shanter — dashed by me with a thing that looked like a wooden gun. I glimpsed the elastic bands, the nail in the slot, and tore it out of his hand. He glared foolishly, covered his face with his arm, and ran.

I could not find Angelo.

But now at last there was the thin imperative wrath of a siren, somewhere off on Calumet Street. The boys heard it too, and their stampede began, a stampede of those who could move at all. At least three were lying still at the rear of the alley.

I saw him now. He jumped up from nowhere. He jumped on a box near the clogged mouth of the alley, his shirt ripped away from flailing pipestem arms, blood and dirt all over him, his face beautiful, defiled, insane, and he was screaming: “Get ’em now! Don’t let ’em break away! What are you — chicken? It’s for Bella — “

Few heard him. The sirens were louder and spoke in clearer terms. The boys were all trying to get free of the alley, Diggers and Mudhawks in common panic, blundering into the warehouse walls, into me as I tried to plow my way through to Angelo. Then two patrol cars squealed into place, shutting off retreat, the sirens’ question ending in the affirmative of a growl. Angelo heard that. He leaped off his box before I could catch him — I don’t think he knew me then — and ran unseeingly straight into the grabbing arms of Patrolman Dunn. “One anyway!” said Dunn, and struck him on the ear.

In the next few howling moments they rounded up six or seven besides Angelo. Three of the four policemen were trying for arms or shirt collars instead of using their clubs, but some of it had to be frantic and dirty work. There was an ambulance beyond the patrol cars. I was cursing Dunn root and branch, but I stopped that, and don’t know if he heard it. While he still gripped Angelo’s arm I yelled in his ear: “Dunn! You can’t take him to the station, it’s going to kill his mother if you do.”

“His mo—” It might have been only then that he recognized Angelo. Gore, mud, gravel marks on a mask of anguish — it wasn’t strange.

I pressed my small advantage: “Her heart, man — you can’t. The kid’s only twelve anyhow. He was sucked into it, I happen to know — tell you later. Take him home, Dunn. Don’t book him.”

“Who’re you?”

“I live there. Saw you when we had that burglary.”

“Ah, yah….” He shook the boy, not roughly but slowly. Angelo swayed at the end of his arm, and spat blood from a cut lip. “Jesus, kid! But you was always a good boy — never in no trouble before, what the hell?”

Angelo asked quietly: “Is that true? I don’t exactly know.”

“Huh? You never done nothing like this before.”

“I have,” said Angelo drowsily, and his head drooped and I could scarcely hear him. “Yes, I have, in my dreams. They come like clouds. Which is the sky: the clouds or the blue?”

“Now, boy, now. What kind of an answer is that? You’re high-sterical is what it is. Pull yourself together. You see that ambulance? You see what’s going into it, huh, Angelo?”

“Take him home, Dunn. Take him home.”

“They all go to the station, mister. But you could be right. I won’t book him, maybe. I’ll get him home. Understand, Angelo? A break. On your mother’s account, not on yours, believe you me. And if there’s ever a second time, no break, no break at all. Now come on—”

“Ben! Ben — ask them to clean me up before they—”

“In with you. In with you now….”

Those women had given Sharon a sleeping pill. (It is increasingly a sleeping-pill culture, Drozma. Seventeen years ago I don’t think a respectable woman in a poor district would have had a supply of barbiturates, much less given one casually to a child without even a doctor’s word. It could be a small symptom of the many forces that may make fools of us and our hope of Union within five hundred years or so. Yet I don’t blame them too much. Life in its growing complexity nags and bedevils them: rather than learn the uses of simplicity, they reach for sleep.) I carried Sharon to my car, and home, cutting short the startled mooings of her parents with some ill-tempered noise of my own. It wasn’t their fault, in a way — to make her frantic effort, Sharon had slid down the rain-spout when they supposed she was in bed. It was another playmate, a seceding Mudhawk, who had let slip word to Sharon of what was planned. So Sharon told me a day or two later. I must finish this report quickly, Drozma.

Namir as Feuermann had not returned to No. 21. I did not think he would. (As I write this, the body of Feuermann has not been found. There was an item about “mysterious summer lightning” destroying a tree in Byfield; the damage done by the falling top may have canceled out the marks of the shallow grave. If the old man is ever found, I suppose his motiveless murder will become a popular mystery to addle the experts.)

No. 21 was gently quiet. I found Rosa sewing in her basement living room, unconcerned, mild, too far from the war in Quire Lane to have heard its crying, comfortable in the belief that Angelo was asleep in his room with a bit of a cold. It was too much for me. I don’t understand either the strength or the fragility of human beings, as I see them sometimes bending viably before enormous pressures, sometimes snapping at a touch.

Rosa knew from my face that something was wrong. She put her sewing away and came to me. “What is it, Ben? You sick?” Still unhurt, still safe behind her unreal shield of love and security — the house quiet, Angelo surely in his room — she could be sorry for me, and anxious to help. “What is the matter, Ben? You look awful.”

So I gabbled. “Nothing serious, but—”

I might have succeeded somehow in preparing her for it. I don’t know. I was hopelessly human in my stammering hunt for words that might warn without wounding. While I stammered, Dunn came in. Through the basement door, without ringing, holding Angelo by the arm. Yes, they’d tried to clean him up a little, but couldn’t hide the cut lip or the gash over his eye. They’d washed his face, but couldn’t wash away the shame, the glaze of withdrawal, the agony.

I saw Rosa’s hand leave her wobbling lips and clutch at her left arm. I could not reach her, nor could Dunn, in time to check her fall.

There was no rising. Only the choking, the brief struggle, and the relinquishment. Even after her face turned cyanotic I think she was still trying to see where Angelo was, or perhaps say something to him — that it was all right, not his fault, something like that….

“May I go and get Father Ryan?”

That blank whisper made Dunn remember him and turn to him. “Why — she’s gone, boy. She’s gone.”

“Yes, I see, I know. I did that. May I go and get Father Ryan?”

“Of course.”

He never returned, Drozma. The priest came quickly, but Angelo was not with him. Father Ryan said Angelo had run on ahead of him.

In the week since then, the Latimer and state police have done everything possible. There is an eight-state alarm, everything else that human intelligence can devise. They are looking for Feuermann too, the worthless rumors like the haze that hangs on after forest fire. Since it seems that he ran into night, and night took him, I will go into night myself, and look for him there.

A word about Sharon. I saw her last in Amagoya, but she knew its magic had perished, as well as I knew it, and it was unavoidable that we should talk like grownups. I told her that of course Angelo would be found, or more likely come back by himself when he could. I told her that I was going away alone to look for him. It was hard for her to accept the obvious fact that she could not come with me. She did accept it. I have never been so dangerously close to revealing what we must not, as I was there in Amagoya when she said: “You know everything, Ben. You will find him.” So I know everything! She was a woman, Drozma. Even her mangled big words weren’t funny, they weren’t funny at all. I made her promise to do what she already knew she must — stay, stay with her music, grow up, “be a good girl” — we found we could laugh some at that last, nevertheless knowing what it meant.

If I end this here, I have time to make myself a passable new face before dawn. As soon as there has been time for this report to have reached you I will call through the Toronto Communicator and learn your orders.

Whatever they are, I cannot return to Northern City if it means abandoning this mission. I will yield no such victory to Namir and his kind. We are a little less than human, Drozma, and a little more.