Pilgrimage: The Book of the People

Pilgrimage

The First Book of

the People

Zenna Henderson

1961

I

THE Window of the bus was a dark square against the featureless night. Lea let her eyes focus slowly from their unthinking blur until her face materialized, faint and fragmentary, highlighted by the dim light of the bus interior. “Look,’ the thought, “I still have a face.” She tilted her head and watched the wan light slide along the clean soft line of her cheek. There was no color except darkness for the wide eyes, the crisp turn of short cuffs above her ears and the curve of her brows-all were an out-of-focus print against the outside darkness. “That’s what I look like to people,” she thought impersonally. “My outside is intact-an eggshell sucked of life.”

The figure in the seat next to her stirred.

“Awake, deary?” The plump face beamed in the dusk. “Must have had a good nap, “You’ve been so quiet ever since I got on. Here, let me turn on the reading light.” She fumbled above her. “I think these lights are cunning. How’d they get them to point just in the right place?” The light came on and Lea winced away from it. “Bright, isn’t it?” The elderly face creased into mirth. “Reminds me of when I was a youngster and we came in out of the dark and lighted a coal-oil lamp. It always made me squint like that. By the time I was your age, though, we had electricity. But I got my first two before we got electricity. I married at seventeen and the two of them came along about as quick as they could. You can’t be much more than twenty-two or three. Lordee! I had four by then and buried another. Here, I’ve got pictures of my grandbabies. I’m just coming back from seeing the newest one. That’s Jennie’s latest. A little girl after three boys. You remind me of her a little, your eyes being dark and the color your hair is. She wears hers longer but it has that same kinda red tinge to it.” She fumbled in her bag. Lea felt as though words were washing over her like a warm frothy flood. She automatically took the bulging billfold the woman tendered her and watched unseeingly as the glassine windows flipped. “… and this is Arthur and Jane. Ah, there’s Jennie. Here, take a good look and see if she doesn’t look like you.”

Lea took a deep breath and came back from a long painful distance. She stared down at the billfold.

“Well?” The face beamed at her expectantly.

“She’s-” Lea’s voice didn’t work. She swallowed dryly

“She’s pretty.”

“Yes, she is,” the woman smiled. “Don’t you think she looks a little like you, though?”

“A little-” Her repetition of the sentence died, but the woman took it for an answer.

“Go on, look through the others and see which one of her kids you think’s the cutest.”

Lea mechanically flipped the other windows, then sat staring down into her lap.

“Well, which one did you pick?” The woman leaned over.

“Well!” She drew an indignant breath. “That’s my driver’s license! I didn’t say snoop!” The billfold was snatched away! and the reading light snapped off. There was a good deal of flouncing and muttering from the adjoining seat before quiet descended.

The hum of the bus was hypnotic and Lea sank back into her apathy, except for a tiny point of discomfort that kept jabbing her consciousness. The next stop she’d have to do something. Her ticket went no farther. Then what? Another decision to make. And all she wanted was nothing-nothing. And all she had was nothing-nothing. Why did she have to do anything? Why couldn’t she just not-? She leaned her forehead against the glass, dissolving the nebulous reflection of herself, and stared into the darkness. Helpless against habit, she began to fit her aching thoughts hack into the old ruts, the old footprints leading to complete futility-leading into the dark nothingness. She caught her breath and fought against the horrifying-threatening …

All the lights in the bus flicked on and there was a sleepy stirring murmur. The scattered lights of the outskirts of town slid past the slowing bus.

It was a small town. Lea couldn’t even remember the name of it. She didn’t even know which way she turned when she went out the station door. She walked away from the bus depot, her feet swift and silent on the cracked sidewalk, her body appreciating the swinging rhythm of the walk after the long hours of inactivity. Her mind was still circling blindly, unnoticing, uncaring, unconcerned.

The business district died out thinly and Lea was walking up an incline. The walk leveled and after a while she wavered into a railing. She clutched at it, waiting for a faintness to go away. She looked out and down into darkness. “‘It’s a bridge!” she thought. “Over a river.” Gladness flared up in her. “It’s the answer,” she exulted. “This is it. After this-nothing!” She leaned her elbows on the railing, framing her chin and cheeks with her hands, her eyes on the darkness below, a darkness so complete that not even a ripple caught a glow from the bridge lights.

The familiar, so reasonable voice was speaking again. Pain like this should be let go of. Just a momentary discomfort and it ends. No more breathing, no more thinking, no aching, no blind longing for anything. Lea moved along the walk, her hand brushing the railing. “I can stand it now,” she thought, “Now that I know there is an end. I can stand to live a minute or so longer-to say good-by.” Her shoulders shook and she felt the choke of laughter in her throat. Good-by? To whom? Who’d even notice she was gone? One ripple stilled in all a stormy sea. Let the quiet water take her breathing. Let its impersonal kindness hide her-dissolve her-so no one would ever be able to sigh and say, That was Lea. Oh, blessed water!

There was no reason not to. She found herself defending her action as though someone had questioned it. “Look,” she thought. “I’ve told you so many times. There’s no reason to go on. I could stand it when futility wrapped around me occasionally, but don’t you remember? Remember the morning I sat there dressing, one shoe off and one shoe on, and couldn’t think of one good valid reason why I should put the other shoe on? Not one reason! To finish dressing? Why? Because I had to work? Why? To earn a living? Why? To get something to eat? Why? To keep from starving to death? Why? because you have to live! Why? Why? Why!

“And there were no answers. And I sat there until the grayness dissolved from around me as it did on lesser occasions. But then-” Lea’s hands clutched each other and twisted painfully.

“Remember what came then? The distorted sky wrenched open and gushed forth all the horror of a meaningless mindless universe-a reasonless existence that insisted on running on like a ! faceless clock-a menacing nothingness that snagged the little thread of reason I was hanging onto and unraveled it and unraveled it.” Lea shuddered and her lips tightened with the effort to regain her composure. “That was only the beginning.

“So after that the depths of futility became a refuge instead of something to run from, its negativeness almost comfortable in contrast to the positive horror of what living has become. But I can’t take either one any more.” She sagged against the railing. “And I don’t have to.” She pushed herself upright and swallowed a sudden dry nausea. “The middle will be deeper,” she thought. “Deep, swift, quiet, carrying me out of this intolerable-“

And as she walked she heard a small cry somewhere in the lostness inside her. “But I could have loved living so much! Why have I come to this pass?”

Shhh! the darkness said to the little voice. Shhh! Don’t bother to think. It hurts. Haven’t you found it hurts? You need never think again or speak again or breathe again past this next inhalation ….

Lea’s lungs filled slowly. The last breath! She started to slide across the concrete bridge railing into the darkness-into finishedness-into The End.

“You don’t really want to.” The laughing voice caught her like a splash of water across her face. “Besides, even if you did, you couldn’t here. Maybe break a leg, but that’s all.

“Break a leg?” Lea’s voice was dazed and, inside, something broke and cried in disappointment, “I’ve spoken again!”

“Sure.” Strong hands pulled her away from the railing and nudged her to a seat in a little concrete kiosk sort of thing.

“You must be very new here, like on the nine-thirty bus tonight.”

“Nine-thirty bus tonight,” Lea echoed flatly.

” ‘Cause if you’d been here by daylight you’d know this bridge is a snare and a delusion as far as water goes. You couldn’t drown a gnat in the river here. It’s dammed up above. Sand and tamarisks here, that’s all. Besides you don’t want to die, especially with a lovely coat like that-almost new!”

“‘Want to die,” Lea echoed distantly. Then suddenly she jerked away from the gentle hands and twisted away from the encircling arm.

“I do want to die! Go away!” Her voice sharpened as she spoke and she almost spat the last word.

“But I told you!” The dim glow from the nearest light of the necklace of lights that pearled the bridge shone on a smiling girl-face, not much older than Lea’s own. “You’d goof it up good if you tried to commit suicide here. Probably lie down there in the sand all night, maybe with a sharp stub of a tamarisk stuck through your shoulder and your broken leg hurting like mad. And tomorrow the ants would find you, and the flies-the big blowfly kind. Blood attracts them, you know. Your blood, spilling onto the sand.”

Lea hid her face, her fingernails cutting into her hairline with the violence of the gesture. This-this creature had no business peeling the oozing bleeding scab off, she thought. It’s so easy to think of lumping into darkness-into nothingness, but not to think of blowflies and blood-your own blood.

“Besides-” the arm was around her again, gently leading her back to the bench, “you can’t want to die and miss out on everything.”

“Everything is nothing,” Lea gasped, grabbing for the comfort of a well-worn groove. “It’s nothing but gray chalk writing gray words on a gray sky in a high wind. There’s nothing! There’s nothing !”

“You must have used that carefully rounded sentence often and often to have driven yourself such a long way into darkness,” the voice said, unsmiling now. “But you must come back, ” you know, back to wanting to live.”

“No, no!” Lea moaned, twisting. “Let me go!’”

“I can’t.” The voice was soft, the hands firm. “The Power sent me by on purpose. You can’t return to the Presence with your life all unspent. But you’re not hearing me, are you? Let me tell you.

“Your name is Lea Holmes. Mine, by the way, is Karen. You left your home in Clivedale two days ago. You bought a ticket for as far as your money would reach. You haven’t eaten in two days. You’re not even quite sure what state you’re in, except the state of utter despair and exhaustion-right?”

“How-how did you know?” Lea felt a long-dead something stir inside her, but it died again under the flat monotone of her voice. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You don’t know anything about it!” A sick anger fluttered in her empty stomach. “‘You don’t know what it’s like to have your nose pressed to a blank wall and still have to walk and walk, day after day, with no way to get off the treadmill-no way to break through the wall-nothing, nothing, nothing! Not even an echo! Nothing!”

She snatched herself away from Karen’s hands and, in a mad flurry of motion, scraped her way across the concrete railing and flung herself over into the darkness.

Endlessly tumbling-endlessly turning-slowly, slowly. Did it take so long to die? Softly the sand received her.

“You see,” Karen said, shifting in the sand to cradle Lea’s head on her lap. “I can’t let you do it.”

“But-I-I-jumped!” Lea’s hands spatted sideways into the sand, and she looked up to where the lights of the passing cars ran like sticks along a picket fence.

“Yes, you did.” Karen laughed a warm little laugh. “See, Lea, there is some wonder left in the world. Not everything is bogged down in hopelessness. What’s that other quote you’ve been using for an anesthesia?”

Lea turned her head fretfully and sat up. “Leave me alone.”

“What was that other quote?” Karen’s voice was demanding now.

” ‘There is for me no wonder more,’ ” Lea whispered into her hands, ” ‘Except to wonder where my wonder went, And why my wonder all is spent-‘ ” Hot tears stung her eyes but could not fall. ” ‘-no wonder more-‘ ” The big emptiness that was always waiting, stretched and stretched, distorting-“No wonder?” Karen broke the bubble with her tender laughter. “Oh, Lea, if only I had the time! No wonder, indeed! But I’ve got to go. The most incredibly wonderful-” There was a brief silence and the cars shh-ed by overhead, busily, busily. “Look!” Karen took Lea’s hands. “You don’t care what happens to you any more, do you?”

“No!” Lea said dully, but a faint voice murmured protest somewhere behind the dullness.

“You feel that life is unlivable, don’t you?” Karen persisted.

“That nothing could be worse?”

“Nothing,” Lea said dully, squelching the murmur.

“Then listen.” Karen hunched closer to her in the dark. “I’ll take you with me. I really shouldn’t, especially right now, but they’ll understand. I’ll take you along and then-then-if when it’s all over you still feel there’s no wonder left in the world, I’ll take you to a much more efficient suicide-type place and push you over!”

“But where-” Lea’s hands tugged to release themselves.

“Ah, ah!” Karen laughed, “Remember, you don’t care! You don’t care! Now I’l1 have to blindfold you for a minute. Stand up. Here, let me tie this scarf around your eyes. There, I guess that isn’t too tight, but tight enough-” Her chatter poured on and Lea grabbed suddenly, feeling as though the world were dissolving around her. She clung to Karen’s shoulder and stumbled from sand to solidness. “Oh, does being blindfolded make you dizzy?” Karen asked. “Well, okay. I’ll take it off then.” She whisked the scarf off. “Hurry, we have to catch the bus. It’s almost due.” She dragged Lea along the walk on the bridge, headed for the far bank, away from the town.

“But-” Lea staggered with weariness and hunger, “how did we get up on the bridge again? This is crazy! We were down-“

“Wondering, Lea?” Karen teased back over her shoulder.

“If we hurry we’ll have time for a hamburger for you before the bus gets here. My treat.”

A hamburger and a glass of milk later, the InterUrban roared up to the curb, gulped Lea and Karen in and roared away. Twenty minutes later the driver, expostulating, opened the door into blackness.

“But, lady, there’s nothing out there! Not even a house for a mile!”

“I know,” Karen smiled. “But this is the place. Someone’s waiting for us.” She tugged Lea down the steps. “Thanks!” she called. “Thanks a lot!”

“Thanks!” the driver muttered, slamming the doors. “This isn’t even a corner! Screwballs!’” And roared off down the road.

The two girls watched the glowworm retreat of the bus until it disappeared around a curve.

“Now!” Karen sighed happily. “Miriam is waiting for us somewhere around here. Then we’ll go-“

“I won’t.” Lea’s voice was flatly stubborn in the almost tangible darkness. “I won’t go another inch. Who do you think you are, anyway? I’m going to stay here until a car comes along-“

“And jump in front of it?” Karen’s voice was cold and hard.

“You have no right to draft someone to be your executioner. Who do you think you are that you can splash your blood all over someone else?”

“Stop talking about blood!” Lea yelled, stung to have had her thoughts caught from her. “Let me die! Let me die!”

“It’d serve you right if I did,” Karen said unsympathetically.

“I’m not so sure you’re worth saving. But as long as I’ve got you on my hands, shut up and come on. Cry babies bore me.”

“But-you-don’t-know!” Lea sobbed tearlessly, stumbling miserably along, towed at arm’s length behind Karen, dodging cactus and greasewood, mourning the all-enfolding comfort of nothingness that could have been hers if Karen had only let her go.

“You might be surprised,” Karen snapped. “But anyway God knows, and you haven’t thought even once of Him this whole evening. If you’re so all-fired eager to go busting into His house uninvited you’d better stop bawling and start thinking up a convincing excuse.”

“You’re mean!” Lea wailed, like a child.

“So I’m mean.’” Karen stopped so suddenly that Lea stumbled into her. “Maybe I should leave you alone. I don’t want this most wonderful thing that’s happening to be spoiled by such stupid goings on. Good-by!”

And she was gone before Lea could draw a breath. Gone completely. Not a sound of a footstep. Not a rustle of brush. Lea cowered in the darkness, panic swelling in her chest, fear catching her breath. The high arch of the sky glared at her starrily and the suddenly hostile night crept closer and closer. There was nowhere to go-nowhere to hide-no corner to back into. Nothing-nothing!

“Karen!” she shrieked, starting to run blindly. “Karen!”

“Watch it.” Karen reached out of the dark and caught her. “There’s cactus around here.” Her voice went on in exasperated patience. “Scared to death of being alone in the dark for two minutes and fourteen seconds-and yet you think an eternity of it would be better than living-

“Well, I’ve checked with Miriam. She says she can help me manage you, so come along.

“Miriam, here she is. Think she’s worth saving?” Lea recoiled, startled, as Miriam materialized vaguely out of the darkness.

“Karen, stop sounding so mean,” the shadow said. “You know wild horses couldn’t pull you away from Lea now. She needs healing-not hollering at.”

“She doesn’t even want to be healed,” Karen said.

“As though I’m not even here,” Lea thought resentfully. “‘Not here. Not here.” The looming wave of despair broke and swept over her. “Oh, let me go! Let me die!” She turned away from Karen, but the shadow of Miriam put warm arms around her.

“She didn’t want to live either, but you wouldn’t accept that-no more than you’ll accept her not wanting to be healed.”

“It’s late,” Karen said. “Chair-carry?”

“I suppose so,” Miriam said. “It’ll be shock enough, anyway. The more contact the better.”

So the two made a chair, hand clasping wrist, wrist clasped by hand. They stooped down.

“Here, Lea,” Karen said, “sit down. Arms around our necks.”

“I can walk,” Lea said coldly. “I’m not all that tired. Don’t be silly.”

“You can’t walk where we’re going. Don’t argue. We’re behind schedule now. Sit.”

Lea folded her lips but awkwardly seated herself, clinging tightly as they stood up, lifting her from the ground.

“Okay?” Miriam asked.

“Okay,” Karen and Lea said together.

“Well?” Lea said, waiting for steps to begin.

“Well,” Karen laughed, “don’t say I didn’t warn you, but look down.”

Lea looked down. And down! And down! Down to the scurrying sparks along a faded ribbon of a road. Down to the dew-jeweled cobweb of street lights stretching out flatly below. Down to the panoramic perfection of the whole valley, glowing magically in the night. Lea stared, unbelieving, at her two feet swinging free in the air-nothing beneath them but air-the same air that brushed her hair back and tangled her eyelashes as they picked up speed. Terror caught her by the throat. Her arms convulsed around the two girls’ necks.

“Hey!” Karen strangled. “You’re choking us! You’re all right. Not so tight! Not so tight!”

“You’d better Still her,” Miriam gasped. “She can’t hear you,”

“Relax,” Karen said quietly. “Lea, relax.”

Lea felt fear leave her like a tide going out. Her arms relaxed. Her uncomprehending eyes went up to the stars and down to the lights again. She gave a little sigh and her head drooped on Karen’s shoulder.

“It did kill me,” she said. “Jumping off the bridge. Only it’s taken me a long time to die. This is just delirium before death. No wonder, with a stub of a tamarisk through my shoulder.” And her eyes closed and she went limp.

Lea lay in the silvery darkness behind her closed eyes and savored the anonymous unfeeling between sleep and waking. Quietness sang through her, a humming stillness. She felt as anonymous as a transparent seaweed floating motionless between two layers of clear water. She breathed slowly, not wanting to disturb the mirror-stillness, the transparent peace. If you breathe quickly you think, and if you think-She stirred, her eyelids fluttering, trying to stay closed, but awareness and the growing light pried them opera She lay thin and flat on the bed, trying to be another white sheet between two muslin ones. But white sheets don’t hear morning birds or smell breakfasts. She turned on her side and waited for the aching burden of life to fill her, to weigh her down, to beset her with its burning futility.

“Good morning.” Karen was perched on the window sill, reaching out with one cupped hand. “Do you know how to get a bird to notice you, short of being a crumb? I wonder if they do notice anything except food and eggs. Do they ever take a deep breath for the sheer joy of breathing?” She dusted the crumbs from her hands out the window.

“I don’t know much about birds.” Lea’s voice was thick and rusty. “Nor about joy either, I guess.” She tensed, waiting for the heavy horror to descend.

“Relax,” Karen said, turning from the window. “I’ve Stilled you.”

“You mean I’m-I’m healed?” Lea asked, trying to sort out last night’s memories.

“Oh, my, no! I’ve just switched you off onto a temporary siding. Healing is a slow thing. You have to do it yourself, you know. I can hold the spoon to your lips but you’ll have to do the swallowing.”

“What’s in the spoon?” Lea asked idly, swimming still in the unbeset peace.

“What have you to be cured of?”

“Of life.” Lea turned her face away. “Just cure me of living.”

“That line again. We could bat words back and forth all day and arrive at nowhere-besides I haven’t the time. I must leave now.” Karen’s face lighted and she spun around lightly.

“Oh, Lea! Oh, Lea!” Than, hastily: “There’s breakfast in the other room. I’m shutting you in. I’ll be back later and then-well, by than I’ll have figured out something. God bliss!” She whisked through the door but Lea heard no lock click.

Lea wandered into the other room, a restlessness replacing the usual sick inertia. She crumbled a piece of bacon between her fingers and poured a cup of coffee. She left them both untasted and wandered back into the bedroom. She fingered the strange nightgown she was wearing and then, in a sudden breathless skirl of action, stripped it off and scrambled into her own clothes.

She yanked the doorknob. It wouldn’t turn. She hammered softly with her fists on the unyielding door. She hurried to the open window and sitting on the sill started to swing her legs across it. Her feet thumped into an invisible something. Startled she thrust out a hand and stubbed her fingers. She pressed both hands slowly outward and stared at them as they splayed against a something that stopped them.

She went back to the bed and stared at it. She made it up, quickly, meticulously, mitering the corners of the sheets precisely and plumping the pillow. She melted down to the edge of the bed and stared at her tightly clasped hands. Then she slid slowly down, turning and catching herself on her knees. She buried her face in her hands and whispered into the arid grief that burned her eyes, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Are You really there?”

For a long time she knelt there, feeling pressed against the barrier that confined her, the barrier that, probably because of Karen, was now an inert impersonal thing instead of the malicious agony-laden frustrating, deliberately evil creature it had been for so long.

Then suddenly, incongruously, she heard Karen’s voice. “You haven’t eaten.” Her startled head lifted. No one was in the room with her. “You haven’t eaten,” she heard the voice again, Karen’s matter-of-fact tone. “You haven’t eaten.”

She pulled herself up slowly from her knees, feeling the smart of returning circulation. Stiffly she limped to the other room. The coffee steamed gently at her although she had poured it out a lifetime ago. The bacon and eggs were still warm and uncongealed. She broke the warm crisp toast and began to eat.

“I’ll figure it all out sometime soon,” she murmured to her plate. “And then I’ll probably scream for a while.”

Karen came back early in the afternoon, bursting through the door that swung open before she reached it.

“Oh, Lea!” she cried, seizing her and whirling her in a mad dance. “You’d never guess-not in a million years! Oh, Lea! Oh, Lea!” She dumped the two of them onto the bed and laughed delightedly. Lea pulled away from her.

“Guess what?” Her voice sounded as dry and strained as her tearless eyes.

Karen sat up quickly. “Oh, Lea! I’m so sorry. In all the mad excitement I forgot.

“Listen, Jemmy says you’re to come to the Gathering tonight. I can’t tell you-I mean, you wouldn’t be able to understand without a lengthy explanation, and even then-” She looked into Lea’s haunted eyes. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” she asked softly. “‘Even Stilled, it comes through like a blunt knife hacking, doesn’t it? Can’t you cry, Lea? Not even a tear?”

“Tears-” Lea’s hands were restless. ” ‘Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.’ ” She pressed her hands to the tight constriction in her chest. Her throat ached intolerably. “How can I bear it?” she whispered. “When you let it come back again how can I even bear it?”

“You don’t have to bear it alone. You need never have borne it alone. And I won’t release you until you have enough strength.

“Anyway-” Karen stood up briskly, “food again-then a nap. I’ll give sleep to you. Then the Gathering. There will be your new beginning.”

Lea shrank back into her corner, watching with dread as the Gathering grew. Laughter and cries and overtones and undercurrents swirled around the room.

“They won’t bite!” Karen whispered. “They won’t even notice you, if you don’t want them to. Yes,” she answered Lea’s unasked question. “You must stay-like it or not, whether you can see any use in it or not. I’m not quite sure myself why Jemmy called this Gathering, but how appropriate can you get-having us meet in the schoolhouse? Believe it or not, this is the where that I got my education-and this is where-Well, teachers have been our undoing-or doing according to your viewpoint. You know, adults can fairly well keep themselves to themselves and not let anyone else in on their closely guarded secrets-but the kids-” She laughed. “Poor cherubs-or maybe they’re wiser. They pour out the most personal things quite unsolicited to almost any adult who will listen-and who’s more apt to listen than a teacher? Ask one sometime how much she learns of a child’s background and everyday family activities from just what is let drop quite unconsciously. Kids are the key to any community-which fact has never been more true than among us. That’s why teachers have been so involved in the affairs of the People. Remind me sometime when we have a minute to tell you about-well, Melodye, for instance. But now-“

The room suddenly arranged itself decorously and stilled itself expectantly and waited attentively.

Jemmy half sat on one corner of the teacher’s desk in front of the Group, a piece of paper clutched in one hand. All heads bowed. “We are met together in Thy Name,” Jemmy said. A settling rustle filled the room and subsided. “Out of consideration for some of us the proceedings here will be vocal. I know some of the Group have wondered that we included all of you in the summons. The reasons are twofold. One, to share this joy with us-” A soft musical trill of delight curled around the room, followed by faint laughter. “Francher!” Jemmy said.

“The other is because of the project we want to begin tonight. “In the last few days it has become increasingly evident that we all have a most important decision to make. Whatever we decide there will be good-bys to say. There will be partings to endure. There will be changes.”

Sorrow was tangible in the room, and a soft minor scale mourned over each note as it moved up and down, just short of tears. “The Old Ones have decided it would be wise to record our history to this point. That’s why all of you are here. Each one of you holds an important part of our story within you. Each of you has influenced indelibly the course of events for our Groups. We want your stories. Not reinterpretations in the light of what you now know, but the original premise, the original groping, the original reaching-” There was a murmur through the room. “Yes,” Jemmy answered. “Live it over, exactly the same-aching and all.

“Now,” he smoothed out his piece of paper, “chronologically

-Oh, first, where’s Davey’s recording gadget?”

“Gadget?” someone called. “What’s wrong with our own memories?”

“Nothing,” Jemmy said, “but we want this record independent of any of us, to go with whoever goes and stay with whoever stays. We share the general memories, of course, but all the little details-well, anyway. Davey’s gadget.” It had arrived on the table unobtrusively, small and undistinguished. “Now chronologically-Karen, you’re first-“

“Who, me?” Karen straightened up, surprised. “Well, yes,” she answered herself, settling back, “I guess I am.”

“Come to the desk,” Jemmy said. “Be comfortable.”

Karen squeezed Lea’s hand and whispered, “Make way for wonder!” and, after threading her way through the rows of desks, sat behind the table.

“I think I’ll theme this beginning,” she said. “We’ve remarked on the resemblance before, you know.

” ‘And the Ark rested … upon the mountains of Ararat.’ Ararat’s more poetical than Baldy, anyway!

“And now,” she smiled, “to establish Then again. Your help, please?”

Lea watched Karen, fascinated against her will. She saw her face alter and become younger. She saw her hair change its part and lengthen. She felt years peel back from Karen like thin tissue and she leaned forward, listening as Karen’s voice, higher and younger, began ….

ARARAT

WE’VE HAD trouble with teachers in Cougar Canyon. It’s just an accommodation school anyway, isolated and so unhandy to anything. There’s really nothing to hold a teacher. But the way the People bring forth their young, in quantities and with regularity, even our small Group can usually muster the nine necessary for the county superintendent to arrange for the schooling for the year.

Of course I’m past school age, Canyon school age, and have been for years, but if the tally came up one short in the fall I’d go back for a postgraduate course again. But now I’m working on a college level because Father finished me off for my high-school diploma two summers ago. He’s promised me that if I do well this year I’ll get to go Outside next year and get my training and degree so I can be the teacher and we won’t have to go Outside for one any more. Most of the kids would just as soon skip school as not, but the Old Ones don’t hold with ignorance and the Old Ones have the last say around here.

Father is the head of the school board. That’s how I get in on lots of school things the other kids don’t. This summer when he wrote to the county seat that we’d have more than our nine again this fall and would they find a teacher for us, he got back a letter saying they had exhausted their supply of teachers who hadn’t heard of Cougar Canyon and we’d have to dig up our own teacher this year. That “‘dig up” sounded like a dirty crack to me since we have the graves of four past teachers in the far corner of our cemetery. They sent us such old teachers, the homeless, the tottering, who were trying to piece out the end of their lives with a year here and a year there in jobs no one else wanted because there’s no adequate pension system in the state and most teachers seem to die in harness. And their oldness and their tottering were not sufficient in the Canyon where there are apt to be shocks for Outsiders-unintentional as most of them are.

We haven’t done so badly the last few years, though. The Old Ones say we’re getting adjusted, though some of the nonconformists say that the Crossing thinned our blood. It might be either or both or the teachers are just getting tougher. The last two managed to last until just before the year ended. Father took them in as far as Kerry Canyon and ambulances took them on in. But they were all right after a while in the sanatorium and they’re doing okay now. Before them, though, we usually had four teachers a year.

Anyway Father wrote to a teachers’ agency on the coast, and after several letters each way he finally found a teacher.

He told us about it at the supper table.

“‘She’s rather young,” he said, reaching for a toothpick and tipping his chair back on its hind legs.

Mother gave Jethro another helping of pie and picked up her own fork again. “Youth is no crime,” she said, “and it’ll be a pleasant change for the children.”

“Yes, though it seems a shame.” Father prodded at a back tooth and Mother frowned at him. I wasn’t sure if it was for picking his teeth or for what he said. I knew he meant it seemed a shame to get a place like Cougar Canyon so early in a career. It isn’t that we’re mean or cruel, you understand. It’s only that they’re Outsiders and we sometimes forget-especially the kids.

“She doesn’t have to come,” Mother said. “She could say no.”

“Well, now-” Father tipped his chair forward. “Jethro, no more pie. You go on out and help Kiah bring in the wood. Karen, you and Lizbeth get started on the dishes. Hop to it, kids.”

And we hopped, too. Kids do to fathers in the Canyon, though I understand they don’t always Outside. It annoyed me because I knew Father wanted us out of the way so he could talk adult talk to Mother, so I told Lizbeth I’d clear the table and then worked as slowly as I could, and as quietly, listening hard.

“She couldn’t get any other job,” Father said. “The agency told me they had placed her twice in the last two years and she didn’t finish the year either place.”

“Well,” Mother said, pinching in her mouth and frowning.

“If she’s that bad why on earth did you hire her for the Canyon?”

“We have a choice?” Father laughed. Then he sobered. “No, it wasn’t for incompetency. She was a good teacher. The way she tells it they just fired her out of a clear sky. She asked for recommendations and one place wrote, ‘Miss Carmody is a very competent teacher but we dare not recommend her for a teaching position.’ “

” ‘Dare not’?” Mother asked.

” ‘Dare not,’ ” Father said; “The agency assured me that they had investigated thoroughly and couldn’t find any valid reasons for the dismissals, but she can’t seem to find another job anywhere on the coast. She wrote me that she wanted to try another state.”

“Do you suppose she’s disfigured or deformed?” Mother suggested.

“Not from the neck up!” Father laughed. He took an envelope from his pocket. “Here’s her application picture.”

By this time I’d got the table cleared and I leaned over Father’s shoulder.

“Gee!” I said. Father looked back at me, raising one eyebrow. I knew then that he had known all along that I was listening.

I flushed but stood my ground, knowing I was being granted admission to adult affairs, if only by the back door.

The girl in the picture was lovely. She couldn’t have been many years older than I and she was twice as pretty.

She had short dark hair curled all over her head and apparently that poreless creamy skin which seems to have an inner light of its own. She had a tentative look about her as though her dark eyebrows were horizontal question marks. There was a droop to the corners of her mouth-not much, just enough to make you wonder why, and want to comfort her.

“She’ll stir the Canyon for sure,” Father said.

“I don’t know” Mother frowned thoughtfully. “What will the Old Ones say to a marriageable Outsider in the Canyon?”

“Adonday Veeah!” Father muttered. “That never occurred to me. None of our other teachers was ever of an age to worry about.”

“‘What would happen?” I asked. “I mean if one of the Group married an Outsider?”

“Impossible,” Father said, so like the Old Ones that I could see why his name was approved in Meeting last spring.

“Why, there’s even our Jemmy,” Mother worried. “Already he’s saying he’ll have to start trying to find another Group. None of the girls here pleases him. Supposing this Outsider-how old is she?”

Father unfolded the application. “Twenty-three. Just three years out of college.”

“Jemmy’s twenty-four.” Mother pinched her mouth together. “Father, I’m afraid you’ll have to cancel the contract. If anything happened-well, you waited overlong to become an Old One to my way of thinking and it’d be a shame to have something go wrong your first year.”

“I can’t cancel the contract. She’s on her way here. School starts next Monday.” Father ruffled his hair forward as he does when he’s disturbed. “We’re probably making a something of a nothing,” he said hopefully.

“Well, I only hope we don’t have any trouble with this Outsider.”

“Or she with us,” Father grinned. “Where are my cigarettes?”

“On the bookcase,” Mother said, getting up and folding the tablecloth together to hold the crumbs.

Father snapped his fingers and the cigarettes drifted in from the front room.

Mother went on out to the kitchen. The tablecloth shook itself over the wastebasket and then followed her.

Father drove to Kerry Canyon Sunday night to pick up our new teacher. She was supposed to have arrived Saturday afternoon but she didn’t make bus connections at the county seat. The road ends at Kerry Canyon. I mean for Outsiders. There’s not much of the look of a well-traveled road very far out our way from Kerry Canyon, which is just as well. Tourists leave us alone. Of course we don’t have much trouble getting our cars to and fro, but that’s why everything dead-ends at Kerry Canyon and we have to do all our own fetching and carrying-I mean the road being in the condition it is.

All the kids at our house wanted to stay up to see the new teacher, so Mother let them, but by seven thirty the youngest ones began to drop off and by nine there was only Jethro and Kiah, Lizbeth and Jemmy and me. Father should have been home long before and Mother was restless and uneasy. But at nine fifteen we heard the car coughing and sneezing up the draw. Mother’s wide relieved smile was reflected on all our faces.

“Of course!” she cried. “I forgot. He has an Outsider in the car. He had to use the road and it’s terrible across Jackass Flat.”

I felt Miss Carmody before she came in the door. Already I was tingling all over from anticipation, but suddenly I felt her, so plainly that I knew with a feeling of fear and pride that I was of my grandmother, that soon I would be bearing the burden and blessing of her Gift-the Gift that develops into free access to any mind, one of the People or an Outsider, willing or not. And besides the access, the ability to counsel and help, to straighten tangled minds and snarled emotions.

And then Miss Carmody stood in the doorway, blinking a little against the light, muffled to the chin against the brisk fall air. A bright scarf hid her hair, but her skin was that luminous matte-cream it had looked. She was smiling a little but scared, too. I shut my eyes and-I went in, just like that. It was the first time I had ever sorted anybody She was all fluttery with tiredness and strangeness, and there was a question deep inside her that had the wornness of repetition, but I couldn’t catch what it was. And under the uncertainty there was a sweetness and dearness and such a bewildered sorrow that I felt my eyes dampen. Then I looked at her again (sorting takes such a little time) as Father introduced her. I heard a gasp beside me and suddenly I went into Jemmy’s mind with a stunning rush.

Jemmy and I have been close all our lives and we don’t always need words to talk with each other, but this was the first time I had ever gone in like this and I knew he didn’t know what had happened. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to know his emotion so starkly. I closed him out as quickly as possible, but not before I knew that now Jemmy would never hunt for another Group; Old Ones or no Old Ones, he had found his love.

All this took less time than it takes to say how-do-you-do and shake hands. Mother descended with cries and drew Miss Carmody and Father out to the kitchen for coffee, and Jemmy swatted Jethro and made him carry the luggage instead of snapping it to Miss Carmody’s room. After all we didn’t want to lose our teacher before she even saw the schoolhouse.

I waited until everyone was bedded down. Miss Carmody in her cold cold bed, the rest of us of course with our sheets set for warmth-how I pity Outsiders! Then I went to Mother.

She met me in the dark hall and we clung together as she comforted me.

“Oh, Mother,” I whispered, “I sorted Miss Carmody tonight. I’m afraid.”

Mother held me tight again. “I wondered. It’s a great responsibility. You have to be so wise and clear-thinking. Your grandmother carried the Gift with graciousness and honor. “You are of her. You can do it.”

“But, Mother! To be an Old One!”

Mother laughed. “You have years of training ahead of you before you’ll be an Old One. Councilor to the soul is a weighty job.”

“Do I have to tell?” I pleaded. “I don’t want anyone to know yet. I don’t want to be set apart.”

“I’ll tell the Oldest. No one else need know.” She hugged me again and I went back, comforted, to bed.

I lay in the darkness and let my mind clear, not even knowing how I knew how to. Like the gentle teachings of quiet fingers I felt the family about me. I felt warm and comfortable as though I were cupped in the hollow palm of a loving hand. Someday I would belong to the Group as I now belonged to the family. Belong to others? With an odd feeling of panic I shut the family out. I wanted to be alone-to belong just to me and no one else. I didn’t want the Gift.

I slept after a while.

Miss Carmody left for the schoolhouse an hour before we did. She wanted to get things started a little before school-time, her late arrival making it kind of rough on her. Kiah, Jethro, Lizbeth and I walked down the lane to the Armisters’ to pick up their three kids. The sky was so blue you could taste it, a winy fallish taste of harvest fields and falling leaves. We were all feeling full of bubbly enthusiasm for the beginning of school. We were lighthearted and light-footed, too, as we kicked along through the cottonwood leaves paving the lane with gold. In fact Jethro felt too light-footed, and the third time I hauled him down and made him walk on the ground I cuffed him good. He was still sniffling when we got to Armisters’.

“She’s pretty!” Lizbeth called before the kids got out to the gate, all agog and eager for news of the new teacher.

“She’s young,” Kiah added, elbowing himself ahead of Lizbeth.

“She’s littler’n me,” Jethro sniffed, and we all laughed because he’s five six already even if he isn’t twelve yet.

Debrah and Rachel Armister linked arms with Lizbeth and scuffled down the lane, heads together, absorbing the details of teacher’s hair, dress, nail polish, luggage and night clothes, though goodness knows how Lizbeth found out about all that.

Jethro and Kiah annexed Jeddy and they climbed up on the rail fence that parallels the lane, and walked the top rail. Jethro took a tentative step or two above the rail, caught my eye and stepped back in a hurry. He knows as well as any child in the Canyon that a kid his age has no business lifting along a public road.

We detoured at the Mesa Road to pick up the Kroginold boys. More than once Father has sighed over the Kroginolds.

You see, when the Crossing was made the People got separated in that last wild moment when air was screaming past and the heat was building up so alarmingly. The members of our Group left their ship just seconds before it crashed so devastatingly into the box canyon behind Old Baldy and literally splashed and drove itself into the canyon walls, starting a fire that stripped the hills bare for miles. After the People gathered themselves together from the life slips, and founded Cougar Canyon they discovered that the alloy the ship was made of was a metal much wanted here. Our Group has lived on mining the box canyon ever since, though there’s something complicated about marketing the stuff. It has to be shipped out of the country and shipped in again because everyone knows that it isn’t found in this region.

Anyway our Group at Cougar Canyon is probably the largest of the People, but we are reasonably sure that at least one Group and maybe two survived along with us. Grandmother in her time sensed two Groups but could never locate them exactly, and, since our object is to go unnoticed in this new life, no real effort has ever been made to find them. Father can remember just a little of the Crossing, but some of the Old Ones are blind and crippled from the heat and the terrible effort they put forth to save the others from burning up like falling stars.

But getting back, Father often mourned that of all the People who could have made up our Group we had to get the Kroginolds. They’re rebels and were even before the Crossing. It’s their kids who have been so rough on our teachers. The rest of us usually behave fairly decently and remember that we have to be careful around Outsiders.

Derek and Jake Kroginold were wrestling in a pile of leaves by the front gate when we got there. They didn’t even hear us coming, so I leaned over and whacked the nearest rear end, and they turned in a flurry of leaves and grinned up at me for all the world like pictures of Pan in the mythology book at home.

“What kinda old bat we got this time?” Derek asked as he scrabbled in the leaves for his lunch box.

“She’s not an old bat,” I retorted, madder than need be because Derek annoys me so. “She’s young and beautiful.”

“Yeah, I’l1 bet!” Jake emptied the leaves from his cap onto the trio of squealing girls.

“She is so!” Kiah retorted. “The nicest teacher we ever had.”

“She won’t teach me nothing!” Derek yelled, lifting to the top of the cottonwood tree at the turnoff.

“Well, if she won’t I will,” I muttered, and reaching for a handful of sun I platted the twishers so quickly that Derek fell like a rock. He yelled like a catamount, thinking he’d get killed for sure, but I stopped him about a foot from the ground and then let go. Well, the stopping and the thump to the ground pretty well jarred the wind out of him, but he yelled:

“I’ll tell the Old Ones! You ain’t supposed to platt twishers!”

“Tell the Old Ones,” I snapped, kicking on down the leafy road. “I’ll be there and tell them why. And then, old smarty pants, what will be your excuse for lifting?”

And then I was ashamed. I was showing off as bad as a Kroginold, but they make me so mad!

Our last stop before school was at the Clarinades’. My heart always squeezed when I thought of the Clarinade twins. They just started school this year, two years behind the average Canyon kid. Mrs. Kroginold used to say that the two of them, Susie and Jerry, divided one brain between them before they were born. That’s unkind and untrue-thoroughly a Kroginold remark-but it is true that by Canyon standards the twins were retarded. They lacked so many of the attributes of the People. Father said it might be a delayed effect of the Crossing that they would grow out of, or it might be advance notice of what our children will be like here-what is ahead for the People. It makes me shiver, wondering.

Susie and Jerry were waiting, clinging to each other’s hands as they always were. They were shy and withdrawn, but both were radiant because of starting school. Jerry, who did almost all the talking for the two of them, answered our greetings with a shy hello.

Then Susie surprised us all by exclaiming, “We’re going to school!”

“Isn’t it wonderful?” I replied, gathering her cold little hand into mine. “And you’re going to have the prettiest teacher we ever had.”

But Susie had retired into blushing confusion and didn’t say another word all the way to school.

I was worried about Jake and Derek. They were walking apart from us, whispering, looking over at us and laughing. They were cooking up some kind of mischief for Miss Carmody. And more than anything I wanted her to stay. I found right then that there would be years ahead of me before I became an Old One. I tried to go into Derek and Jake to find out what was cooking, but try as I might I couldn’t get past the sibilance of their snickers and the hard flat brightness of their eyes.

We were turning off the road into the school yard when Jemmy, who should have been up at the mine long since, suddenly stepped out of the bushes in front of us, his hands behind him. He glared at Jake and Derek and then at the rest of the children.

“You kids mind your manners when you get to school,” he snapped, scowling. “And you Kroginolds-just try anything funny and I’ll lift you to Old Baldy and platt the twishers on you. This is one teacher we’re going to keep.”

Susie and Jerry clung together in speechless terror. The Kroginolds turned red and pushed out belligerent jaws. The rest of us just stared at a Jemmy, who never raised his voice and never pushed his weight around.

“l mean it, Jake and Derek. You try getting out of line and the Old Ones will find a few answers they’ve been looking for-especially about the bell in Kerry Canyon.”

The Kroginolds exchanged looks of dismay and the girls sucked in breaths of astonishment. One of the most rigorously enforced rules of the Group concerns showing off outside the community. If Derek and Jake had been involved in ringing that bell all night last Fourth of July-well!

“Now you kids, scoot!” Jemmy jerked his head toward the schoolhouse, and the terrified twins scudded down the leaf-strewn path like a pair of bright leaves themselves, followed by the rest of the children, with the Kroginolds looking sullenly back over their shoulders and muttering.

Jemmy ducked his head and scowled, “It’s time they got civilized anyway. There’s no sense to our losing teachers all the time.”

“No,” I said noncommittally.

“There’s no point in scaring her to death.” Jemmy was intent on the leaves he was kicking with one foot.

“No,” I agreed, suppressing my smile.

Then Jemmy smiled ruefully in amusement at himself. “I should waste words with you? Here.” He took his hands from behind him and thrust a bouquet of burning-bright autumn leaves into my arms. “They’re from you to her. Something pretty for the first day.”

“Oh, Jemmy!” I cried through the scarlet and crimson and gold. “They’re beautiful. You’ve been up on Baldy this morning.”

“That’s right. But she won’t know where they came from.” And he was gone.

I hurried to catch up with the children before they got to the door. Suddenly overcome with shyness, they were milling around the porch steps, each trying to hide behind the others.

“Oh, for goodness” sakes!” I whispered to our kids. “‘You ate breakfast with her this morning. She won’t bite. Go on in.”

But I found myself shouldered to the front and leading the subdued group into the schoolroom. While I was giving the bouquet of leaves to Miss Carmody the others with the ease of established habit slid into their usual seats, leaving only the twins, stricken and white, standing alone.

Miss Carmody, dropping the leaves on her desk, knelt quickly beside them, pried a hand of each gently free from their frenzied clutching and held them in hers.

“I’m so glad you came to school,” she said in her warm rich voice. “I need a first grade to make the school work out right and I have a seat that must have been built on purpose for twins.”

And she led them over to the side of the room, close enough to the old potbellied stove for Outside comfort later and near enough to the window to see out. There, in dusted glory, stood one of the old double desks that the Group must have inherited from some ghost town out in the hills. There were two wooden boxes for footstools for small dangling feet and, spouting like a flame from the old inkwell hole, a spray of vivid red leaves-matchmates to those Jemmy had given me.

The twins slid into the desk, never loosening hands, and stared up at Miss Carmody, wide-eyed. She smiled back at them and, leaning forward, poked her fingertip into the deep dimple in each round chin.

“Buried smiles,” she said, and the two scared faces lighted up briefly with wavery smiles. Then Miss Carmody turned to the rest of us.

I never did hear her introductory words. I was too busy mulling over the spray of leaves and how she came to know the identical routine, words and all, that the twins’ mother used to make them smile, and how on earth she knew about the old desks in the shed. But by the time we rose to salute the flag and sing our morning song I had it figured out. Father must have briefed her on the way home last night. The twins were an ever-present concern of the whole Group, and we were all especially anxious to have their first year a successful one. Also, Father knew the smile routine and where the old desks were stored. As for the spray of leaves, well, some did grow this low on the mountain and frost is tricky at leaf-turning time.

So school was launched and went along smoothly. Miss Carmody was a good teacher and even the Kroginolds found their studies interesting.

They hadn’t tried any tricks since Jemmy had threatened them. That is, except that silly deal with the chalk. Miss Carmody was explaining something on the board and was groping sideways for the chalk to add to the lesson. Jake deliberately lifted the chalk every time she almost had it. I was just ready to do something about it when Miss Carmody snapped her fingers with annoyance and grasped the chalk firmly. Jake caught my eye about then and shrank about six inches in girth and height. I didn’t tell Jemmy, but Jake’s fear that I might kept him straight for a long time.

The twins were really blossoming. They laughed and played with the rest of the kids, and Jerry even went off occasionally with the other boys at noontime, coming back as disheveled and wet as the others after a dam-building session in the creek.

Miss Carmody fitted so well into the community and was so well liked by us kids that it began to look like we’d finally keep a teacher all year. Already she had withstood some of the shocks that had sent our other teachers screaming. For instance…

The first time Susie got a robin-redbreast sticker on her bookmark for reading a whole page-six lines-perfectly, she lifted all the way back to her seat, literally walking about four inches in the air. I held my breath until she sat down and was caressing the glossy sticker with one finger, then I sneaked a cautious look at Miss Carmody. She was sitting very erect, her hands clutching both ends of her desk as though in the act of rising, a look of incredulous surprise on her face. Then she relaxed, shook her head and smiled, and busied herself with some papers.

I let my breath out cautiously. The last teacher but two went into hysterics when one of the girls absentmindedly lifted back to her seat because her sore foot hurt. I had hoped Miss Carmody was tougher, and apparently she was.

That same week, one noon hour, Jethro came pelting up to the schoolhouse where Valancy-that’s her first name and I call her by it when we are alone; after all she’s only four years older than I-was helping me with that gruesome tests and measurements I was taking by extension from teachers’ college.

“Hey, Karen!” he yelled through the window. “Can you come out a minute?”

“Why?” I yelled back, annoyed at the interruption just when I was trying to figure what was normal about a normal grade curve.

“There’s need,” Jethro yelled.

I put down my book. “I’m sorry, Valancy. I’ll go see what’s eating him.”

“Should I come, too?” she asked. “If something’s wrong-“

“It’s probably just some silly thing,” I said, edging out fast.

When one of the People says, “There’s need,” that means Group business.

“Adonday Veeah!” I muttered at Jethro as we rattled down the steep rocky path to the creek. “What are you trying to do? Get us all in trouble? What’s the matter?”

“Look,” Jethro said, and there were the boys standing around an alarmed but proud Jerry, and above their heads, poised in the air over a half-built rock dam, was a huge boulder.

“‘Who lifted that?” I gasped.

“I did,” Jerry volunteered, blushing crimson.

I turned on Jethro. “Well, why didn’t you platt the twishers on it? You didn’t have to come running-“

“On that?” Jethro squeaked. “You know very well we’re not allowed to lift anything that big, let alone platt it. Besides,” shamefaced, “I can’t remember that dern girl stuff.”

“Oh, Jethro! You’re so stupid sometimes!” I turned to Jerry. “How on earth did you ever lift anything that big?”

He squirmed. “I watched Daddy at the mine once.”

“Does he let you lift at home?” I asked severely.

“I don’t know.” Jerry squashed mud with one shoe, hanging his head. “I never lifted anything before.”

“Well, you know better. You kids aren’t allowed to lift anything an Outsider your age can’t handle alone. And not even that if you can’t platt it afterward.”

“I know it.” Jerry was still torn between embarrassment and pride.

“Well, remember it.” And taking a handful of sun I platted the twishers and set the boulder back on the hillside where it belonged.

Platting does come easier to the girls-sunshine platting, that is. Of course only the Old Ones do the sun-and-rain one, and only the very Oldest of them all would dare the moonlight-and-dark, which can move mountains. But that was still no excuse for Jethro to forget and run the risk of having Valency see what she mustn’t see.

It wasn’t until I was almost back to the schoolhouse that it dawned on me. Jerry had lifted! Kids his age usually lift play stuff almost from the time they walk. That doesn’t need platting because it’s just a matter of a few inches and a few seconds, so gravity manages the return. But Jerry and Susie never had.

They were finally beginning to catch up. Maybe it was just the Crossing that slowed them down-and maybe only the Clarinades. In my delight I forgot and lifted to the school porch without benefit of the steps. But Valancy was putting up pictures on the high old-fashioned molding just below the ceiling, so no harm was done. She flushed from her efforts and asked me to bring the step stool so she could finish them. I brought it and steadied it for her-and then nearly let her fall as I stared. How had she hung those first four pictures before I got there?

The weather was unnaturally dry all fall. We didn’t mind it much because rain with an Outsider around is awfully messy. We have to let ourselves get wet. But when November came and went and Christmas was almost upon us and there was practically no rain and no snow at all, we all began to get worried. The creek dropped to a trickle and then to scattered puddles and then went dry. Finally the Old Ones had to spend an evening at the Group reservoir doing something about our dwindling water supply. They wanted to get rid of Valancy for the evening, just in case, so Jemmy volunteered to take her to Kerry to the show. I was still awake when they got home long after midnight. Since I began to develop the Gift I have had long periods of restlessness when it seems I have no apartness but am of every person in the Group. The training I should start soon will help me shut out the others except when I want them. The only thing is that we don’t know who is to train me. Since Grandmother died there has been no Sorter in our Group, and because of the Crossing we have no books or records to help.

Anyway I was awake and leaning on my window sill in the darkness. They stopped on the porch-Jemmy is bunking at the mine during his stint there. I didn’t have to guess or use a Gift to read the pantomime before me. I closed my eyes and my mind as their shadows merged. Under their strong emotion I could have had free access to their minds, but I had been watching them all fall. I knew in a special way what passed between them, and I knew that Valancy often went to bed in tears and that Jemmy spent too many lonely hours on the crag that juts out over the canyon from high on Old Baldy, as though he were trying to make his heart as inaccessible to Outsiders as the crag is. I knew what he felt, but oddly enough I had never been able to sort Valancy since that first night. There was something very un-Outsiderish and also very un-Groupish about her mind and I couldn’t figure what.

I heard the front door open and close and Valancy’s light steps fading down the hall and then I felt Jemmy calling me outside. I put my coat on over my robe and shivered down the hall. He was waiting by the porch steps, his face still and unhappy in the faint moonlight.

“She won’t have me,” he said flatly.

“Oh, Jemmy! You asked her-“

“Yes. She said no.”

“I’m so sorry.” I huddled down on the top step to cover my cold ankles. “But, Jemmy-“

“Yes, I know” he retorted savagely. “She’s an Outsider. I have no business even to want her. Well, if she’d have me I wouldn’t hesitate a minute. This purity-of-the-Group deal is-“

“Is fine and right,” I said softly, “as long as it doesn’t touch you personally? But think for a minute, Jemmy. Would you be able to live a life as an Outsider? Just think of the million and one restraints that you would have to impose on yourself-and for the rest of your life, too, or lose her after all.

Maybe it’s better to accept ‘no’ now than to try to build something and ruin it completely later. And if there should be children-” I paused. “Could there be children, Jemmy?”

I heard him draw a sharp breath.

“We don’t know,” I went on. “We haven’t had the occasion to find out. Do you want Valancy to be part of the first experiment?”

Jemmy slapped his hat viciously down on his thigh, then he laughed.

“You have the Gift,” he said, though I had never told him.

“Have you any idea, sister mine, how little you will be liked when you become an Old One?”

“Grandmother was well liked,” I answered placidly. Then I cried, “Don’t you set me apart, darn you, Jemmy. Isn’t it enough to know that among a different people I am different? Don’t you desert me now!” I was almost in tears,

Jemmy dropped to the step beside me and thumped my shoulder in his old way. “Pull up your socks, Karen. We have to do what we have to do. I was just taking my mad out on you. What a world!” He sighed heavily.

I huddled deeper in my coat, cold of soul.

“But the other one is gone,” I whispered. “The Home.”

And we sat there sharing the poignant sorrow that is a constant undercurrent among the People, even those of us who never actually saw the Home. Father says it’s because of a sort of racial memory.

“But she didn’t say no because she doesn’t love me,” Jemmy went on at last. “She does love me. She told me so.”

“Then why not?” As his sister I couldn’t imagine anyone turning Jemmy down.

Jemmy laughed-a short unhappy laugh. “Because she is different.”

“She’s different?”

“That’s what she said, as though it was pulled out of her. ‘I can’t marry,’ she said. ‘I’m different!’ That’s pretty good, isn’t it, coming from an Outsider!”

“She doesn’t know we’re the People. She must feel that she is different from everyone. I wonder why?”

“I don’t know. There’s something about her, though. A kind of shield or wall that keeps us apart. I’ve never met anything like it in an Outsider or in one of the People either. Sometimes it’s like meshing with one of us and then bang! I smash the daylights out of me against that stone wall.”

“Yes, I know, I’ve felt it, too.”

We listened to the silent past-midnight world and then Jemmy stood.

“Well, g’night, Karen. Be seeing you.”

I stood up, too. “Good night, Jemmy.” I watched him start off in the late moonlight. He turned at the gate, his face hidden in the shadows.

“But I’m not giving up,” he said quietly. “Valancy is my love.”

The next day was hushed and warm, unusually so for December in our hills. There was a kind of ominous stillness among the trees, and, threading thinly against the milky sky, the slender smokes of little brush fires pointed out the dryness of the whole country. If you looked closely you could see piling behind Old Baldy an odd bank of clouds, so nearly the color of the sky that it was hardly discernible, but puffy and summer-thunderheady.

All of us were restless in school, the kids reacting to the weather, Valancy pale and unhappy after last night. I was bruising my mind against the blank wall in hers, trying to find some way I could help her.

Finally the thousand and one little annoyances were climaxed by Jerry and Susie scuffling until Susie was pushed out of the desk onto an open box of wet water colors that Debra for heaven only knows what reason had left on the floor by her desk. Susie shrieked and Debra sputtered and Jerry started a high silly giggle of embarrassment and delight. Valency, without looking, reached for something to rap for order with and knocked down the old cracked vase full of drooping wildflowers and three-day-old water. The vase broke and flooded her desk with the foul-smelling deluge, ruining the monthly report she had almost ready to send in to the county school superintendent.

For a stricken moment there wasn’t a sound in the room, then Valancy burst into half-hysterical laughter and the whole room rocked with her. We all rallied around doing what we could to clean up Susie’s and Valancy’s desks, and then Valency declared a holiday and decided that it would be the perfect time to go up-canyon to the slopes of Baldy and gather what greenery we could find to decorate our schoolroom for the holidays.

We all take our lunches to school, so we gathered them up and took along a square tarp the boys had brought to help build the dam in the creek. Now that the creek was dry they couldn’t use it, and it’d come in handy to sit on at lunchtime and would serve to carry our greenery home in, too, stretcher fashion.

Released from the schoolroom, we were all loud and jubilant and I nearly kinked my neck trying to keep all the kids in sight at once to nip in the bud any thoughtless lifting or other Group activity. The kids were all so wild, they might forget.

We went on up-canyon past the kids’ dam and climbed the bare dry waterfalls that stair-step up to the mesa. On the mesa we spread the tarp and pooled our lunches to make it more picnicky. A sudden hush from across the tarp caught my attention. Debra, Rachel and Lizbeth were staring horrified at Susie’s lunch. She was calmly dumping out a half dozen koomatka beside her sandwiches.

Koomatka are almost the only plants that lasted through the Crossing. I think four koomatka survived in someone’s personal effects. They were planted and cared for as tenderly as babies, and now every household in the Group has a koomatka plant growing in some quiet spot out of casual sight. Their fruit is eaten not so much for nourishment as Earth knows nourishment but as a last remembrance of all other similar delights that died with the Home. We always save koomatka for special occasions. Susie must have sneaked some out when her mother wasn’t looking. And there they were-across the table from an Outsider!

Before I could snap them to me or say anything Valancy turned, too, and caught sight of the softly glowing bluey green pile. Her eyes widened and one hand went out. She started to say something and then she dropped her eyes quickly and drew her hand back. She clasped her hands tightly together, and the girls, eyes intent on her, scrambled the koomatka back into the sack and Lizbeth silently comforted Susie, who had just realized what she had done. She was on the verge of tears at having betrayed the people to an Outsider.

Just then Kiah and Derek rolled across the picnic table fighting over a cupcake. By the time we salvaged our lunch from under them and they had scraped the last of the chocolate frosting off their T-shirts, the koomatka incident seemed closed. And yet as we lay back resting a little to settle our stomachs, staring up at the smothery low-hanging clouds that had grown from the milky morning sky, I suddenly found myself trying to decide about Valancy’s look when she had seen the fruit. Surely it couldn’t have been recognition!

At the end of our brief siesta we carefully buried the remains of our lunch-the hill was much too dry to think of burning it-and started on again. After a while the slope got steeper and the stubborn tangle of manzanita tore at our clothes and scratched our legs and grabbed at the rolled-up tarp until we all looked longingly at the free air above it. If Valancy hadn’t been with us we could have lifted over the worst and saved all this trouble. But we blew and panted for a while and then struggled on.

After an hour or so we worked out onto a rocky knoll that leaned against the slope of Baldy and made a tiny island in the sea of manzanita. We all stretched out gratefully on the crumbling granite outcropping, listening to our heart beats slowing.

Then Jethro sat up and sniffed. Valancy and I alerted. A sudden puff of wind from the little side canyon brought the acrid pungency of burning brush to us. Jethro scrambled along the narrow ridge to the slope of Baldy and worked his way around out of sight into the canyon. He came scrambling back, half lifting, half running.

“Awful!” he panted. “It’s awful! The whole canyon ahead is on fire and it’s coming this way fast!”

Valancy gathered us together with a glance.

“Why didn’t we see the smoke?” she asked tensely. “There wasn’t any smoke when we left the schoolhouse.”

“Can’t see this slope from school,” he said. “Fire could burn over a dozen slopes and we’d hardly see the smoke. This side of Baldy is a rim fencing in an awful mess of canyons.”

“What’ll we do?” Lizbeth quavered, hugging Susie to her.

Another gust of wind and smoke set us all to coughing, and through my streaming tears I saw a long lapping tongue of fire reach around the canyon wall.

Valancy and I looked at each other. I couldn’t sort her mind, but mine was a panic, beating itself against the fire and then against the terrible tangle of manzanita all around us. Bruising against the possibility of lifting out of danger, then against the fact that none of the kids was capable of sustained progressive self-lifting for more than a minute or so, and how could we leave Valancy? I hid my face in my hands to shut out the acres and acres of tinder-dry manzanita that would blaze like a torch at the first touch of fire. If only it would rain! You can’t set fire to wet manzanita, but after these long months of drought-!

I heard the younger children scream and looked up to see Valancy staring at me with an intensity that frightened me even as I saw fire standing bright and terrible behind her at the mouth of the canyon.

Jake, yelling hoarsely, broke from the group and lifted a yard or two over the manzanita before he tangled his feet and fell helpless into the ugly angled branches.

“Get under the tarp!” Valancy’s voice was a whiplash. “All of you get under the tarp!”

“It won’t do any good,” Kiah bellowed. “It’ll burn like paper!”

“Get-under-the-tarp!” Valancy’s spaced icy words drove us to unfolding the tarp and spreading it to creep under. Hoping even at this awful moment that Valancy wouldn’t see me, I lifted over to Jake and yanked him back to his feet. I couldn’t lift with him, so I pushed and prodded and half carried him back through the heavy surge of black smoke to the tarp and shoved him under. Valancy was standing, back to the fire, so changed and alien that I shut my eyes against her and started to crawl in with the other kids.

And then she began to speak. The rolling terrible thunder of her voice shook my bones and I swallowed a scream. A surge of fear swept through our huddled group and shoved me back out from under the tarp.

Till I die I’ll never forget Valancy standing there tense and taller than life against the rolling convulsive clouds of smoke, both her hands outstretched, fingers wide apart as the measured terror of her voice went on and on in words that plagued me because I should have known them and didn’t. As I watched I felt an icy cold gather, a paralyzing unearthly cold that froze the tears on my tensely upturned face.

And then lightning leaped from finger to finger of her lifted hands. And lightning answered in the clouds above her. With a toss of her hands she threw the cold, the lightning, the sullen shifting smoke upward, and the roar of the racing fire was drowned in a hissing roar of down-drenching rain.

I knelt there in the deluge, looking for an eternal second into her drained despairing hopeless eyes before I caught her just in time to keep her head from banging on the granite as she pitched forward, inert.

Then as I sat there cradling her head in my lap, shaking with cold and fear, with the terrified wailing of the kids behind me, I heard Father shout and saw him and Jemmy and Darcy Clarinade in the old pickup, lifting over the steaming streaming manzanita, over the trackless mountainside through the rain to us. Father lowered the truck until one of the wheels brushed a branch and spun lazily; then the three of them lifted all of us up to the dear familiarity of that beat-up old jalopy.

Jemmy received Valancy’s limp body into his arms and crouched in back, huddling her in his arms, for the moment hostile to the whole world that had brought his love to such a pass.

We kids clung to Father in an ecstasy of relief. He hugged us all tight to him; then he raised my face.

“Why did it rain?” he asked sternly, every inch an Old One while the cold downpour dripped off the ends of my hair and he stood dry inside his shield.

“I don’t know,” I sobbed, blinking my streaming eyes against his sternness. “Valancy did it-with lightning-it was cold-she talked-” Then I broke down completely, plumping down on the rough floor boards and, in spite of my age, howling right along with the other kids.

It was a silent solemn group that gathered in the schoolhouse that evening. I sat at my desk with my hands folded stiffly in front of me, half scared of my own People. This was the first official meeting of the Old Ones I’d ever attended. They all sat in desks, too, except the Oldest who sat in Valancy’s chair. Valancy sat stony-faced in the twins’ desk, but her nervous fingers shredded one Kleenex after another as she waited.

The Oldest rapped the side of the desk with his cane and turned his sightless eyes from one to another of us.

“We’re all here,” he said, “to inquire-’”

“Oh, stop it!” Valency jumped up from her seat. “Can’t you fire me without all this rigmarole? I’m used to it. Just say go and I’ll go!” She stood trembling.

“Sit down, Miss Carmody,” said the Oldest. And Valancy sat down meekly.

“Where were you born?” the Oldest asked quietly.

“What does it matter?” Valancy flared. Then resignedly,

“It’s in my application. Vista Mar, California.”

“And your parents?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a stir in the room.

“Why not?”

“Oh, this is so unnecessary!” Valency cried. “But if you have to know, both my parents were foundlings. They were found wandering in the streets after a big explosion and fire in Vista Mar. An old couple who lost everything in the fire took them in. When they grew up, they married. I was born. They died. Can I go now?”

A murmur swept the room.

“Why did you leave your other jobs?” Father asked.

Before Valancy could answer the door was flung open and Jemmy stalked defiantly in.

“Go!” the Oldest said.

“Please,” Jemmy said, deflating suddenly. “Let me stay. It concerns me, too.”

The Oldest fingered his cane and then nodded. Jemmy half smiled with relief and sat down in a back seat.

“‘Go on,” the Oldest One said to Valancy.

“All right then,” Valancy said. “‘I lost my first job because I-well-I guess you’d call it levitated to fix a broken blind in my room. It was stuck and I just-went up-in the air until I unstuck it. The principal saw me. He couldn’t believe it and it scared him so he fired me.’” She paused expectantly.

The Old Ones looked at one another, and my silly confused mind began to add up columns that only my lack of common sense had kept from giving totals to long ago.

“And the other one?” The Oldest leaned his cheek on his doubled up hand as he bent forward.

Valancy was taken aback and she flushed in confusion.

“Well,” she said hesitantly, “I called my books to me-I mean they were on my desk-“

“We know what you mean,” the Oldest said.

“You know!” Valency looked dazed.

The Oldest stood up.

“Valancy Carmody, open your mind!”

Valancy stared at him and then burst into tears.

“I can’t, I can’t,” she sobbed. “It’s been too long. I can’t let anyone in. I’m different. I’m alone. Can’t you understand? They all died. I’m alien!”

“You are alien no longer,” the Oldest said. “You are home now, Valancy.” He motioned to me. “Karen, go in to her.”

So I did. At first the wall was still there; then with a soundless cry, half anguish and half joy, the wall went down and I was with Valancy. I saw all the secrets that had cankered in her since her parents died-the parents who were of the People.

They had been reared by the old couple who were not only of the People but had been the Oldest of the whole Crossing.

I tasted with her the hidden frightening things-the need for living as an Outsider, the terrible need for concealing all her differences and suppressing all the extra Gifts of the People, the ever-present fear of betraying herself and the awful lostness that came when she thought she was the last of the People.

And then suddenly she came in to me and my mind was flooded with a far greater presence than I had ever before experienced.

My eyes flew open and I saw all of the Old Ones staring at Valancy. Even the Oldest had his face turned to her, wonder written as widely on his scarred face as on the others.

He bowed his head and made the Sign. “The lost Persuasions and Designs,” he murmured. “She has them all.”

And then I knew that Valancy, Valancy who had wrapped herself so tightly against the world to which any thoughtless act might betray her that she had lived with us all this time without our knowing about her or her knowing about us, was one of us. Not only one of us but such a one as had not been since Grandmother died, and even beyond that. My incoherent thoughts cleared to one.

Now I would have someone to train me. Now I could become a Sorter, but only second to her.

I turned to share my wonder with Jemmy. He was looking at Valancy as the People must have looked at the Home in the last hour. Then he turned to the door.

Before I could draw a breath Valancy was gone from me and from the Old Ones and Jemmy was turning to her outstretched hands.

Then I bolted for the outdoors and rushed like one possessed down the lane, lifting and running until I staggered up our porch steps and collapsed against Mother, who had heard me coming.

“Oh, Mother! She’s one of us! She’s Jemmy’s love! She’s wonderful!” And I burst into noisy sobs in the warm comfort of Mother’s arms.

So now I don’t have to go Outside to become a teacher. We have a permanent one. But I’m going anyway. I want to be as much like Valancy as I can and she has her degree. Besides I can use the discipline of living Outside for a year.

I have so much to learn and so much training to go through, but Valancy will always be there with me. I won’t be set apart alone because of the Gift.

Maybe I shouldn’t mention it, but one reason I want to hurry my training is that we’re going to try to locate the other People. None of the boys here please me.

II

IT Was as though silver curtains were shimmering back across some magic picture, warm with remembered delight. Lea took a deep breath and, with a realization as sudden as the bursting of a bubble, became aware that she had completely forgotten herself and her troubles for the first time in months and months. And it felt good-oh, so good-so smooth, so smilingly relaxing. “If only,” she thought wistfully. “If only!” And then shivered under the bare echoless thunk as things-as-they-are thudded against the blessed shelter Karen had loaned her. Her hands tightened bitterly.

Someone laughed softly into the silence. “Have you found him yet, Karen? You started looking long enough ago-“

“Not so long,” Karen smiled, still entangled in the memories she had relived. “And I have got my degree now. Oh, I had forgotten so much-the wonder-the terror-” She dreamed a moment longer, then shook her head and laughed.

“There, Jemmy, I seen my duty and I done it. Whose hot little hands hold the next installment?”

Jemmy smoothed out his crumpled paper. “Well, Peter’s next, I guess. Unless Bethie wants to-“

“Oh no, oh no!” Bethie’s soft voice protested. “Peter, Peter can do it better-he was the one-I mean-Peter!”

Everyone laughed. “Okay, Bethie, okay!” Jemmy said.

“Cool down. Peter it will be. Well, Peter, you have until tomorrow evening to get organized. I think after the excitement of the day, one-well-installment will be enough.”

The crowd stood up and swirled and moved. The soft murmur of their voices and laughter washed over Lea like a warm ocean.

“Lea.” It was Karen. “Here’s Jemmy and Valancy. They want to meet you.”

Lea struggled to her feet, feeling impaled by their interested eyes. She felt welcome enwrapping her-a welcome far beyond any words. She felt a pang catch painfully somewhere in her chest, and to her bewilderment tears began to wash down her cheeks. She turned her head aside and groped for a handkerchief. Someone tucked a huge white one into her hands and someone’s shoulder was strong and steady for a moment and someone’s arms were deft and sure as they lifted her and bore her, blind with sobless weeping, away from the schoolhouse.

Later-oh, much later-she suddenly sat up in her bed. Karen was there instantly, noiselessly.

“Karen, was that supposed to be real?”

“Was what supposed to be real?”

“That story you told. It wasn’t true, was it?”

“But of course. Every word of it.”

“But it can’t be!” Lea cried. “People from space! Magic people! It can’t be true.”

“Why don’t you want it to be true?”

“‘Because-because! It doesn’t fit. There’s nothing outside of what is-I mean, you go around the world and come back to where you started from. Everything ends back where it started from. There are boundaries beyond which-” Lea groped for words. “Anything outside the bounds isn’t true!”

“Who defines the boundaries?””

“Why, they’re just there. You get trapped in them when you’re born. “You have to bear them till you die.”

“Who sold you into slavery?” Karen asked wonderingly.

“Or did you volunteer? I agree with you that everything comes back to where it started, but where did everything start?”

“No!” Lea shrieked, clenching her fists over her eyes and writhing back on her pillow. “Not back to that muck and chaos and mindless seething!”

The blackness rolled and flared and roared its insidious whimper-the crowded emptiness, the incinerating cold-the impossibility of all possibilities ….

“Lea, Lea.” Karen’s voice cut softly but authoritatively through the tangled horror. “Lea, sleep now. Sleep now, knowing that everything started with the Presence and all things can return joyfully to their beginning.”

Lea ate breakfast with Karen the next morning. The wind was blowing the short ruffled curtains in and out of the room.

“No screens?” Lea asked, carrying the armed truce with darkness as carefully as a cup of water, not to brim it over.

“No, no screens,” Karen said. “We keep the bugs out another. way.”

“A way that works for keeping bugs in, too,” Lea smiled.

“I tried to leave yesterday.”

“I know.” Karen held a slice of bread in her hand and watched it brown slowly and fragrantly. “That’s why I blocked the windows a little more than usual. They aren’t that way today.”

“You trust me?” Lea asked, feeling the secret slop of terror in the balanced cup.

“This isn’t jail! Yesterday you were still clinging to the skirts of death. Today you can smile. Yesterday I put the lye up on the top shelf. Today you can read the label for yourself.”

“Maybe I’m illiterate,” Lea said somberly. Then she pushed her cup back. “I’d like to go outside today, if it’s okay. It’s been a long time since I looked at the world.”

“Don’t go too far. Most of the going around here is climbing-or lifting. We haven’t many Outside-type trails. Only don’t go beyond the schoolhouse. Right now we’d rather you didn’t-the flat beyond-” She smiled softly. “Anyway there’s lots of other places to go.”

“Maybe I’ll see some of the children,” Lea said. “Davy or Lizbeth or Kiah.”

Karen laughed. “It isn’t very likely-not under the circumstances, and ‘the children’ would be vastly insulted if they heard you. They’ve grown up-at least they think they have. My story was years ago, Lea.”

“Years ago! I thought it just happened!”

“Oh, my golly, no! What made you think-?”

“You remembered so completely! Such little things. And the way Jemmy looked at Valancy and Valancy at him-“

“The People have their special memory. And Jemmy was only looking love at Valancy. Love doesn’t die-“

“Love doesn’t-” Lea’s mouth twisted. “Come, then, let us define love-” She stood up briskly. “I do want to walk a little-” She hesitated. “And maybe wade a little? In real wet water, free-running-“

“Why, sure,” Karen said. “The creek is running. Wade to your heart’s content. Lunch will be here for you and I’ll be back by supper. We’ll go to the school together for Peter’s installment.”

Lea came upon the pool, her bare feet bruised, her skirt hem dabbled with creek water, and her stomach empty of the lunch she had forgotten.

The pool was wide and quiet. Water murmured into it at one end and chuckled out at the other. In between the surface was like a mirror. A yellow leaf fell slowly from a cottonwood tree and touched so gently down on the water that the resultant rings ran as fine as wire out to the sandy edge. Lea sighed, gathered up her skirts and stepped cautiously into the pool. The clean cold bite of the water caught her breath, but she waded deeper. The water crept up to her knees and over them. She stood under the cottonwood tree, waiting, waiting so quietly that the water closed smoothly around her legs and she could feel its flow only in the tiny crumblings of sand under her feet. She stood there until another leaf fell, brushed her cheek, slipped down her shoulder and curved over her crumpled blouse, catching briefly in the gathered-up folds of her skirt before it turned a leisurely circle on the surface of the shining water.

Lea stared down at the leaf and the silver shadow behind it that was herself, then lifted her face to the towering canyon walls around her. She hugged her elbows tightly to her sides and thought, “I am becoming an entity again. I have form and proportion. I have boundaries and limits. I should be able to learn how to manage a finite being. The burden of being a nothing in infinite nothingness was too much-too much-“

A restless stirring that could turn to panic swung Lea around and she started for shore. As she clambered up the bank, hands encumbered by her skirt, she slipped and, flailing wildly for balance, fell backward into the pool with a resounding splat. Dripping and gasping she scrambled wetly to a sitting position, her shoulders barely out of the water. She blinked the water out of her eyes and saw the man.

He had one foot in the water, poised in the act of starting toward her. He was laughing. She spluttered indignantly, and the water sloshed up almost to her chin.

“I might have drowned!” she cried, feeling very silly and very wet.

“If you go on sitting there you can drown yet!” he called.

“‘High water comes in October.’”

“At the rate you’re helping me out,” she answered. “I’ll make it! I can’t get up without getting my head all wet.”

“But you’re already wet all over,” he laughed, wading toward her.

“That was accidental,” she sputtered. “It’s different, doing it on purpose!”

“Female logic!” He grabbed her hands and hoisted her to her feet, pushed her to shore and shoved her up the bank.

Lea looked up into his smiling face and, smiling back, started to thank him. Suddenly his face twisted all out of focus-and retreated a thousand miles away. Faintly, faintly from afar, she heard his voice and her own gasping breath. Woodenly she turned away and started to grope away from him. She felt him catch her hand, and as she tugged away from him she felt all her being waver and dissolve and nothingness roll in, darker and darker.

“Karen!” she cried. “Karen! Karen!” And she lost herself.

“I won’t go.” She turned fretfully away from Karen’s proffered hand. The bed was soft.

“Oh, yes, you will,” Karen said. “You’ll love Peter’s installment. And Bethie! You must hear about Bethie.”

“Oh, Karen, please don’t make me try any more,” Lea pleaded.

“I can’t bear the slipping back after-after-” She shook her head” mutely.

“You haven’t even started to try yet,” Karen said, coolly.

“You’ve got to go tonight. It’s lesson two for you, so you’ll be ready to go on.”

“My clothes,” Lea groped for an excuse. “They must be a mess.”

“They are,” Karen said, undisturbed. “You’re about Lizbeth’s size. I brought you plenty. Choose.”

“No.” Lea turned away.

“Get up.” Karen’s voice was still cool but Lea got up. She fumbled wordlessly into the proffered clothes.

“Hmm!” Karen said. “You’re taller than I thought. You slump around so since you gave up.”

Lea felt a stir of indignation but stood still as Karen knelt and tugged at the hem of the dress. The material stretched and stayed stretched, making the skirt a more seemly length for Lea.

“There,” Karen said, standing and settling the dress smoothly around Lea’s waist by pinching a fullness into a pleat. Then, with a stroke of her hand, she deepened the color of the material.

“Not bad. It’s your color. Come on now or we’ll be late.”

Lea stubbornly refused to be interested in anything. She sat in her corner and concentrated on her clasped hands, letting the ebb and flow of talk and movement lap around her, not even looking. Suddenly, after the quiet invocation, she felt a pang of pure homesickness-homesickness for strong hands holding hers with the coolness of water moving between them. She threw back her head, startled, just as Jemmy said, “I yield the desk to you, Peter. It’s yours, every decrepit splinter of it.”

“Thanks,” Peter said. “I hope the chair’s comfortable. This’ll take a while. I’ve decided to follow Karen’s lead and have a theme, too. It could well have been my question at almost any time in those long years.

“‘Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?’ “

In the brief pause Lea snatched at a thought that streaked through her mind. “I forgot all about the pond! Who was it? Who was it?” But she found no answer as Peter began ….

GILEAD

I DON’T know when it was that I found out that our family was different from other families. There was nothing to point it out. We lived in a house very like the other houses in Socorro. Our pasture lot sloped down just like the rest through arrowweed and mesquite trees to the sometime Rio Gordo that looped around town. And on occasion our cow bawled just as loudly across the river at the Jacobses’ bull as all the other cows in all the other pasture lots. And I spent as many lazy days as any other boy in Socorro lying on my back in the thin shade of the mesquites, chewing on the beans when work was waiting somewhere. It never occurred to me to wonder if we were different.

I suppose my first realization came soon after I started to school and fell in love-with the girl with the longest pigtails and the widest gap in her front teeth of all the girls in my room. I think she was seven to my six.

My girl and I had wandered down behind the school woodshed, under the cottonwoods, to eat our lunch together, ignoring the chanted “Peter’s got a gir-ul! Peter’s got a gir-ul!” and the whittling fingers that shamed me for showing my love. We ate our sandwiches and pickles and then lay back, arms doubled under our heads, and blinked at the bright sky while we tried to keep the crumbs from our cupcakes from falling into our ears. I was so full of lunch, contentment and love that I suddenly felt I just had to do something spectacular for my lady-love. I sat up, electrified by a great idea and by the knowledge that I could carry it out.

“Hey! Did you know that I can fly?” I scrambled to my feet, leaving my love sitting gape-mouthed in the grass.

“You can’t neither fly! Don’t be crazy!”

“I can too fly!”

‘“You can not neither!”

“I can so! You just watch!” And lifting my arms I swooped up to the roof of the shed. I leaned over the edge and said, “See there? I can, too!”

“I’ll tell teacher on you!” she gasped, wide-eyed, staring up at me. “You ain’t supposed to climb up on the shed.”

“Oh, poof,” I said, “I didn’t climb. Come on, you fly up, too. Here, I’ll help you.”

And I slid down the air to the ground. I put my arms around my love and lifted. She screamed and wrenched away from me and fled shrieking back to the schoolhouse. Somewhat taken aback by her desertion, I gathered up the remains of my cake and hers and was perched comfortably on the ridgepole of the shed, enjoying the last crumbs, when teacher arrived with half the school trailing behind her.

“Peter Merrill! How many times have you been told not to climb things at school?”

I peered down at her, noting with interest that the spit curls on her cheeks had been jarred loose by her hurry and agitation and one of them was straightening out, contrasting oddly with the rest of her shingled bob.

“Hang on tight until Stanley gets the ladder!”

“I can get down,” I said, scrambling off the ridgepole. “It’s easy.”

“Peter!” teacher shrieked. “Stay where you are!”

So I did, wondering at all the fuss.

By the time they got me down and teacher yanked me by one arm back up to the schoolhouse I was bawling at the top of my voice, outraged and indignant because no one would believe me, even my girl denying obstinately the evidence of her own eyes. Teacher, annoyed at my persistence, said over and over, “Don’t be silly, Peter. You can’t fly. Nobody can fly. Where are your wings?”

“I don’t need wings,” I bellowed. “People don’t need wings. I ain’t a bird!”

“Then you can’t fly. Only things with wings can fly.”

So I alternately cried and kicked the schoolhouse steps for the rest of the noon hour, and then I began to worry for fear teacher would tattle to Dad. After all I had been on forbidden territory, no matter how I got there.

As it turned out she didn’t tell Dad, but that night after I was put to bed I suddenly felt an all-gone feeling inside me.

Maybe I couldn’t fly. Maybe teacher was right. I sneaked out of bed and cautiously flew up to the top of the dresser and back. Then I pulled the covers up tight under my chin and whispered to myself, “I can so fly,” and sighed heavily. Just another fun stuff that grownups didn’t allow, like having cake for breakfast or driving the tractor or borrowing the cow for an Indian-pony-on-a-warpath.

And that was all of that incident except that when teacher met Mother and me at the store that Saturday she ruffled my hair and said, “How’s my little bird?” Then she laughed and said to Mother, “He thinks he can fly!”

I saw Mother’s fingers tighten whitely on her purse, and she looked down at me with all the laughter gone from her eyes. I was overflooded with incredulous surprise mixed with fear and dread that made me want to cry, even though I knew it was Mother’s emotions and not my own that I was feeling.

Mostly Mother had laughing eyes. She was the laughingest mother in Socorro. She carried happiness inside her as if it were a bouquet of flowers and she gave part of it to everyone she met. Most of the other mothers seemed to have hardly enough to go around to their own families. And yet there were other times, like at the store, when laughter fled and fear showed through-and an odd wariness. Other times she made me think of a caged bird, pressing against the bars. Like one night I remember vividly.

Mother stood at the window in her ankle-length flannel nightgown, her long dark hair lifting softly in the draft from the rattling window frames. A high wind was blowing in from a spectacular thunderstorm in the Huachucas. I had been awakened by the rising crescendo and was huddled on the sofa wondering if I was scared or excited as the house shook with the constant thunder. Dad was sitting with the newspaper in his lap.

Mother spoke softly, but her voice came clearly through the tumult.

“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be up there in the middle of the storm with clouds under your feet and over your head and lightning lacing around you like hot golden rivers?”

Dad rattled his paper. “Sounds uncomfortable,” he said.

But I sat there and hugged the words to me in wonder. I knew!

l remembered! ” ‘And the rain like icy silver hair lashing across your lifted face,’ ” I recited as though it were a loved lesson.

Mother whirled from the window and stared at me. Dad’s eyes were on me, dark and troubled.

“How do you know?” he asked.

I ducked my head in confusion. “I don’t know,” I muttered.

Mother pressed her hands together, hard, her bowed head swinging the curtains of her hair forward over her shadowy face. “‘He knows because I know. I know because my mother knew. She knew because our People used to-” Her voice broke. “Those were her words-“

She stopped and turned back to the window, leaning her arm against the frame, her face pressed to it, like a child in tears.

“Oh, Bruce, I’m sorry!”

I stared, round-eyed in amazement, trying to keep tears from coming to my eyes as I fought against Mother’s desolation and sorrow.

Dad went to Mother and turned her gently into his arms. He looked over her head at me. “Better run on back to bed, Peter. The worst is over.”

I trailed off reluctantly, my mind filled with wonder. Just before I shut my door I stopped and listened.

“I’ve never said a word to him, honest.” Mother’s voice quivered. “Oh, Bruce, I try so hard, but sometimes-oh sometimes!”

“I know, Eve. And you’ve done a wonderful job of it. I know it’s hard on you, but we’ve talked it out so many times. It’s the only way, honey.”

“Yes,” Mother said. “It’s the only way, but-oh, be my strength, Bruce! Bless the Power for giving me you!”

I shut my door softly and huddled in the dark in the middle of my bed until I felt Mother’s anguish smooth out to loving warmness again. Then for no good reason I flew solemnly to the top of the dresser and back, crawled into bed and relaxed. And remembered. Remembered the hot golden rivers, the clouds over and under and the wild winds that buffeted like foam-frosted waves. But with all the sweet remembering was the reminder, You can’t because you’re only eight. You’re only eight. You’ll have to wait.

And then Bethie was born, almost in time for my ninth birthday. I remember peeking over the edge of the bassinet at the miracle of tiny fingers and spun-sugar hair. Bethie, my little sister. Bethie, who was whispered about and stared at when Mother let her go to school, though mostly she kept her home even after she was old enough. Because Bethie was different-too.

When Bethie was a month old I smashed my finger in the bedroom door. I cried for a quarter of an hour, but Bethie sobbed on and on until the last pain left my finger.

When Bethie was six months old our little terrier, Glib, got caught in a gopher trap. He dragged himself, yelping, back to the house dangling the trap. Bethie screamed until Glib fell asleep over his bandaged paw.

Dad had acute appendicitis when Bethie was two, but it was Bethie who had to be given a sedative until we could get Dad to the hospital.

One night Dad and Mother stood over Bethie as she slept restlessly under sedatives. Mr. Tyree-next-door had been cutting wood and his ax slipped. He lost a big toe and a pint or so of blood, but as Doctor Dueff skidded to a stop on our street it was into our house that he rushed first and then to Mr. Tyree-next-door who lay with his foot swathed and propped up on a chair, his hands pressed to his ears to shut out Bethie’s screams.

“What can we do, Eve?” Dad asked. “What does the doctor say?”

“Nothing. They can do nothing for her. He hopes she will outgrow it. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know that she-“

“What’s the matter? What makes her like this?” Dad asked despairingly.

Mother winced. “She’s a Sensitive. Among my People there were such-but not so young. Their perception made it possible for them to help sufferers. Bethie has only half the Gift. She has no control.”

“Because of me?” Dad’s voice was ragged.

Mother look at him with steady loving eyes. “Because of us, Bruce. It was the chance we took. We pushed our luck after Peter.”

So there we were, the two of us-different-but different in our differences. For me it was mostly fun, but not for Bethie.

We had to be careful for Bethie. She tried school at first, but skinned knees and rough rassling and aching teeth and bumped heads and the janitor’s Monday hangover sent her home exhausted and shaking the first day, with hysteria hanging on the flick of an eyelash. So Bethie read for Mother and learned her numbers and leaned wistfully over the gate as the other children went by.

It wasn’t long after Bethie’s first day in school that I found a practical use for my difference. Dad sent me out to the woodshed to stack a cord of mesquite that Delfino dumped into our back yard from his old wood wagon. I had a date to explore an old fluorspar mine with some other guys and bitterly resented being sidetracked. I slouched out to the woodpile and stood, hands in pockets, kicking the heavy rough stove lengths. Finally I carried in one armload, grunting under the weight, and afterward sucking the round of my thumb where the sliding wood had peeled me. I hunkered down on my heels and stared as I sucked. Suddenly something prickled inside my brain. If I could fly why couldn’t I make the wood fly? And I knew I could! I leaned forward and flipped a finger under half a dozen sticks, concentrating as I did so. They lifted into the air and hovered. I pushed them into the shed, guided them to where I wanted them and distributed them like dealing a pack of cards. It didn’t take me long to figure out the maximum load, and I had all the wood stacked in a wonderfully short time.

I whistled into the house for my flashlight. The mine was spooky and dark, and I was the only one of the gang with a flashlight.

“I told you to stack the wood.” Dad looked up from his milk records.

“I did,” I said, grinning.

“Cut the kidding,” Dad grunted. “You couldn’t be done already.”

“I am, though,” I said triumphantly. “I found a new way to do it. You see-” I stopped, frozen by Dad’s look.

“We don’t need any new ways around here,” he said evenly.

“Go back out there until you’ve had time to stack the wood right!”

“It is stacked,” I protested. “And the kids are waiting for me!”

“I’m not arguing, son,” said Dad, white-faced. “Go back out to the shed.”

I went back out to the shed-past Mother, who had come in from the kitchen and whose hand half went out to me. I sat in the shed fuming for a long time, stubbornly set that I wouldn’t leave till Dad told me to.

Then I got to thinking. Dad wasn’t usually unreasonable like this. Maybe I’d done something wrong. Maybe it was bad to stack wood like that. Maybe-my thoughts wavered as I remembered whispers I’d overheard about Bethie. Maybe it-it was a crazy thing to do-an insane thing.

I huddled close upon myself as I considered it. Crazy means not doing like other people. Crazy means doing things ordinary people don’t do. Maybe that’s why Dad made such a fuss. Maybe I’d done an insane thing! I stared at the ground, lost in bewilderment. What was different about our family? And for the first time I was able to isolate and recognize the feeling I must have had for a long time-the feeling of being on the outside looking in-the feeling of apartness. With this recognition came a wariness, a need for concealment. If something was wrong no one else must know-I must not betray…

Then Mother was standing beside me. “Dad says you may go now,-” she said, sitting down on my log.

“Peter-” She looked at me unhappily. “Dad’s doing what is best. All I can say is: remember that whatever you do, wherever you live, different is dead. You have to conform or-or die. But Peter, don’t be ashamed. Don’t ever be ashamed!” Then swiftly her hands were on my shoulders and her lips brushed my ear.

“Be different!” she whispered. “Be as different as you can. But don’t let anyone see-don’t let anyone know!” And she was gone up the back steps, into the kitchen.

As I grew further into adolescence I seemed to grow further and further away from kids my age. I couldn’t seem to get much of a kick out of what they considered fun. So it was that with increasing frequency in the years that followed I took Mother’s whispered advice, never asking for explanations I knew she wouldn’t give. The wood incident had opened up a whole vista of possibilities-no telling what I might be able to do-so I got in the habit of going down to the foot of our pasture lot. There, screened by the brush and greasewood, I tried all sorts of experiments, never knowing whether they would work or not. I sweated plenty over some that didn’t work-and some that did.

I found that I could snap my fingers and bring things to me, or send them short distances from me without bothering to touch them as I had the wood. I roosted regularly in the tops of the tall cottonwoods, swan-diving ecstatically down to the ground, warily, after I got too ecstatic once and crash-landed on my nose and chin. By headaching concentration that left me dizzy, I even set a small campfire ablaze. Then blistered and charred both hands unmercifully by confidently scooping up the crackling fire.

Then I guess I got careless about checking for onlookers because some nasty talk got started. Bub Jacobs whispered around that I was “doing things” all alone down in the brush.

His sly grimace as he whispered made the “doing things” any nasty perversion the listeners’ imaginations could conjure up, and the “alone” damned me on the spot. I learned bitterly then what Mother had told me. Different is dead-and one death is never enough. You die and die and die.

Then one day I caught Bub cutting across the foot of our wood lot. He saw me coming and lit for tall timber, already smarting under what he knew he’d get if I caught him, I started full speed after him, then plowed to a stop. Why waste effort? If I could do it to the wood I could do it to a blockhead like Bub.

He let out a scream of pure terror as the ground dropped out from under him. His scream flatted and strangled into silence as he struggled in midair, convulsed with fear of falling and the terrible thing that was happening to him. And I stood and laughed at him, feeling myself a giant towering above stupid dopes like Bub.

Sharply, before he passed out, I felt his terror, and an echo of his scream rose in my throat. I slumped down in the dirt, sick with sudden realization, knowing with a knowledge that went beyond ordinary experience that I had done something terribly wrong, that I had prostituted whatever powers I possessed by using them to terrorize unjustly.

I knelt and looked up at Bub, crumpled in the air, higher than my head, higher than my reach, and swallowed painfully as I realized that I had no idea how to get him down. He wasn’t a stick of wood to be snapped to the ground. He wasn’t me, to dive down through the air. I hadn’t the remotest idea how to get a human down.

Half dazed, I crawled over to a shaft of sunlight that slit the cottonwood branches overhead and felt it rush through my fingers like something to be lifted-and twisted-and fashioned and used! Used on Bub! But how? How? I clenched my fist in the flood of light, my mind beating against another door that needed only a word or look or gesture to open, but I couldn’t say it, or look it, or make it.

I stood up and took a deep breath. I jumped, batting at Bub’s heels that dangled a little lower than the rest of him. I missed. Again I jumped and the tip of one finger flicked his heel and he moved sluggishly in the air. Then I swiped the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead and laughed-laughed at my stupid self.

Cautiously, because I hadn’t done much hovering, mostly just up and down, I lifted myself up level with Bub. I put my hands on him and pushed down hard. He didn’t move.

I tugged him up and he rose with me. I drifted slowly and deliberately away from him and pondered. Then I got on the other side of him and pushed him toward the branches of the cottonwood. His head was beginning to toss and his lips moved with returning consciousness. He drifted through the air like a waterlogged stump, but he moved and I draped him carefully over a big limb near the top of the tree, anchoring his arms and legs as securely as I could. By the time his eyes opened and he clutched frenziedly for support I was standing down at the foot of the tree, yelling up at him.

“Hang on, Bub! I’ll go get someone to help you down!”

So for the next week or so people forgot me, and Bub squirmed under “Who treed you, feller?” and “How’s the weather up there?” and “Get a ladder, Bub, get a ladder!”

Even with worries like that it was mostly fun for me. Why couldn’t it be like that for Bethie? Why couldn’t I give her part of my fun and take part of her pain?

Then Dad died, swept out of life by our Rio Gordo as he tried to rescue a fool Easterner who had camped on the bone-dry white sands of the river bottom in cloudburst weather. Somehow it seemed impossible to think of Mother by herself. It had always been Mother and Dad. Not just two parents but Mother-and-Dad, a single entity. And now our thoughts must limp to Mother-and, Mother-and. And Mother-well, half of her was gone.

After the funeral Mother and Bethie and I sat in our front room, looking at the floor. Bethie was clenching her teeth against the stabbing pain of Mother’s fingernails gouging Mother’s palms.

I unfolded the clenched hands gently and Bethie relaxed.

“Mother,” I said softly, “I can take care of us. I have my part-time job at the plant. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of us.”

I knew what a trivial thing I was offering to her anguish, but I had to do something to break through to her.

“Thank you, Peter,” Mother said, rousing a little. “I know you will-” She bowed her head and pressed both hands to her dry eyes with restrained desperation. “Oh, Peter, Peter! I’m enough of this world now to find death a despair and desolation instead of the solemnly sweet calling it is. Help me, help me!” Her breath labored in her throat and she groped blindly for my hand.

“If I can, Mother,” I said, taking one hand as Bethie took the other. “Then help me remember. Remember with me.”

And behind my closed eyes I remembered. Unhampered flight through a starry night, a flight of a thousand happy people like birds in the sky, rushing to meet the dawn-the dawn of the Festival. I could smell the flowers that garlanded the women and feel the quiet exultation that went with the Festival dawn. Then the leader sounded the magnificent opening notes of the Festival song as he caught the first glimpse of the rising sun over the heavily wooded hills. A thousand voices took up the song. A thousand hands lifted in the Sign ….

I opened my eyes to find my own fingers lifted to trace a sign I did not know. My own throat throbbed to a note I had never sung. I took a deep breath and glanced over at Bethie. She met my eyes and shook her head sadly. She hadn’t seen. Mother sat quietly, eyes closed, her face cleared and calmed.

“What was it, Mother?” I whispered.

“The Festival,” she said softly. “‘For an those who had been called during the year. For your father, Peter and Bethie. We remembered it for your father.”

“Where was it?” I asked. “Where in the world-?”

“Not in this-” Mother’s eyes flicked open. “It doesn’t matter, Peter. You are of this world. There is no other for you.”

“Mother,” Bethie’s voice was a hesitant murmur, “what do you mean, ‘remember’?”

Mother looked at her and tears swelled into her dry burned-out eyes.

“Oh, Bethie, Bethie, all the burdens and none of the blessings! I’m sorry, Bethie, I’m sorry.” And she fled down the hall to her room.

Bethie stood close against my side as we looked after Mother.

“Peter,” she murmured, “what did Mother mean, ‘none of the blessings’?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I’ll bet it’s because I can’t fly like you.”

“Fly!” My startled eyes went to hers. “How do you know?”

“‘I know lots of things,” she whispered. “But mostly I know we’re different. Other people aren’t like us. Peter, what made us different?”

“Mother?” I whispered. “Mother?”

“I guess so,” Bethie murmured. “But how come?”

We fell silent and then Bethie went to the window where the late sun haloed her silvery blond hair in fire.

“I can do things, too,” she whispered. “Look.”

She reached out and took a handful of sun, the same sort of golden sun-slant that had flowed so heavily through my fingers under the cottonwoods while Bub dangled above me. With flashing fingers she fashioned she sun into an intricate glowing pattern. “But what’s it for?” she murmured, “except for pretty?”

“I know,” I said, looking at my answer for lowering Bub. “I know, Bethie.” And I took the pattern from her. It strained between my fingers and flowed into darkness.

The years that followed were casual uneventful years. I finished high school, but college was out of the question. I went to work in the plant that provided work for most of the employables in Socorro.

Mother built up quite a reputation as a midwife-a very necessary calling in a community which took literally the injunction to multiply and replenish the earth and which lay exactly seventy-five miles from a hospital, no matter which way you turned when you got to the highway.

Bethie was in her teens and with Mother’s help was learning to control her visible reactions to the pain of others, but I knew she still suffered as much as, if not more than, she had when she was smaller. But she was able to go to school most of the time now and was becoming fairly popular in spite of her quietness.

So all in all we were getting along quite comfortably and quite ordinarily except-well, I always felt as though I were waiting for something to happen or for someone to come. And Bethie must have, too, because she actually watched and listened-especially after a particularly bad spell. And even Mother. Sometimes as we sat on the porch in the long evenings she would cock her head and listen intently, her rocking chair still. But when we asked what she heard she’d sigh and say, “Nothing. Just the night.” And her chair would rock again.

Of course I still indulged my differences. Not with the white fire of possible discovery that they had kindled when I first began, but more like the feeding of a small flame just “for pretty.” I went farther afield now for my “holidays,” but Bethie went with me. She got a big kick out of our excursions, especially after I found that I could carry her when I flew, and most especially after we found, by means of a heart-stopping accident, that though she couldn’t go up she could control her going down. After that it was her pleasure to have me carry her up as far as I could and she would come down, sometimes taking an hour to make the descent, often weaving about her the intricate splendor of her sunshine patterns.

It was a rustling russet day in October when our world ended-again. “We talked and laughed over the breakfast table, teasing Bethie about her date the night before. Color was high in her usually pale cheeks, and, with all the laughter and brightness the tingle of fall, everything just felt good.

But between one joke and another the laughter drained out of Bethie’s face and the pinched set look came to her lips.

“Mother!” she whispered, and then she relaxed.

“Already?” asked Mother, rising and finishing her coffee as I went to get her coat. “I had a hunch today would be the day. Reena would ride that jeep up Peppersauce Canyon this close to her time.”

I helped her on with her coat and hugged her tight.

“Bless-a-mama,” I said, “when are you going to retire and let someone else snatch the fall and spring crops of kids?’”

“When I snatch a grandchild or so for myself,” she said, joking, but I felt her sadness. “Besides she’s going to name this one Peter-or Bethie, as the case may be.” She reached for her little black bag and looked at Bethie. “‘No more yet?”

Bethie smiled. “‘No,” she murmured.

“Then I’ve got plenty of time. Peter, you’d better take Bethie for a holiday. Reena takes her own sweet time and being just across the road makes it bad on Bethie.”

“Okay, Mother,” I said. “We planned one anyway, but we hoped this time you’d go with us.”

Mother looked at me, hesitated and turned aside. “I-I might sometime.”

“Mother! Really?” This was the first hesitation from Mother in all the times we’d asked her.

“Well, you’ve asked me so many times and I’ve been wondering. Wondering if it’s fair to deny our birthright. After all there’s nothing wrong in being of the People.”

“What people, Mother?” I pressed, “Where are you from? Why can-?”

“Some other time, son,” Mother said. “Maybe soon. These last few months I’ve begun to sense-yes, it wouldn’t hurt you to know even if nothing could ever come of it; and perhaps soon something can come, and you will have to know. But no,” she chided as we clung to her. “There’s no time now. Reena might fool us after all and produce before I get there. You kids scoot, now!”

“We looked back as the pickup roared across the highway and headed for Mendigo’s Peak. Mother answered our wave and went in the gate of Keena’s yard, where Dalt, in spite of this being their sixth, was running like an anxious puppy dog from Mother to the porch and back again.

It was a day of perfection for us. The relaxation of flight for me, the delight of hovering for Bethie, the frosted glory of the burning-blue sky, the russet and gold of grasslands stretching for endless miles down from the snow-flecked blue and gold Mendigo.

At lunchtime we lolled in the pleasant warmth of our favorite baby box canyon that held the sun and shut out the wind. After we ate we played our favorite game, Remembering. It began with my clearing my mind so that it lay as quiet as a hidden pool of water, as receptive as the pool to every pattern the slightest breeze might start quivering across its surface.

Then the memories would come-strange un-Earthlike memories that were like those Mother and I had had when Dad died. Bethie could not remember with me, but she seemed to catch the memories from me almost before the words could form in my mouth.

So this last lovely “holiday” we remembered again our favorite. We walked the darkly gleaming waters of a mountain lake, curling our toes in the liquid coolness, loving the tilt and sway of the waves beneath our feet, feeling around us from shore and sky a dear familiarity that was stronger than any Earth ties we had yet formed.

Before we knew it the long lazy afternoon had fled and we shivered in the sudden chill as the sun dropped westward, nearing the peaks of the Huachucas. We packed the remains of our picnic in the basket, and I turned to Bethie, to lift her and carry her back to the pickup.

She was smiling her soft little secret smile.

“Look, Peter,” she murmured. And flicking her fingers over her head she shook out a cloud of snowflakes, gigantic whirling tumbling snowflakes that clung feather-soft to her pale hair and melted, glistening, across her warm cheeks and mischievous smile.

“Early winter, Peter!” she said.

“Early winter, punkin!” I cried and snatching her up, boosted her out of the little canyon and jumped over her, clearing the boulders she had to scramble over. “For that you walk, young lady!”

But she almost beat me to the car anyway. For one who couldn’t fly she was learning to run awfully light.

Twilight had fallen before we got back to the highway. We could see the headlights of the scurrying cars that seldom even slowed down for Socorro. “So this is Socorro, wasn’t it?” was the way most traffic went through.

We had topped the last rise before the highway when Bethie screamed. I almost lost control of the car on the rutty road. She screamed again, a wild tortured cry as she folded in on herself.

“Bethie!” I called, trying to get through to her. “What is it? Where is it? Where can I take you?”

But her third scream broke off short and she slid limply to the floor. I was terrified. She hadn’t reacted like this in years. She had never fainted like this before. Could it be that Reena hadn’t had her child yet? That she was in such agony-but even when Mrs. Allbeg had died in childbirth Bethie hadn’t-I lifted Bethie to the seat and drove wildly homeward, praying that Mother would be…

And then I saw it. In front of our house. The big car skewed across the road. The kneeling cluster of people on the pavement.

The next thing I knew I was kneeling, too, beside Dr. Dueff, clutching the edge of the blanket that mercifully covered Mother from chin to toes. I lifted a trembling hand to the dark trickle of blood that threaded crookedly down from her forehead.

“Mother,” I whispered. “Mother!”

Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up blindly. “Peter.” I could hardly hear her. “Peter, where’s Bethie?”

“She fainted. She’s in the car,” I faltered. “Oh, Mother!”

“Tell the doctor to go to Bethie.”

“‘But, Mother!” I cried. “You-“

“I am not called yet. Go to Bethie.”

We knelt by her bedside, Bethie and I. The doctor was gone. There was no use trying to get Mother to a hospital. Just moving her indoors had started a dark oozing from the corner of her mouth. The neighbors were all gone except Gramma Reuther who always came to troubled homes and had folded the hands of the dead in Socorro from the founding of the town. She sat now in the front room holding her worn Bible in quiet hands, after all these years no longer needing to look up the passages of comfort and assurance.

The doctor had quieted the pain for Mother and had urged sleep upon Bethie, not knowing how long the easing would last, but Bethie wouldn’t take it.

Suddenly Mother’s eyes were open.

“I married your father,” she said clearly, as though continuing a conversation. “We loved each other so, and they were all dead-all my People. Of course I told him first, and oh, Peter! He believed me! After all that time of having to guard every word and every move I had someone to talk to-someone to believe me. I told him all about the People and lifted myself and then I lifted the car and turned it in mid-air above the highway-just for fun. It pleased him a lot but it made him thoughtful and later he said, ‘You know, honey, your world and ours took different turns way back there. We turned to gadgets. You turned to the Power.’ “

Her eyes smiled. “He got so he knew when I was lonesome for the Home. Once he said, “Homesick, honey? So am I. For what this world could have been. Or maybe-God willing-what it may become.” “Your father was the other half of me.” Her eyes closed, and in the silence her breath became audible, a harsh straining sound. Bethie crouched with both hands pressed to her chest, her face dead white in the shadows.

“We discussed it and discussed it,” Mother cried. “But we had to decide as we did. We thought I was the last of the People. I had to forget the Home and be of Earth. You children had to be of Earth, too, even if-That’s why he was so stern with you, Peter. Why he didn’t want you to—experiment. He was afraid you’d do too much around other people if you found out-” She stopped and lay panting. “Different is dead,” she whispered, and lay scarcely breathing for a moment.

“I knew the Home.” Her voice was heavy with sorrow.

“I remember the Home. Not just because my People remembered it but because I saw it. I was born there. It’s gone now. Gone forever. There is no Home. Only a band of dust between the stars!” Her face twisted with grief and Bethie echoed her cry of pain.

Then Mother’s face cleared and her eyes opened. She half propped herself up in her bed.

“You have the Home, too. You and Bethie. You will have it always. And your children after you. Remember, Peter? Remember?”

Then her head tilted attentively and she gave a laughing. sob. “Oh, Peter! Oh, Bethie! Did you hear it? I’ve been called! I’ve been called!” Her hand lifted in the Sign and her lips moved tenderly.

“Mother!” I cried fearfully. “What do you mean? Lie down. Please lie down!” I pressed her back against the pillows.

“I’ve been called back to the Presence. My years are finished. My days are totaled.”

“But Mother,” I blubbered like a child, “what will we do without you?”

“Listen!” Mother whispered rapidly, one hand pressed to my hair. “You must find the rest. You must go right away. They can help Bethie. They can help you, Peter. As long as you are separated from them you are not complete. I have felt them calling the last year or so, and now that I am on the way to the Presence I can hear them clearer, and clearer.” She paused and held her breath. “There is a canyon-north. The ship crashed there, after our life slips-here, Peter, give me your hand.” She reached urgently toward me and I cradled her hand in mine.

And I saw half the state spread out below me like a giant map. I saw the wrinkled folds of the mountains, the deceptively smooth roll of the desert up to the jagged slopes. I saw the blur of timber blunting the hills and I saw the angular writhing of the narrow road through the passes. Then I felt a sharp pleasurable twinge, like the one you feel when seeing home after being away a long time.

“There!” Mother whispered as the panorama faded. “I wish I could have known before. It’s been lonely-“But you, Peter,” she said strongly. “You and Bethie must go to them.”

“Why should we, Mother?” I cried in desperation. “What are they to us or we to them that we should leave Socorro and go among strangers?’”

Mother pulled herself up in bed, her eyes intent on my face. She wavered a moment and then Bethie was crouched behind her, steadying her back.

“They are not strangers,” she said clearly and slowly. “They are the People. “We shared the ship with them during the Crossing. They were with us when we were out in the middle of emptiness with only the fading of stars behind and the brightening before to tell us we were moving. They, with us, looked at all the bright frosting of stars across the blackness, wondering if on one of them we would find a welcome.

“You are woven of their fabric. Even though your father was not of the People-“

Her voice died, her face changed. Bethie moved from in back of her and lowered her gently. Mother clasped her hands and sighed.

“It’s a lonely business,” she whispered. “No one can go with you. Even with them waiting it’s lonely.”

In the silence that followed we heard Gramma Reuther rocking quietly in the front room. Bethie sat on the floor beside me, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide with a strange dark awe.

“Peter, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all. It healed!”

But we didn’t go. How could we leave my job and our home and go off to-where? Looking for-whom? Because-why? It was mostly me, I guess, but I couldn’t quite believe what Mother had told us. After all she hadn’t said anything definite. We were probably reading meaning where it didn’t exist. Bethie returned again and again to the puzzle of Mother and what she had meant, but we didn’t go.

And Bethie got paler and thinner, and it was neatly a year later that I came home to find her curled into an impossibly tight ball on her bed, her eyes tight shut, snatching at breath that came out again in sharp moans.

I nearly went crazy before I at last got through to her and uncurled her enough to get hold of one of her hands. Finally, though, she opened dull dazed eyes and looked past me.

“Like a dam, Peter,” she gasped. “It all comes in. It should-it should! I was born to-” I wiped the cold sweat from her forehead. “But it just piles up and piles up. It’s supposed to go somewhere. I’m supposed to do something! Peter Peter Peter!” She twisted on the bed, her distorted face pushing into the pillow.

“What does, Bethie?” I asked, turning her face to mine.

“What does?”

“Glib’s foot and Dad’s side and Mr. Tyree-next-door’s toe-” and her voice faded down through the litany of years of agony.

“‘I’ll go get Dr. Dueff,” I said hopelessly.

“No.” She turned her face away. “Why build the dam higher? Let it break. Oh, soon soon!”

“Bethie, don’t talk like that,” I said, feeling inside me my terrible aloneness that only Bethie could fend off now that Mother was gone. “We’ll find something-some way-“

“Mother could help,” she gasped. “A little. But she’s gone. And now I’m picking up mental pain, too! Reena’s afraid she’s got cancer. Oh, Peter Peter!” Her voice strained to a whisper. “Let me die! Help me die!”

Both of us were shocked to silence by her words. Help her die? I leaned against her hand. Go back into the Presence with the weight of unfinished years dragging at our feet? For if she went I went, too.

Then my eyes flew open and I stared at Bethie’s hand. What Presence? Whose ethics and mores were talking in my mind?

And so I had to decide. I talked Bethie into a sleeping pill and sat by her even after she was asleep. And as I sat there all the past years wound through my head. The way it must have been for Bethie all this time and I hadn’t let myself know.

Just before dawn I woke Bethie. We packed and went. I left a note on the kitchen table for Dr. Dueff saying only that we were going to look for help for Bethie and would he ask Reena to see to the house. And thanks.

I slowed the pickup over to the side of the junction and slammed the brakes on.

“Okay,” I said hopelessly. “You choose which way this time. Or shall we toss for it? Heads straight up, tails straight down!

I can’t tell where to go, Bethie. I had only that one little glimpse that Mother gave me of this country. There’s a million canyons and a million side roads. We were fools to leave Socorro. After all we have nothing to go on but what Mother said. It might have been delirium.”

“No,” Bethie murmured. “‘It can’t be. It’s got to be real.”

“But, Bethie,” I said, leaning my weary head on the steering wheel, “you know how much I want it to be true, not only for you but for myself, too. But look. What do we have to assume if Mother was right? First, that space travel is possible-was possible nearly fifty years ago. Second, that Mother and her People came here from another planet. Third, that we are, bluntly speaking, half-breeds, a cross between Earth and heaven knows what world. Fourth, that there’s a chance-in ten million-of our finding the other People who came at the same time Mother did, presupposing that any of them survived the Crossing.

“Why, any one of these premises would brand us as crazy crackpots to any normal person. No, we’re building too much on a dream and a hope. Let’s go back, Bethie. We’ve got just enough gas money along to make it. Let’s give it up.”

“And go back to what?” Bethie asked, her face pinched. “No, Peter. Here.”

I looked up as she handed me one of her sunlight patterns, a handful of brilliance that twisted briefly in my fingers before it flickered out.

“Is that Earth?” she asked quietly. “How many of our friends can fly? How many-” she hesitated, “how many can Remember?”

“Remember!” I said slowly, and then I whacked the steering wheel with my fist. “Oh, Bethie, of all the stupid-! Why, it’s Bub all over again!”

I kicked the pickup into life and turned on the first faint desert trail beyond the junction. I pulled off even that suggestion of a trail and headed across the nearly naked desert toward a clump of ironwood, mesquite and catclaw that marked a sand wash against the foothills. With the westering sun making shadow lace through the thin foliage we made camp.

I lay on my back in the wash and looked deep into the arch of the desert sky. The trees made a typical desert pattern of warmth and coolness on me, warm in the sun, cool in the shadow, as I let my mind clear smoother, smoother, until the soft intake of Bethie’s breath as she sat beside me sent a bright ripple across it.

And I remembered. But only Mother-and-Dad and the little campfire I had gathered up, and Glib with the trap on his foot and Bethie curled, face to knees on the bed, and the thin crying sound of her labored breath.

I blinked at the sky. I had to Remember. I just had to. I shut my eyes and concentrated and concentrated, until I was exhausted. Nothing came now, not even a hint of memory. In despair I relaxed, limp against the chilling sand. And all at once unaccustomed gears shifted and slipped into place in my mind and there I was, just as I had been, hovering over the life-sized map.

Slowly and painfully I located Socorro and the thin thread that marked the Rio Gordo. I followed it and lost it and followed it again, the finger of my attention pressing close. Then I located Vulcan Springs Valley and traced its broad rolling to the upsweep of the desert, to the Sierra Cobrena Mountains. It was an eerie sensation to look down on the infinitesimal groove that must be where I was lying now. Then I hand-spanned my thinking around our camp spot. Nothing. I probed farther north, and east, and north again. I drew a deep breath and exhaled it shakily. There it was. The Home twinge. The call of familiarity.

I read it off to Bethie. The high thrust of a mountain that pushed up baldly past its timber, the huge tailings dump across the range from the mountain. The casual wreathing of smoke from what must be a logging town, all forming sides of a slender triangle. Somewhere in this area was the place.

I opened my eyes to find Bethie in tears.

“Why, Bethie!” I said. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you glad-?”

Bethie tried to smile but her lips quivered. She hid her face in the crook of her elbow and whispered. “I saw, too! Oh, Peter, this time I saw, too!”

We got out the road map and by the fading afternoon light we tried to translate our rememberings. As nearly as we could figure out we should head for a place way off the highway called Kerry Canyon. It was apparently the only inhabited spot anywhere near the big bald mountain. I looked at the little black dot in the kink in the third-rate road and wondered if it would turn out to be a period to all our hopes or the point for the beginning of new lives for the two of us. Life and sanity for Bethie, and for me … In a sudden spasm of emotion I crumpled the map in my hand. I felt blindly that in all my life I had never known anyone but Mother and Dad and Bethie. That I was a ghost walking the world. If only I could see even one other person that felt like our kind! Just to know that Bethie and I weren’t all alone with our unearthly heritage!

I smoothed out the map and folded it again. Night was on us and the wind was cold. We shivered as we scurried around looking for wood for our campfire.

Kerry Canyon was one business street, two service stations, two saloons, two stores, two churches and a handful of houses flung at random over the hillsides that sloped down to an area that looked too small to accommodate the road. A creek which was now thinned to an intermittent trickle that loitered along, waited for the fall rains to begin. A sudden speckling across our windshield suggested it hadn’t long to wait.

We rattled over the old bridge and half through the town. The road swung up sharply over a rusty single-line railroad and turned left, shying away from the bluff that was hollowed just enough to accommodate one of the service stations.

We pulled into the station. The uniformed attendant came alongside.

“We just want some information,” I said, conscious of the thinness of my billfold. We had picked up our last tankful of gas before plunging into the maze of canyons between the main highway and here. Our stopping place would have to be soon whether we found the People or not.

“Sure! Sure! Glad to oblige.” The attendant pushed his cap back from his forehead. “How can I help you?”

I hesitated, trying to gather my thoughts and words-and some of the hope that had jolted out of me since we had left the junction. “We’re trying to locate some-friends-of ours. We were told they lived out the other side of here, out by Baldy. Is there anyone-?”

“Friends of them people?” he asked in astonishment. “Well, say, now, that’s interesting! You’re the first I ever had come asking after them.”

I felt Bethie’s arm trembling against mine. Then there was something beyond Kerry Canyon!

“How come? What’s wrong with them?”

“Why, nothing, Mac, nothing. Matter of fact they’re dern nice people. Trade here a lot. Come in to church and the dances.”

“Dances?” I glanced around the steep sloping hills.

“‘Sure. We ain’t as dead as we look,” the attendant grinned.

“Come Saturday night we’re quite a town. Lots of ranches around these hills. Course, not much out Cougar Canyon way. That’s where your friends live, didn’t you say?”

“Yeah. Out by Baldy.”

“Well, nobody else lives out that way.” He hesitated. “Hey, there’s something I’d like to ask.”

“Sure. Like what?”

“Well, them people pretty much keep themselves to themselves, I don’t mean they’re stuck-up or anything, but-well, I’ve always wondered. Where they from? One of them overrun countries in Europe? They’re foreigners, ain’t they? And seems like most of what Europe exports any more is DP’s. Are them people some?”

“Well, yes, you might call them that. Why?”

“Well, they talk just as good as anybody and it must have been a war a long time ago because they’ve been around since my Dad’s time, but they just-feel different.” He caught his upper lip between his teeth reflectively. “Good different. Real nice different.” He grinned again. “Wouldn’t mind shining up to some of them gals myself. Don’t get no encouragement, though.

“Anyway, keep on this road. It’s easy. No other road going that way. Jackass Flat will beat the tar outa your tires, but you’ll probably make it, less’n comes up a heavy rain. Then you’ll skate over half the county and most likely end up in a ditch. Slickest mud in the world. Colder’n hell-beg pardon, lady-out there on the flat when the wind starts blowing. Better bundle up.”

“Thanks, fella,” I said. “Thanks a lot. Think we’ll make it before dark?”

“Oh, sure. ‘Tain’t so awful far but the road’s lousy. Oughta make it in two-three hours, less’n like I said, comes up a heavy rain.”

We knew when we hit Jackass Flat. It was like dropping off the edge. If we had thought the road to Kerry Canyon was bad we revised our opinions, but fast. In the first place it was choose your own ruts. Then the tracks were deep sunk in heavy clay generously mixed with sharp splintery shale and rocks as big as your two fists that were like a gigantic gravel as far as we could see across the lifeless expanse of the flat.

But to make it worse, the ruts I chose kept ending abruptly as though the cars that had made them had either backed away from the job or jumped over. Jumped over! I drove, in and out of ruts, so wrapped up in surmises that I hardly noticed the tough going until a cry from Bethie aroused me.

“Stop the car!” she cried. “Oh, Peter! Stop the car!”

I braked so fast that the pickup swerved wildly, mounted the side of a rut, lurched and settled sickeningly down on the back tire which sighed itself flatly into the rising wind.

“What on earth!” I yelped, as near to being mad at Bethie as I’d ever been in my life. “What was that for?”

Bethie, white-faced, was emerging from the army blanket she had huddled in against the cold. “It just came to me. Peter, supposing they don’t want us?”

“Don’t want us? What do you mean?” I growled, wondering if that lace doily I called my spare tire would be worth the trouble of putting it on.

“We never thought. It didn’t even occur to us. Peter, we-we don’t belong. We won’t be like them. We’re partly of Earth-as much as we are of wherever else. Supposing they reject us? Supposing they think we’re undesirable-?” Bethie turned her face away. “Maybe we don’t belong anywhere, Peter, not anywhere at all.”

I felt a chill sweep over me that was not of the weather. We had assumed so blithely that we would be welcome. But how did we know? Maybe they wouldn’t want us. We weren’t of the People. We weren’t of Earth. Maybe we didn’t belong-not anywhere.

“Sure they’ll want us,” I forced out heartily. Then my eyes wavered away from Bethie’s and I said defensively, “Mother said they would help us. She said we were woven of the same fabric-“

“But maybe the warp will only accept genuine woof. Mother couldn’t know. There weren’t any-half-breeds-when she was separated from them. Maybe our Earth blood will mark us-“

“There’s nothing wrong with Earth blood,” I said defiantly.

“Besides, like you said, what would there be for you if we went back?”

She pressed her clenched fists against her cheeks, her eyes wide and vacant. “Maybe,” she muttered, “‘maybe if I’d just go on and go completely insane it wouldn’t hurt so terribly much. It might even feel good.”

“Bethie!” my voice jerked her physically. “Cut out that talk right now! We’re going on. The only way we can judge the People is by Mother. She would never reject us or any others like us. And that fellow back there said they were good people.”

I opened the door. “You better try to get some kinks out of your legs while I change the tire. By the looks of the sky we’ll be doing some skating before we get to Cougar Canyon.”

But for all my brave words it wasn’t just for the tire that I knelt beside the car, and it wasn’t only the sound of the lug wrench that the wind carried up into the darkening sky.

I squinted through the streaming windshield, trying to make out the road through the downpour that fought our windshield wiper to a standstill. What few glimpses I caught of the road showed a deceptively smooth-looking chocolate river, but we alternately shook like a giant maraca, pushed out sheets of water like a speedboat, or slithered aimlessly and terrifyingly across sudden mud flats that often left us yards off the road. Then we’d creep cautiously back until the soggy squelch of our tires told us we were in the flooded ruts again.

Then all at once it wasn’t there. The road, I mean. It stretched a few yards ahead of us and then just flowed over the edge, into the rain, into nothingness.

“It couldn’t go there,” Bethie murmured incredulously. “It can’t just drop off like that.”

“Well, I’m certainly not dropping off with it, sight unseen,” I said, huddling deeper into my army blanket. My jacket was packed in back and I hadn’t bothered to dig it out. I hunched my shoulders to bring the blanket up over my head. “I’m going to take a look first.”

I slid out into the solid wall of rain that hissed and splashed around me on the flooded flat. I was soaked to the knees and mud-coated to the shins before I slithered to the drop-off. The trail-call that a road?-tipped over the edge of the canyon and turned abruptly to the right, then lost itself along a shrub-grown ledge that sloped downward even as it paralleled the rim of the canyon. If I could get the pickup over the rim and onto the trail it wouldn’t be so bad. But-I peered over the drop-off at the turn. The bottom was lost in shadows and rain. I shuddered.

Then quickly, before I could lose my nerve, I squelched back to the car.

“Pray, Bethie. Here we go.”

There was the suck and slosh of our turning tires, the awful moment when we hung on the brink. Then the turn. And there we were, poised over nothing, with our rear end slewing outward.

The sudden tongue-biting jolt as we finally landed, right side up, pointing the right way on the narrow trail, jarred the cold sweat on my face so it rolled down with the rain.

I pulled over at the first wide spot in the road and stopped the car. We sat in the silence, listening to the rain. I felt as though something infinitely precious were lying just before me. Bethie’s hand crept into mine and I knew she was feeling it, too. But suddenly Bethie’s hand was snatched from mine and she was pounding with both fists against my shoulder in most un-Bethie-like violence.

“I can’t stand it, Peter!” she cried hoarsely, emotion choking her voice. “Let’s go back before we find out any more. If they should send us away! Oh, Peter! Let’s go before they find us! Then we’ll still have our dream. We can pretend that someday we’ll come back. We can never dream again, never hope again!” She hid her face in her hands. “I’ll manage somehow. I’d rather go away, hoping, than run the risk of being rejected by them.”

“Not me,” I said, starting the motor. “We have as much chance of a welcome as we do of being kicked out. And if they can help you-say, what’s the matter with you today? I’m supposed to be the doubting one, remember? You’re the mustard seed of this outfit!” I grinned at her, but my heart sank at the drawn white misery of her face. She almost managed a smile.

The trail led steadily downward, lapping back on itself as it worked back and forth along the canyon wall, sometimes steep, sometimes almost level. The farther we went the more rested I felt, as though I were shutting doors behind or opening them before me.

Then came one of the casual miracles of mountain country. The clouds suddenly opened and the late sun broke through. There, almost frighteningly, a huge mountain pushed out of the featureless gray distance. In the flooding light the towering slopes seemed to move, stepping closer to us as we watched. The rain still fell, but now in glittering silver-beaded curtains; and one vivid end of a rainbow splashed color recklessly over trees and rocks and a corner of the sky.

I didn’t watch the road. I watched the splendor and glory spread out around us. So when, at Bethie’s scream, I snatched back to my driving all I took down into the roaring splintering darkness was the thought of Bethie and the sight of the other car, slanting down from the bobbing top branches of a tree, seconds before it plowed into us broadside, a yard above the road.

I thought I was dead. I was afraid to open my eyes because I could feel the rain making little puddles over my closed lids. And then I breathed. I was alive, all right. A knife jabbed itself up and down the left side of my chest and twisted itself viciously with each reluctant breath I drew.

Then I heard a voice.

“Thank the Power they aren’t hurt too badly. But, oh, Valancy! What will Father say?” The voice was young and scared.

“You’ve known him longer than I have,” another girl-voice answered. “You should have some idea.”

“I never had a wreck before, not even when I was driving instead of lifting.”

“I have a hunch that you’ll be grounded for quite a spell,” the second voice replied. “‘But that isn’t what’s worrying me, Karen. Why didn’t we know they were coming? We always can sense Outsiders. We should have known-“

“Q. E. D. then,” said the Karen-voice.

“‘Q. E. D.’?”

“Yes. If we didn’t sense them, then they’re not Outsiders-” There was the sound of a caught breath and then, “Oh, what I said, Valancy! You don’t suppose!” I felt a movement close to me and heard the soft sound of breathing. “Can it really be two more of us? Oh, Valancy, they must be second generation-they’re about our age. How did they find us? Which of our Lost Ones were their parents?”

Valancy sounded amused. “Those are questions they’re certainly in no condition to answer right now, Karen. We’d better figure out what to do. Look, the girl is coming to.”

I was snapped out of my detached eavesdropping by a moan beside me. I started to sit up. “Bethie-” I began, and all the knives twisted through my lungs. Bethie’s scream followed my gasp.

My eyes were open now, but good, and my leg was an agonized burning ache down at the far end of my consciousness. I gritted my teeth but Bethie moaned again.

“Help her, help her!” I pleaded to the two fuzzy figures leaning over us as I tried to hold my breath to stop the jabbing.

“But she’s hardly hurt,” Karen cried. “A bump on her head. Some cuts.”

With an effort I focused on a luminous clear face-Valancy’s-whose deep eyes bent close above me. I licked the rain from my lips and blurted foolishly, “You’re not even wet in all this rain!” A look of consternation swept over her face. There was a pause as she looked at me intently and then said, “Their shields aren’t activated, Karen. We’d better extend ours.”

“Okay, Valancy.” And the annoying sibilant wetness of the rain stopped.

“How’s the girl?”

“It must be shock or maybe internal-“

I started to turn to see, but Bethie’s sobbing cry pushed me flat again.

“Help her,” I gasped, grabbing wildly in my memory for Mother’s words. “She’s a-a Sensitive!”

“A Sensitive?” The two exchanged looks. “Then why doesn’t she-?” Valancy started to say something, then turned swiftly. I crooked my arm over my eyes as I listened.

“Honey-Bethie-hear me!” The voice was warm but authoritative. “I’m going to help you. I’ll show you how, Bethie.”

There was a silence. A warm hand clasped mine and Karen squatted close beside me.

“She’s sorting her,” she whispered. “Going into her mind. To teach her control. It’s so simple. How could it happen that she doesn’t know-?”

I heard a soft wondering “Oh!” from Bethie, followed by a breathless “Oh, thank you, Valancy, thank you!”

I heaved myself up onto my elbow, fire streaking me from head to foot, and peered over at Bethie. She was looking at me, and her quiet face was happier than smiles could ever make it. We stared for the space of two relieved tears, then she said softly, “Tell them now, Peter. We can’t go any farther until you tell them.”

I lay back again, blinking at the sky where the scattered raindrops were still falling, though none of them reached us. Karen’s hand was warm on mine and I felt a shiver of reluctance. If they sent us away … ! But then they couldn’t take back what they had given to Bethie, even if-I shut my eyes and blurted it out as bluntly as possible.

“We aren’t of the People-not entirely. Father was not of the People. We’re half-breeds.”

There was a startled silence.

“You mean your mother married an Outsider?” Valancy’s voice was filled with astonishment. “That you and Bethie are-?’

“Yes she did and yes we are!” I retorted. “And Dad was the best-” My belligerence ran thinly out across the sharp edge of my pain. “They’re both dead now. Mother sent us to you.”

“But Bethie is a Sensitive-” Valancy’s voice was thoughtful

“Yes, and I can fly and make things travel in the air and I’ve even made fire. But Dad-” I hid my face and let it twist with the increasing agony.

“Then we can!” I couldn’t read the emotion in Valancy’s voice. “Then the People and Outsiders-but it’s unbelievable that you-” Her voice died.

In the silence that followed, Bethie’s voice came fearful and tremulous, “Are you going to send us away?” My heart twisted to the ache in her voice.

“Send you away! Oh, my people, my people! Of course not! As if there were any question.” Valancy’s arm went tightly around Bethie, and Karen’s hand closed warmly on mine. The tension that had been a hard twisted knot inside me dissolved, and Bethie and I were home.

Then Valancy became very brisk.

“Bethie, what’s wrong with Peter?”

Bethie was astonished. “How did you know his name?” Then she smiled. “Of course. When you were sorting me!” She touched me lightly along my sides, along my legs. “Four of his ribs are hurt. His left leg is broken. That’s about all. Shall I control him?”

“Yes,” Valancy said. “I’ll help.”

And the pain was gone, put to sleep under the persuasive warmth that came to me as Bethie and Valancy came softly into my mind.

“Good,” Valancy said. “We’re pleased to welcome a Sensitive. Karen and I know a little of their function because we are Sorters. But we have no full-fledged Sensitive in our Group now.”

She turned to me. “You said you know the inanimate lift?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know the words for lots of things.”

“You’ll have to relax completely. We don’t usually use it on people. But if you let go all over we can manage.”

They wrapped me warmly in our blankets and lightly, a hand under my shoulders and under my heels, lifted me carrying-high and sped with me through the trees, Bethie trailing from Valancy’s free hand.

Before we reached the yard the door flew open and warm yellow light spilled out into the dusk. The girls paused on the porch and shifted me to the waiting touch of two men. In the wordless pause before the babble of question and explanation I felt Bethie beside me draw a deep wondering breath and merge like a raindrop in a river into the People around us.

But even as the lights went out for me again, and I felt myself slide down into comfort and hunger-fed belongingness, somewhere deep inside of me was a core of something that couldn’t quite-no, wouldn’t quite dissolve-wouldn’t yet yield itself completely to the People.

III

LEA SLIPPED soundlessly toward the door almost before Peter’s last words were said. She was halfway up the steep road that led up the canyon before she heard the sound of Karen coming behind her. Lifting and running, Karen caught up with her.

“Lea!” she called, reaching for her arm.

With a twist of her shoulder Lea evaded Karen and wordlessly, breathlessly ran on up the road.

“Lea!” Karen grabbed both her shoulders and stopped her bodily. “Where on earth are you going!”

“Let me go!” Lea shouted. “Sneak! Peeping Tom! Let me go!” She tried to wrench out of Karen’s hands.

“Lea, whatever you’re thinking it isn’t so.”

“Whatever I’m thinking!” Lea’s eyes blazed. “Don’t know what I’m thinking? Haven’t you done enough scrabbling around in all the muck and mess-?” Her fingernails dented Karen’s hands. “Let me go!”

“Why do you care, Lea?” Karen’s cold voice jabbed mercilessly. “Why should you care? What difference does it make to you} You left life a long time ago.”

“Death-” Lea choked; feeling the dusty bitterness of the word she had thought so often and seldom said. “Death is at least private-no one nosing around-“

“Can you be so sure?” It was Karen’s quiet voice. “Anyway, believe me, Lea, I haven’t gone in to you even once. Of course I could if I wanted to and I will if I have to, but I never would without your knowledge-if not your consent. All I’ve learned of you has been from the most open outer part of your mind. Your inner mind is sacredly your own. The People are taught reverence for individual privacy. Whatever powers we have are for healing, not for hurting. We have health and life for you if you’ll accept it. You see, there is balm in Gilead! Don’t refuse it, Lea.”

Lea’s hands drooped heavily. The tension went out of her body slowly.

“I heard you last night,” she said, puzzled. “I heard your story and it didn’t even occur to me that you could-I mean, it just wasn’t real and I had no idea-” She let Karen turn her back down the road. “But then when I heard Peter-I don’t know-he seemed more true. You don’t expect men to go in for fairy tales-” She clutched suddenly at Karen. “Oh, Karen, what shall I do? I’m so mixed up that I can’t-“

“Well, the simplest and most immediate thing is to come on back. We have time to hear another report and they’re waiting for us. Melodye is next. She saw the People from quite another angle.”

Back in the schoolroom Lea fitted herself self-consciously into her corner again, though no one seemed to notice her. Everyone was busy reliving or commenting on the days of Peter and Bethie. The talking died as Melodye Amerson took her place at the desk.

“Valancy’s helping me,” she smiled. “We chose the theme together, too. Remember-?

” ‘Behold, I am at a point to die and what profit shall this birthright do to me? And he sold his birthright for bread and pottage.’ “I couldn’t do the recalling alone, either. So now, if you don’t mind, there’ll be a slight pause while we construct our network.”

She relaxed visibly and Lea could fed the receptive quietness spread as though the whole room were becoming mirror-placid like the pool in the creek, and then Melodye began to speak ….

POTTAGE

YOU GET tired of teaching after a while. Well, maybe not of teaching itself, because it’s insidious and remains a tug in the blood for all of your life, but there comes a day when you look down at the paper you’re grading or listen to an answer you’re giving a child and you get a boinnng! feeling. And each reverberation of the boing is a year in your life, another set of children through your hands, another beat in monotony, and it’s frightening. The value of the work you’re doing doesn’t enter into it at that moment and the monotony is bitter on your tongue.

Sometimes you can assuage that feeling by consciously savoring those precious days of pseudofreedom between the time you receive your contract for the next year and the moment you sign it. Because you can escape at that moment, but somehow-you don’t.

But I did, one spring. I quit teaching. I didn’t sign up again. I went chasing after-after what? Maybe excitement-maybe a dream of wonder-maybe a new bright wonderful world that just must be somewhere else because it isn’t here-and-now. Maybe a place to begin again so I’d never end up at the same frightening emotional dead end. So I quit.

But by late August the emptiness inside me was bigger than boredom, bigger than monotony, bigger than lusting after freedom. It was almost terror to be next door to September and not care that in a few weeks school starts-tomorrow school starts-first day of school. So, almost at the last minute, I went to the placement bureau. Of course it was too late to try to return to my other school, and besides, the mold of the years there still chafed in too many places.

“Well,” the placement director said as he shuffled his end-of-the-season cards, past Algebra and Home Ec and PE and High-School English, “there’s always Bendo.” He thumbed out a battered-looking three-by-five. “There’s always Bendo.”

And I took his emphasis and look for what they were intended and sighed.

“‘Bendo?”

“Small school. One room. Mining town, or used to be. Ghost town now.” He sighed wearily and let down his professional hair. “Ghost people, too. Can’t keep a teacher there more than a year. Low pay-fair housing-at someone’s home. No community activities-no social life. No city within fifty or so miles. No movies. No nothing but children to be taught. Ten of them this year. All grades.”

“Sounds like the town I grew up in,” I said. “Except we had two rooms and lots of community activities.”

“I’ve been to Bendo.” The director leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. “Sick community. Unhappy people. No interest in anything. Only reason they have a school is because it’s the law. Law-abiding anyway. Not enough interest in anything to break a law, I guess.”

“I’ll take it,” I said quickly before I could think beyond the feeling that this sounded about as far back as I could go to get a good running start at things again.

He glanced at me quizzically. “If you’re thinking of lighting a torch of high reform to set Bendo afire with enthusiasm, forget it. I’ve seen plenty of king-sized torches fizzle out there.”

“I have no torch,” I said. “Frankly I’m fed to the teeth with bouncing bright enthusiasm and huge PTA’s and activities until they come out your ears. They usually turn out to be the most monotonous kind of monotony. Bendo will be a rest.”

“It will that,” the director said, leaning over his cards again.

“Saul Diemus is the president of the board. If you don’t have a car the only way to get to Bendo is by bus-it runs once a week.”

I stepped out into the August sunshine after the interview and sagged a little under its savage pressure, almost hearing hiss as the refrigerated coolness of the placement bureau evaporated from my skin.

I walked over to the quad and sat down on one of the stone benches I’d never had time to use, those years ago when I had been a student here. I looked up at my old dorm window and, for a moment, felt a wild homesickness-not only for years that were gone and hopes that had died and dreams that had had grim awakenings, but for a special magic I had found in that room. It was a magic-a true magic-that opened such vistas to me that for a while anything seemed possible, anything feasible-if not for me right now, then for others, someday. Even now, after the dilution of time, I couldn’t quite believe that magic, and even now, as then, I wanted fiercely to believe it. If only it could be so! If only it could be so!

I sighed and stood up. I suppose everyone has a magic moment somewhere in his life and, like me, can’t believe that anyone else could have the same-but mine was different! No one else could have had the same experience! I laughed at myself. Enough of the past and of dreaming. Bendo waited. I had things to do.

I watched the rolling clouds of red-yellow dust billow away from the jolting bus, and cupped my hands over my face to get a breath of clean air. The grit between my teeth and the smothering sift of dust across my clothes was familiar enough to me, but I hoped by the time we reached Bendo we would have left this dust plain behind and come into a little more vegetation. I shifted wearily on the angular seat, wondering if it had ever been designed for anyone’s comfort, and caught myself as a sudden braking of the bus flung me forward.

We sat and waited for the dust of our going to catch up with us, while the last-but-me passenger, a withered old Indian, slowly gathered up his gunny-sack bundles and his battered saddle and edged his Levied velveteen-bloused self up the aisle and out to the bleak roadside.

We roared away, leaving him a desolate figure in a wide desolation. I wondered where he was headed. How many weary miles to his hogan in what hidden wash or miniature greenness in all this wilderness.

Then we headed straight as a die for the towering redness of the bare mountains that lined the horizon. Peering ahead I could see the road, ruler straight, disappearing into the distance. I sighed and shifted again and let the roar of the motor and the weariness of my bones lull me into a stupor on the border between sleep and waking.

A change in the motor roar brought me back to the jouncing bus. We jerked to a stop again. I looked out the window through the settling clouds of dust and wondered who we could be picking up out here in the middle of nowhere. Then a clot of dust dissolved and I saw

BENDO POST OFFICE

GENERAL STORE

Garage & Service Station

Dry Goods & Hardware

Magazines

in descending size on the front of the leaning, weather-beaten building propped between two crumbling smoke-blackened stone ruins. After so much flatness it was almost a shock to see the bare tumbled boulders crowding down to the roadside and humping their lichen-stained shoulders against the sky.

“Bendo,” the bus driver said, unfolding his lanky legs and hunching out of the bus. “End of the line-end of civilization-end of everything!” He grinned and the dusty mask of his face broke into engaging smile patterns.

“Small, isn’t it?” I grinned back.

“Usta be bigger. Not that it helps now. Roaring mining town years ago.” As he spoke I could pick out disintegrating buildings dotting the rocky hillsides and tumbling into the steep washes.

“My dad can remember it when he was a kid. That was long enough ago that there was still a river for the town to be in the bend o’.”

“Is that where it got its name?”

“Some say yes, some say no. Might have been a feller named Bendo.” The driver grunted as he unlashed my luggage from the bus roof and swung it to the ground.

“Oh, hi!” said the driver.

I swung around to see who was there. The man was tall, well built, good-looking-and old. Older than his face-older than years could have made him because he was really young, not much older than I. His face was a stern unhappy stillness, his hands stiff on the brim of his Stetson as he held it waist high.

In that brief pause before his “Miss Amerson?” I felt the same feeling coming from him that you can feet around some highly religious person who knows God only as a stern implacable vengeful deity, impatient of worthless man, waiting only for an unguarded moment to strike him down in his sin. I wondered who or what his God was that prisoned him so cruelly. Then I was answering, “Yes, how do you do?” And he touched my hand briefly with a “Saul Diemus” and turned to the problem of my two large suitcases and my record player.

I followed Mr. Diemus’ shuffling feet silently, since he seemed to have slight inclination for talk. I hadn’t expected a reception committee, but kids must have changed a lot since I was one, otherwise curiosity about teacher would have lured out at least a couple of them for a preview look. But the silent two of us walked on for a half block or so from the highway and the post office and rounded the rocky corner of a hill. I looked across the dry creek bed and up the one winding street that was residential Bendo. I paused on the splintery old bridge and took a good look. I’d never see Bendo like this again. Familiarity would blur some outlines and sharpen others, and I’d never again see it, free from the knowledge of who lived behind which blank front door.

The houses were scattered haphazardly over the hillsides and erratic flights of rough stone steps led down from each to the road that paralleled the bone-dry creek bed. The houses were not shacks but they were unpainted and weathered until they blended into the background almost perfectly. Each front yard had things growing in it, but such subdued blossoming and unobtrusive planting that they could easily have been only accidental massings of natural vegetation.

Such a passion for anonymity…

“The school-” I had missed the swift thrust of his hand.

“Where?” Nothing I could see spoke school to me.

“Around the bend.” This time I followed his indication and suddenly, out of the featurelessness of the place, I saw a bell tower barely topping the hill beyond the town, with the fine pencil stroke of a flagpole to one side. Mr. Diemus pulled himself together to make the effort.

“The school’s in the prettiest place around here. There’s a spring and trees, and-” He ran out of words and looked at me as though trying to conjure up something else I’d like to hear.

“I’m board president,” he said abruptly. “You’ll have ten children from first grade to second-year high school. You’re the boss in your school. Whatever you do is your business. Any discipline you find desirable-use. We don’t pamper our children. Teach them what you have to. Don’t bother the parents with reasons and explanations. The school is yours.”

“And you’d just as soon do away with it and me, too,” I smiled at him.

He looked startled. “The law says school them.” He started across the bridge. “So school them.”

I followed meekly, wondering wryly what would happen if I asked Mr. Diemus why he hated himself and the world he was in and even-oh, breathe it softly-the children I was to “school.”

“You’ll stay at my place,” he said. “We have an extra room.”

I was uneasily conscious of the wide gap of silence that followed his pronouncement, but couldn’t think of a thing to fill. it. I shifted my small case from one hand to the other and kept my eyes on the rocky path that protested with shifting stones and vocal gravel every step we took. It seemed to me that Mr. Diemus was trying to make all the noise he could with his shuffling feet. But, in spite of the amplified echo from the hills around us, no door opened, no face pressed to a window. It was a distinct relief to hear suddenly the happy unthinking rusty singing of hens as they scratched in the coarse dust.

I hunched up in the darkness of my narrow bed trying to comfort my uneasy stomach. It wasn’t that the food had been bad-it had been quite adequate-but such a dingy meal! Gloom seemed to festoon itself from the ceiling and unhappiness sat almost visibly at the table.

I tried to tell myself that it was my own travel weariness that slanted my thoughts, but I looked around the table and saw the hopeless endurance furrowed into the adult faces and beginning faintly but unmistakably on those of the children. There were two children there. A girl, Sarah (fourth grade, at a guess), and an adolescent boy, Matt (seventh?)-too silent, too well mannered, too controlled, avoiding much too pointedly looking at the empty chair between them.

My food went down in lumps and quarreled fiercely with the coffee that arrived in square-feeling gulps. Even yet-long difficult hours after the meal-the food still wouldn’t lie down to be digested.

Tomorrow I could slip into the pattern of school, familiar no matter where school was, since teaching kids is teaching kids no matter where. Maybe then I could convince my stomach that all was well, and then maybe even start to thaw those frozen unnatural children. Of course they well might be little demons away from home-which is very often the case. Anyway I felt, thankfully, the familiar September thrill of new beginnings.

I shifted in bed again, then stiffening my neck, lifted my ears clear of my pillow.

It was a whisper, the intermittent hissing I had been hearing. Someone was whispering in the next room to mine. I sat up and listened unashamedly. I knew Sarah’s room was next to mine, but who was talking with her? At first I could get only half words and then either my ears sharpened or the voices became louder.

“… and did you hear her laugh? Right out loud at the table!” The quick whisper became a low voice. “Her eyes crinkled in the corners and she laughed.”

“Our other teachers laughed, too.” The uncertainly deep voice must be Matt.

“Yes,” Sarah whispered. “But not for long. Oh, Matt! What’s wrong with us? People in our books have fun. They laugh and run and jump and do all kinds of fun stuff and nobody-” Sarah faltered, “no one calls it evil.”

“Those are only stories,” Matt said. “Not real life.”

“I don’t believe it!” Sarah cried. “When I get big I’m going away from Bendo. I’m going to see-“

“Away from Bendo!” Matt’s voice broke in roughly. “Away from the Group?”

I lost Sarah’s reply. I felt as though I had missed an expected step. As I wrestled with my breath the sights and sounds and smells of my old dorm room crowded back upon me. Then I caught myself. It was probably only a turn of phrase. This futile desolate unhappiness couldn’t possibly be related in any way to that magic ….

“Where is Dorcas?” Sarah asked, as though she knew the answer already.

“Punished.” Matt’s voice was hard and unchildlike. “She jumped.”

“Jumped!” Sarah was shocked.

“Over the edge of the porch. Clear down to the path. Father saw her. I think she let him see her on purpose.” His voice was defiant. “Someday when I get older I’m going to jump, too-all I want to-even over the house. Right in front of Father.”

“Oh, Matt!” The cry was horrified and admiring. “You wouldn’t! You couldn’t. Not so far, not right in front of Father!”

“I would so,” Matt retorted. “I could so, because I-” His words cut off sharply. “Sarah,” he went on, “can you figure any way, any way, that jumping could be evil? It doesn’t hurt anyone. It isn’t ugly. There isn’t any law-“

“Where is Dorcas?” Sarah’s voice was almost inaudible. “In the hidey hole again?” She was almost answering Matt’s question instead of asking one of her own.

“Yes,” Matt said. “In the dark with only bread to eat. So she can learn what a hunted animal feels like. An animal that is different, that other animals hate and hunt.” His bitter voice put quotes around the words.

“You see,” Sarah whispered. “You see?”

In the silence following I heard the quiet closing of a door and the slight vibration of the floor as Matt passed my room. I eased back onto my pillow. I lay back, staring toward the ceiling. What dark thing was here in this house? In this community? Frightened children whispering in the dark. Rebellious children in hidey holes learing how hunted animals feel. And a Group… ? No it couldn’t be. It was just the recent reminder of being on campus again that made me even consider that this darkness might in some way be the reverse of the golden coin Karen had shown me.

My heart almost failed me when I saw the school. It was one of those monstrosities that went up around the turn of the century. This one had been built for a boom town, but now all the upper windows were boarded up and obviously long out of use. The lower floor was blank, too, except for two rooms-though with the handful of children quietly standing around the door it was apparent that only one room was needed. And not only was the building deserted, the yard was swept clean from side to side, innocent of grass or trees-or playground equipment. There was a deep grove just beyond the school, though, and the glint of water down canyon.

“No swings?” I asked the three children who were escorting me. “No slides? No seesaws?”

“No!” Sarah’s voice was unhappily surprised. Matt scowled at her warningly.

“No,” he said, “we don’t swing or slide-nor see a saw!” He grinned up at me faintly.

“What a shame!” I said. “Did they all wear out? Can’t the school afford new ones?”

“We don’t swing or slide or seesaw.” The grin was dead.

“We don’t believe in it.”

There’s nothing quite so flat and incontestable as that last statement. I’ve heard it as an excuse for practically every type of omission, but, so help me, never applied to playground equipment. I couldn’t think of a reply any more intelligent than “Oh,” so I didn’t say anything.

All week long I felt as if I were wading through knee-deep Jello or trying to lift a king-sized feather bed up over my head. I used up every device I ever thought of to rouse the class to enthusiasm-about anything, anything! They were polite and submissive and did what was asked of them, but joylessly, apathetically, enduringly.

Finally, just before dismissal time on Friday, I leaned in desperation across my desk.

“Don’t you like anything?” I pleaded. “Isn’t anything fun?”

Dorcas Diemus’ mouth opened into the tense silence. I saw Matt kick quickly, warningly, against the leg of the desk. Her mouth closed.

“I think school is fun,” I said. “I think we can enjoy all kinds of things. I want to enjoy teaching but I can’t unless you enjoy learning.”

“We learn,” Dorcas said quickly. “We aren’t stupid.”

“You learn,” I acknowledged. “You aren’t stupid. But don’t any of you like school?”

“I like school,” Martha piped up, my first grade. “I think it’s fun!”

“Thank you, Martha,” I said. “And the rest of you-” I glared at them in mock anger, “you’re going to have fun if I have to beat it into you!”

To my dismay they shrank down apprehensively in their seats and exchanged troubled glances. But before I could hastily explain myself Matt laughed and Dorcas joined him. And I beamed fatuously to hear the hesitant rusty laughter spread across the room, but I saw ten-year-old Esther’s hands shake as she wiped tears from her eyes. Tears-of laughter?

That night I twisted in the darkness of my room, almost too tired to sleep, worrying and wondering. What had blighted these people? They had health, they had beauty-the curve of Martha’s cheek against the window was a song, the lift of Dorcas’ eyebrows was breathless grace. They were fed-adequately, clothed-adequately, housed-adequately, but nothing like they could have been. I’d seen more joy and delight and enthusiasm from little campground kids who slept in cardboard shacks and washed-if they ever did-in canals and ate whatever edible came their way, but grinned, even when impetigo or cold sores bled across their grins.

But these lifeless kids! My prayers were troubled and I slept restlessly.

A month or so later things had improved a little bit, but not much. At least there was more relaxation in the classroom. And I found that they had no deep-rooted convictions against plants, so we had things growing on the deep window sills-stuff we transplanted from the spring and from among the trees. And we had jars of minnows from the creek and one drowsy horned toad that roused in his box of dirt only to flick up the ants brought for his dinner. And we sang, loudly and enthusiastically, but, miracle of miracles, without even one monotone in the whole room. But we didn’t sing “Up, Up in the Sky” or “How Do You Like to Go Up in a Swing?” My solos of such songs were received with embarrassed blushes and lowered eyes!

There had been one dust-up between us, though-this matter of shuffling everywhere they walked.

“Pick up your feet, for goodness’ sake,” I said irritably one morning when the shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of their coming and going finally got my skin off. “Surely they’re not so heavy you can’t lift them.”

Timmy, who happened to be the trigger this time, nibbled unhappily at one finger. “I can’t,” he whispered. “Not supposed to.’”

“Not supposed to?” I forgot momentarily how warily I’d been going with these frightened mice of children. “Why not? Surely there’s no reason in the world why you can’t walk quietly.”

Matt looked unhappily over at Miriam, the sophomore who was our entire high school She looked aside, biting her lower lip, troubled. Then she turned back and said, “It is customary in Bendo.”

“To shuffle along?” I was forgetting any manners I had. “Whatever for?”

“That’s the way we do in Bendo.” There was no anger in her defense, only resignation.

“Perhaps that’s the way you do at home. But here at school let’s pick our feet up. It makes too much disturbance otherwise.”

“But it’s bad-” Esther began.

Matt’s hand shushed her in a hurry.

“Mr. Diemus said what we did at school was my business,” I told them. “He said not to bother your parents with our problems. One of our problems is too much noise when others are trying to work. At least in our schoolroom let’s lift our feet and walk quietly.”

The children considered the suggestion solemnly and turned to Matt and Miriam for guidance. They both nodded and we went back to work. For the next few minutes, from the corner of my eyes, I saw with amazement all the unnecessary trips back and forth across the room, with high-lifted feet, with grins and side glances that marked such trips as high adventure-as a delightfully daring thing to do! The whole deal had me bewildered. Thinking back I realized that not only the children of Bendo scuffled but all the adults did, too-as though they were afraid to lose contact with the earth, as though … I shook my head and went on with the lesson.

Before noon, though, the endless shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of feet began again. Habit was too much for the children. So I silently filed the sound under “Uncurable, Endurable,” and let the matter drop.

I sighed as I watched the children leave at lunchtime. It seemed to me that with the unprecedented luxury of a whole hour for lunch they’d all go home. The bell tower was visible from nearly every house in town. But instead they all brought tight little paper sacks with dull crumbly sandwiches and unimaginative apples in them. And silently with their dull scuffly steps they disappeared into the thicket of trees around the spring.

“Everything is dulled around here,” I thought. “Even the sunlight is blunted as it floods the hills and canyons. There is no mirth, no laughter. No high jinks or cutting up. No preadolescent silliness. No adolescent foolishness. Just quiet children, enduring.”

I don’t usually snoop but I began wondering if perhaps the kids were different when they were away from me-and from their parents. So when I got back at twelve thirty from an adequate but uninspired lunch at Diemuses’ house I kept on walking past the schoolhouse and quietly down into the grove, moving cautiously through the scanty undergrowth until I could lean over a lichened boulder and look down on the children.

Some were lying around on the short still grass, hands under their heads, blinking up at the brightness of the sky between the leaves. Esther and little Martha were hunting out fillaree seed pods and counting the tines of the pitchforks and rakes and harrows they resembled. I smiled, remembering how I used to do the same thing.

“I dreamed last night.” Dorcas thrust the statement defiantly into the drowsy silence. “I dreamed about the Home.”

My sudden astonished movement was covered by Martha’s horrified “Oh, Dorcas!”

“What’s wrong with the Home?” Dorcas cried, her cheeks scarlet. “There was a Home! There was! There was! Why shouldn’t we talk about it?”

I listened avidly. This couldn’t be just coincidence-a Group and now the Home. There must be some connection …. I pressed closer against the rough rock.

“But it’s bad!” Esther cried. “You’ll be punished! We can’t talk about the Home!”

“Why not?” Joel asked as though it had just occurred to him, as things do just occur to you when you’re thirteen. He sat up slowly. “Why can’t we?”

There was a short tense silence.

“I’ve dreamed, too,” Matt said. “I’ve dreamed of the Home-and it’s good, it’s good!”

“Who hasn’t dreamed?” Miriam asked. “We all have, haven’t we? Even our parents. I can tell by Mother’s eyes when she has.”

“Did you ever ask how come we aren’t supposed to talk about it?” Joel asked. “I mean and ever get any answer except that it’s bad.”

“I think it has something to do with a long time ago,” Matt said. “Something about when the Group first came-“

“I don’t think it’s just dreams,” Miriam declared, “because I don’t have to be asleep. I think it’s remembering.”

“Remembering?” asked Dorcas. “How can we remember something we never knew?”

“I don’t know,” Miriam admitted, “but I’ll bet it is.”

“I remember,” volunteered Talitha, who never volunteered anything.

“Hush!” whispered Abie, the second-grade next-to-youngest who always whispered.

“I remember,” Talitha went on stubbornly. “I remember a dress that was too little so the mother just stretched the skirt till it was long enough and it stayed stretched. ‘Nen she pulled the waist out big enough and the little girl put it on and flew away.”

“Hoh!” Timmy scoffed. “I remember better than that.” His face stilled and his eyes widened. “The ship was so tall it was like a mountain and the people went in the high high door and they didn’t have a ladder. ‘Nen there were stars, big burning ones-not squinchy little ones like ours.”

“It went too fast!” That was Abie! Talking eagerly! “When the air came it made the ship hot and the little baby died before all the little boats left the ship.” He scrunched down suddenly, leaning against Talitha and whimpering.

“You see!” Miriam lifted her chin triumphantly. “We’ve all dreamed-I mean remembered!”

“I guess so,” said Matt. “I remember. It’s lifting, Talitha, not flying. You go and go as high as you like, as far as you want to and don’t ever have to touch the ground-at all! At all!” He pounded his fist into the gravelly red soil beside him.

“And you can dance in the air, too,” Miriam sighed. “Freer than a bird, lighter than-“

Esther scrambled to her feet, white-faced and panic-stricken.

“Stop! Stop! It’s evil! It’s bad! I’l1 tell Father! We can’t dream-or lift-or dance! It’s bad, it’s bad! You’ll die for it! You’ll die for it!”

Joel jumped to his feet and grabbed Esther’s arm.

“Can we die any deader?” he cried, shaking her brutally.

“You call this being alive?” He hunched down apprehensively and shambled a few scuffling steps across the clearing.

I fled blindly back to school, trying to wink away my tears without admitting I was crying, crying for these poor kids who were groping so hopelessly for something they knew they should have. Why was it so rigorously denied them? Surely, if they were what I thought them … And they could be! They could be!

I grabbed the bell rope and pulled hard. Reluctantly the bell moved and tolled.

One o’clock, it clanged. One o’clock!

I watched the children returning with slow uneager shuffling steps.

That night I started a letter:

“Dear Karen, “Yep, ‘sme after all these years. And, oh, Karen! I’ve found some more! Some more of the People! Remember how much you wished you knew if any other Groups besides yours had survived the Crossing? How you worried about them and wanted to find them if they had? Well, I’ve found a whole Group! But it’s a sick unhappy group. Your heart would break to see them. If you could come and start them on the right path again…”

I put my pen down. I looked at the lines I had written and then crumpled the paper slowly. This was my Group. I had found them. Sure, I’d tell Karen-but later. Later, after-well, after I had tried to start them on the right path-at least the children.

After all I knew a little of their potentialities. Hadn’t Karen briefed me in those unguarded magical hours in the old dorm, drawn to me as I was to her by some mutual sympathy that seemed stronger than the usual roommate attachment, telling me things no Outsider had a right to hear? And if, when I finally told her and turned the Group over to her, if it could be a joyous gift, then I could feel that I had repaid her a little for the wonder world she had opened for me.

“Yes,” I thought ruefully, “and there’s nothing like a large portion of ignorance to give one a large portion of confidence.” Bur I did want to try-desperately. Maybe if I could break prison for someone else, then perhaps my own bars … I dropped the paper in the wastebasket.

But it was several weeks before I could bring myself to do anything to let the children know I knew about them. It was such an impossible situation, even if it was true-and if it wasn’t what kind of lunacy would they suspect me of?

When I finally set my teeth and swore a swear to myself that I’d do something definite my hands shook and my breath was a flutter in my dry throat.

“Today-” I said with an effort, “today is Friday.” Which gem of wisdom the children received with charitable silence.

“We’ve been working hard all week, so let’s have fun today.” This stirred the children-half with pleasure, half with apprehension. They, poor kids, found my “fun” much harder than any kind of work I could give them. But some of them were acquiring a taste for it. Martha had even learned to skip!