Pilgrimage: The Book of the People

“Your music,” she said.

“My mother’s music,” he corrected.

And the music began, a haunting lilting waltz-time melody. As lightly as the leaves that stirred at their feet the two circled the clearing.

I have the picture yet, but when I return to it my heart is emptied of adjectives because there are none for such enchantment. The music quickened and swelled, softly, richly full-the lost music that a mother bequeathed to her child.

Twyla was so completely engrossed in the magic of the moment that I’m sure she didn’t even know when their feet no longer rustled in the fallen leaves. She couldn’t have known when the treetops brushed their shoes-when the long turning of the tune brought them back, spiraling down into the clearing. Her scarlet petticoat caught on a branch as they passed, and left a bright shred to trail the wind, but even that did not distract her.

Before my heart completely broke with wonder the music faded softly away and left the two standing on the ragged grass. After a breathless pause Twyla’s hand went softly, wonderingly, to Francher’s cheek. The kid turned his face slowly and pressed his mouth to her palm. Then they turned and left each other, without a word.

Twyla passed so close to me that her skirts brushed mine. I let her cross the tracks back to the dance before I followed. I got there just in time to catch the whisper on apparently the second round, “… alone out there with the Francher kid!” and the gleefully malicious shock of “… and her petticoat is torn…”

It was like pigsty muck clotting an Easter dress.

Anna said, “Hi!” and flung herself into my one armchair. As the front leg collapsed she caught herself with the dexterity of long practice, tilted the chair, reinserted the leg and then eased herself back into its dusty depths.

“From the vagaries of the small town good Lord deliver me!” she moaned.

“What now?” I asked, shifting gears on my crochet hook as I finished another row of my rug.

“You mean you haven’t heard the latest scandal?” Her eyes widened in mock horror and her voice sank conspiratorially. “They were out there in the dark-alone-doing nobody knows what. Imagine!” Her voice shook with avid outrage. “With the Francher kid!

“Honestly!” Her voice returned to normal. “You’d think the Francher kid was leprosy or something. What a to-do about a little nocturnal smooching. I’d give you odds that most of the other kids are being shocked to ease their own consciences of the same kind of carryings-on. But just because it’s the Francher kid-“

“They weren’t alone,” I said casually, holding a tight rein on my indignation. “I was there.”

“You were?” Anna’s eyebrows bumped her crisp bangs. “Well, well. This complexions things different. What did happen? Not,” she hastened “that I credit these wild tales about, my golly, Twyla, but what did happen?”

“They danced,” I said. “The Francher kid was ashamed of his clothes and wouldn’t come in the hall. So they danced down in the clearing.”

“Without music ?”

“The Francher kid-hummed,” I said, my eyes intent on my work.

There was a brief silence. “Well,” Anna said, “that’s interesting, especially that vacant spot I feel in there. But you were there?”

“Yes.”

“And they just danced?”

“Yes.” I apologized mentally for making so pedestrian the magic I had seen. “And Twyla caught her petticoat on a branch and it tore before she knew it.”

“Hmmm.” Anna was suddenly sober. “You ought to take your rug up to the Sew-Sew Club.”

“But I-” I was bewildered.

“They’re serving nice heaping portions of Twyla’s reputation for refreshments, and Mrs. McVey is contributing the dessert-the unplumbed depravity of foster children.”

I stuffed my rug back into its bag. “‘Is my face on?” I asked.

Well, I got back to the Somansons’ that evening considerably wider of eye than I had left it. Anna took my things from me at the door.

“How did it go?”

“My gorsh!” I said, easing myself into a chair. “If they ever got started on me what would I have left?’”

“Bare bones,” Anna said promptly. “With plenty of tooth marks on them. Well, did you get them told?”

“Yes, but they didn’t want to believe me. It was too tame.

And of course Mrs. McVey didn’t like being pushed out on a limb about the Francher kid’s clothes. Her delicate hint about the high cost of clothes didn’t impress Mrs. Holmes much, not with her six boys. I guess I’ve got me an enemy for life. She got a good-sized look at herself through my eyes and she didn’t like it at all, but I’ll bet the Francher kid won’t turned up Levied for a dance again.”

“Heaven send he’ll never do anything worse,” Anna intoned piously.

That’s what I hoped fervently for a while, but lightning hit Willow Creek anyway, a subtle slow lightning-a calculated, coldly angry lightning. I held my breath as report after report came in. The Turbows’ old shed exploded without a sound on the stroke of nine o’clock Tuesday night and scattered itself like kindling wood over the whole barnyard. Of course the Turbows had talked for years of tearing the shaky old thing down but-I began to wonder how you went about bailing a juvenile out of the clink.

Then the last sound timber on the old railroad bridge below the Thurmans’ house shuddered and dissolved loudly into sawdust at eleven o’clock Tuesday night. The rails, deprived of their support, trembled briefly, then curled tightly up into two absurd rosettes. The bridge being gone meant an hour’s brisk walk to town for the Thurmans instead of a fifteen-minute stroll. It also meant safety for the toddlers too young to understand why the rotting timbers weren’t a wonderful kind of jungle gym.

Wednesday evening at five all the water in the Holmeses’ pond geysered up and crashed down again, pureeing what few catfish were still left in it and breaking a spillway over into the creek, thereby draining the stagnant old mosquito-bearing spot with a conclusive slurp. As the neighbors had nagged at the Holmeses to do for years-but …

I was awestruck at this simple literal translation of my words and searched my memory with wary apprehensiveness. I could almost have relaxed by now if I could have drawn a line through the last two names on my mental roll of the club.

But Thursday night there was a crash and a roar and I huddled in my bed praying a wordless prayer against I didn’t know what, and Friday morning I listened to the shrill wide-eyed recitals at the breakfast table.

“… since the devil was an imp and now there it is …”

“… right in the middle, big as life and twice as natural…”

“What is?” I asked, braving the battery of eyes that pinned me like a moth in a covey of searchlights.

There was a stir around the table. Everyone was aching to speak, but there’s always a certain rough protocol to be observed, even in a boardinghouse.

Ol’ Hank cleared his throat, took a huge mouthful of coffee and sloshed it thoughtfully and noisily around his teeth before swallowing it.

“Balance Rock,” he choked, spraying his vicinity finely, “came plumb unbalanced last night. Came a-crashing down, bouncing like a dang ping-pong ball an’nen it hopped over half a dozen fences an’nen whammo! it lit on a couple of the Scudders’ pigs an’nen tore out a section of the Lelands’ stone fence and now it’s settin there in the middle of their alfalfa field as big as a house. He’ll have a helk of a time mowing that field now.” He slurped largely of his coffee.

“Strange things going on around here.” Blue Nor’s porchy eyebrows rose and felt portentously. “Never heard of a balance rock falling before. And all them other funny things. The devil’s walking our land sure enough!”

I left on the wave of violent argument between proponents of the devil theory and the atom-bomb testing theory as the prime cause. Now I could draw another line through the list. But what of the last name? What of it?

That afternoon the Francher kid materialized on the bottom step at the boardinghouse, his eyes intent on my braces. We sat there in silence for a while, mostly I suppose because I could think of nothing rational to say. Finally I decided to be irrational.

“What about Mrs. McVey?”

He shrugged. “She feeds me.”

“And what’s with the Scudders’ pigs?”

Color rose blotchily to his cheeks. “I goofed. I was aiming for the fence and let it go too soon.”

“I told all those ladies the truth Monday. They knew they had been wrong about you and Twyla. There was no need-“

“No need!” His eyes flashed, and I blinked away from the impact of his straight indignant glare. “They’re dern lucky I didn’t smash them all flat.”

“I know,” I said hastily. “I know how you feel, but I can’t congratulate you on your restraint because however little you did compared to what you might have done, it was still more than you had a right to do. Especially the pigs and the wall.”

“I didn’t mean the pigs,” he muttered as he fingered a patch on his knee. “Old man Scudder’s a pretty right guy.”

“Yes,” I said. “‘So what are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. I could swipe some pigs from somewhere else for him, but I suppose that wouldn’t fix things.”

“No, it wouldn’t. You should buy-do you have any money?”

“Not for pigs!” he flared. “All I have is what I’m saving for my musical instrument and not one penny of that’ll ever go for pigs!”

“All right, all right,” I said. “You figure out something.”

He ducked his head again, fingering the patch, and I watched the late sun run across the curve of his cheek, thinking what an odd conversation this was.

“Francher,’” I said, leaning forward impulsively, “do you ever wonder how come you can do the things you do?”

His eyes were quick on my face. “Do you ever wonder why you can’t do what you can’t do?”

I flushed and shifted my crutches. “I know why.”

“No, you don’t. You only know when your ‘can’t’ began. You don’t know the real why. Even your doctors don’t know all of it. Well, I don’t know the why of my ‘cans.’ I don’t even know the beginning of them, only that sometimes I feel a wave of something inside me that hollers to get out of all the ‘can’ts’ that are around me like you-can’t-do-this, you-can’t-do-that, and then I remember that I can.”

He flicked his fingers and my crutches stirred. They lifted and thudded softly down the steps and then up again to lean back in their accustomed place.

“Crutches can’t walk,” the Francher kid said. “But you-something besides your body musta got smashed in that wreck.”

“Everything got smashed,” I said bitterly, the cold horror of that night and all that followed choking my chest. “Everything ended-everything.”

“There aren’t any endings,” the Francher kid said. “Only new beginnings. When you going to get started?” Then he slouched away, his hands in his pockets, his head bent as he kicked a rock along the path. Bleakly I watched him go, trying to keep alive my flame of anger at him.

Well, the Lelands’ wall had to be rebuilt and it was the Francher kid who got the job. He toiled mightily, lifting the heavy stones and cracking his hands with the dehydrating effect of the mortar he used. Maybe the fence wasn’t as straight as it had been but it was repaired, and perhaps, I hoped, a stone had been set strongly somewhere in the Francher kid by this act of atonement. That he received pay for it didn’t detract too much from the act itself, especially considering the amount of pay and the fact that it all went in on the other reparation.

The appearance of two strange pigs in the Scudders’ east field created quite a stir, but the wonder of it was dulled by all the odd events preceding it. Mr. Scudder made inquiries but nothing ever came of them so he kept the pigs, and I made no inquiries but relaxed for a while about the Francher kid.

It was along about this time that a Dr. Curtis came to town briefly. Well, “came to town” is a euphemism. His car broke down on his way up into the hills, and he had to accept our hospitality until Bill Thurman could get around to finding a necessary part. He stayed at Somansons’ in a room opposite mine after Mrs. Somanson had frantically cleared it out, mostly by the simple expedient of shoving all the boxes and crates and odds and ends to the end of the hall and draping a tarp over them. Then she splashed water across the barely settled dust and mopped out the resultant mud, put a brick under one corner of the bed, made it up with two army-surplus mattresses, one sheet edged with crocheted lace and one of heavy unbleached muslin. She unearthed a pillow that fluffed beautifully but sighed itself to a wafer-thin odor of damp feathers at a touch, and topped the splendid whole with two hand-pieced hand-quilted quilts and a chenille spread with a Technicolor peacock flamboyantly dominating it.

“There,” she sighed, using her apron to dust the edge of the dresser where it showed along the edge of the dresser scarf, “I guess that’ll hold him.”

“I should hope so,” I smiled. “It’s probably the quickest room he’s ever had.”

“He’s lucky to have this at such short notice,” she said, turning the ragrug over so the burned place wouldn’t show.

“If it wasn’t that I had my eye on that new winter coat-“

Dr. Curtis was a very relaxing comfortable sort of fellow, and it seemed so good to have someone to talk to who cared to use words of more than two syllables. It wasn’t that the people in Willow Creek were ignorant, they just didn’t usually care to discuss three-syllable matters. I guess, besides the conversation, I was drawn to Dr. Curtis because he neither looked at my crutches nor not looked at them. It was pleasant except for the twinge of here’s-someone-who. has-never-known-me-without-them.

After supper that night we all sat around the massive oil burner in the front room and talked against the monotone background of the radio turned low. Of course the late shake-making events in the area were brought up. Dr. Curtis was most interested, especially in the rails that curled up into rosettes. Because he was a doctor and a stranger the group expected an explanation of these goings-on from him, or at least an educated guess.

“What do I think?” He leaned forward in the old rocker and rested his arms on his knees. “I think a lot of things happen that can’t be explained by our usual thought patterns, and once we get accustomed to certain patterns we find it very uncomfortable to break over into others. So maybe it’s just as well not to want an explanation.”

“Hmmm.” Ol’ Hank knocked the ashes out of his pipe into his hand and looked around for the wastebasket. “Neat way of saying you don’t know either. Think I’ll remember that. It might come in handy sometime. Well, g’night all.”

He glanced around hastily, dumped the ashes in the geranium pot and left, sucking on his empty pipe.

His departure was a signal for the others to drift off to bed at the wise hour of ten, but I was in no mood for wisdom, not of the early-to-bed type anyway.

“Then there is room in this life for inexplicables.” I pleated my skirt between my fingers and straightened it out again.

“It would be a poor lackluster sort of world if there weren’t,” the doctor said. “I used to rule out anything that I couldn’t explain but I got cured of that good one time.” He smiled reminiscently. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. As I said, it can be mighty uncomfortable.”

“Yes,” I said impulsively. “Like hearing impossible music and sliding down moonbeams-” I felt my heart sink at the sudden blankness of his face. Oh, gee! Goofed again. He could talk glibly of inexplicables but he didn’t really believe in them. “And crutches that walk by themselves,” I rushed on rashly, “and autumn leaves that dance in the windless clearing-” I grasped my crutches and started blindly for the door. “And maybe someday if I’m a good girl and disbelieve enough I’ll walk again-“

” ‘And disbelieve enough’?” His words followed me. “Don’t you mean ‘believe enough’?”

“Don’t strain your pattern,” I called back. “It’s ‘disbelieve.’”

Of course I felt silly the next morning at the breakfast table, but Dr. Curtis didn’t refer to the conversation so I didn’t either. He was discussing renting a jeep for his hunting trip and leaving his car to be fixed.

“Tell Bill you’ll be back a week before you plan to,” said O1’ Hank. “Then your car will be ready when you do get back.”

The Francher kid was in the group of people who gathered to watch Bill transfer Dr. Curtis’ gear from the car to the jeep. As usual he was a little removed from the rest, lounging against a tree. Dr. Curtis finally came out, his .30-06 under one arm and his heavy hunting jacket under the other. Anna and I leaned over our side fence watching the whole procedure.

I saw the Francher kid straighten slowly, his hands leaving his pockets as he stared at Dr. Curtis. One hand went out tentatively and then faltered. Dr. Curtis inserted himself in the seat of the jeep and fumbled at the knobs on the dashboard. “Which one’s the radio?” he asked Bill

“Radio? In this jeep?” Bill laughed.

“But the music-” Dr. Curtis paused for a split second, then turned on the ignition. “Have to make my own, I guess,” he laughed.

The jeep roared into life, and the small group scattered as he wheeled it in reverse across the yard. In the pause as he shifted gears, he glanced sideways at me and our eyes met. It was a very brief encounter, but he asked questions and I answered with my unknowing and he exploded in a kind of wonderment-all in the moment between reverse and low.

We watched the dust boil up behind the jeep as it growled its way down to the highway.

“Well,” Anna said, “a-hunting we do go indeed!”

“Who’s he?” The Francher kid’s hands were tight on the top of the fence, a blind sort of look on his face.

“I don’t know,” I said. “His name is Dr. Curtis.”

“He’s heard music before.”

“I should hope so,” Anna said.

“That music?” I asked the Francher kid.

“Yes,” he nearly sobbed. “Yes!”

“He’ll he back,” I said. “He has to get his car.”

“Well,” Anna sighed. “The words are the words of English but the sense is the sense of confusion. Coffee, anybody?”

That afternoon the Francher kid joined me, wordlessly, as I struggled up the rise above the boardinghouse for a little wideness of horizon to counteract the day’s shut-in-ness.

I would rather have walked alone, partly because of a need for silence and partly because he just couldn’t ever keep his-accusing?-eyes off my crutches. But he didn’t trespass upon my attention as so many people would have, so I didn’t mind too much. I leaned, panting, against a gray granite boulder and let the fresh-from-distant-snow breeze lift my hair as I caught my breath. Then I huddled down into my coat, warming my ears. The Francher kid had a handful of pebbles and was lobbing them at the scattered rusty tin

cans that dotted the hillside. After one pebble turned a square corner to hit a can he spoke.

“If he knows the name of the instrument, then-” He lost his words.

“What is the name?” I asked, rubbing my nose where my coat collar had tickled it.

“It really isn’t a word. It’s just two sounds it makes.”

“Well, then, make me a word. ‘Musical instrument’ is mighty unmusical and unhandy.”

The Francher kid listened, his head tilted, his lips moving.

“I suppose you could call it a ‘rappoor,’ ” he said, softening the a. “But it isn’t that.”

” ‘Rappoor,’ ” I said. “Of course you know by now we don’t have any such instrument.” I was intrigued at having been drawn into another Francher-type conversation. I was developing quite a taste for them. “It’s probably just something your mother dreamed up for you.”

“And for that doctor?”

“Ummm.” My mental wheels spun, tractionless. “What do you think?”

“I almost know that there are some more like Mother. Some who know ‘the madness and the dream,’ too.”

“‘Dr. Curtis??’ I asked.

“No,” he said slowly, rubbing his hand along the boulder.

“No, I could feel a faraway, strange-to-me feeling with him. He’s like you. He-he knows someone who knows, but he doesn’t know.”

“Well, thanks. He’s a nice bird to be a feather of. Then it’s all very simple. When he comes back you ask him who he knows.”

“Yes-” The Francher kid drew a tremulous breath. ‘“Yes!”

We eased down the hillside, talking money and music. The Francher kid had enough saved up to buy a good instrument of some kind-but what kind? He was immersed in tones and timbres and ranges and keys and the possibility of sometime finding a something that would sound like a rappoor.

We paused at the foot of the hill. Impulsively I spoke.

“Francher, why do you talk with me?” I wished the words back before I finished them. Words have a ghastly way of shattering delicate situations and snapping tenuous bonds.

He lobbed a couple more stones against the bank and turned away, hands in his pockets. His words came back to me after I had given them up.

“You don’t hate me-yet.”

I was jarred. I suppose I had imagined all the people around the Francher kid were getting acquainted with him as I was, but his words made me realize differently. After that I caught at every conversation that included the Francher kid, and alerted at every mention of his name. It shook me to find that to practically everyone he was still juvenile delinquent, lazy trash, no-good off-scouring, potential criminal, burden. By some devious means it had been decided that he was responsible for all the odd happenings in town. I asked a number of people how the kid could possibly have done it. The only answer I got was, “The Francher kid can do anything-bad.”

Even Anna still found him an unwelcome burden in her classroom despite the fact that he was finally functioning on a fairly acceptable level academically.

Here I’d been thinking-heaven knows why!-that he was establishing himself in the community. Instead he was doing well to hold his own. I reviewed to myself all that had happened since first I met him, and found hardly a thing that would be positive in the eyes of the general public.

“Why,” I thought to myself, “I’m darned lucky he’s kept out of the hands of the law!” And my stomach knotted coldly at what might happen if the Francher kid ever did step over into out-and-out lawlessness. There’s something insidiously sweet to the adolescent in flouting authority, and I wanted no such appetite for any My Child of mine.

Well, the next few days after Dr. Curtis left were typical hunting-weather days. Minutes of sunshine and shouting autumn colors-hours of cloud and rain and near snow and raw aching winds. Reports came of heavy snow across Mingus Mountain, and Dogietown was snowed in for the winter, a trifle earlier than usual. We watched our own first flakes idle down, then whip themselves to tears against the huddled houses. It looked as though all excitement and activity were about to be squeezed out of Willow Springs by the drab grayness of winter.

Then the unexpected, which sometimes splashes our grayness with scarlet, happened. The big dude-ranch school, the Half Circle Star, that occupied the choicest of the range land in our area, invited all the school kids out to a musical splurge. They had imported an orchestra that played concerts as well as being a very good dance band, and they planned a gala weekend with a concert Friday evening followed by a dance for the teeners Saturday night. The ranch students were usually kept aloof from the town kids, poor little tikes. They were mostly unwanted or maladjusted children whose parents could afford to get rid of them with a flourish under the guise of giving them the advantage of growing up in healthful surroundings.

Of course the whole town was flung into a tizzy. There were the children of millionaires out there and famous people’s kids, too, but about the only glimpse we ever got of them was as they swept grandly through the town in the ranch station wagons. On such occasions we collectively blinked our eyes at the chromium glitter, and sighed-though perhaps for different reasons. I sighed for thin unhappy faces pressed to windows and sad eyes yearning back at houses where families lived who wanted their kids.

Anyway the consensus of opinion was that it would be worth suffering through a “music concert” to get to go to a dance with a real orchestra, because only those who attended the concert were eligible for the dance.

There was much discussion and much heartburning over what to wear to the two so divergent affairs. The boys were complacent after they found out that their one good outfit was right for both. The girls discussed endlessly, and embarked upon a wild lend-borrow spree when they found that fathers positively refused to spend largely even for this so special occasion.

I was very pleased for the Francher kid. Now he’d have a chance to hear live music-a considerable cut above what snarled in our staticky wave lengths from the available radio stations. Now maybe he’d hear a faint echo of his rappoor and in style, too, because Mrs. McVey had finally broken down and bought him a new suit, a really nice one by the local standards. I was as anxious as Twyla to see how the Francher kid would look in such splendor.

So it was with a distinct shock that I saw the kid at the concert, lounging, thumbs in pockets, against the door of the room where the crowd gathered. His face was shut and dark, and his patched faded Levi’s made a blotch in the dimness of the room.

“Look!” Twyla whispered. “He’s in Levi’s!”

“How come?” I breathed. “Where’s his new suit?”

“I don’t know. And those Levi’s aren’t even clean!” She hunched down in her seat, feeling the accusing eyes of the whole world searing her through the Francher kid.

The concert was splendid. Even our rockin’est rollers were caught up in the wonderful web of music. Even I lost myself for long lovely moments in the bright melodic trails that led me out of the gray lanes of familiarity. But I also felt the bite of tears behind my eyes. Music is made to be moved to, and my unresponsive feet wouldn’t even tap a tempo. I let the brasses and drums smash my rebellion into bearable-sized pieces again and joined joyfully in the enthusiastic applause.

“Hey!” Rigo said behind me as the departing stir of the crowd began. “I didn’t know anything could sound like that. Man! Did you hear that horn! I’d like to get me one of them things and blow it!”

“You’d sound like a sick cow,” Janniset said. “Them’s hard to play.”

Their discussion moved on down the aisle.

“He’s gone.” Twyla’s voice was a breath in my ear.

“Yes,” I said. “But we’ll probably see him out at the bus.”

But we didn’t. He wasn’t at the bus. He hadn’t come out on the bus. No one knew hove he got out to the ranch or where he had gone.

Anna and Twyla and I piled into Anna’s car and headed back for Willow Creek, my heart thudding with apprehension, my thoughts busy. When we pulled up at Somansons’ there was a car parked in front.

“The McVey!” Anna sizzled in my ear. “Ah ha! Methinks I smell trouble.”

I didn’t even have time to take my coat off in the smothery warmth of the front room before I was confronted by the monumental violence of Mrs. McVey’s wrath.

“Dress him!” she hissed, her chin thrust out as she lunged forward in the chair. “‘Dress him so’s he’ll feel equal to the others!” Her hands flashed out, and I dodged instinctively and blinked as a bunch of white rags fluttered to my feet. “His new shirt!” she half screamed. Another shower of tatters, dark ones this time. “His new suit! Not a piece in it as big as your hand!” There was a spatter like muffled hail. “His shoes!” Her voice caught on the edge of her violence, and she repeated raggedly, “His shoes!” Fear was battling with anger now. “Look at those pieces-as big as stamps-shoes!” Her voice broke. “Anybody who can tear up shoes!”

She sank back in her chair, spent and breathless, fishing for a crumpled Kleenex to wipe the spittle from her chin. I eased into a chair after Anna helped me shrug out of my coat. Twyla huddled, frightened, near the door, her eyes big with fascinated terror.

“Let him be like the others,” McVey half whispered. “That limb of Satan ever be like anyone decent?”

“But why?” My voice sounded thin and high in the calm after the hurricane.

“For no reason at all,” she gasped, pressing her hand to her panting ribs. “I gave all them brand-new clothes to him to try on, thinking he’d be pleased. Thinking-” her voice slipped to a whining tremulo, “thinking he’d see bow I had his best interest at heart.” She paused and sniffed lugubriously. No ready sympathy for her poured into the hiatus so she went on, angrily aggrieved. “And he took them and went into his room and came out with them like that!” Her finger jabbed at the pile of rags. “He-he threw them at me! You and your big ideas about him wanting to be like other kids!” Her lips curled away from the venomous spate of words. “He don’t want to be like nobody ‘cepting hisself. And he’s a devil!” Her voice sank to a whisper and her breath drew in on the last word, her eyes wide.

“‘But why did he do it?” I asked. “He must have said something.”

Mrs. McVey folded her hands across her ample middle and pinched her lips together. “There are some things a lady don’t repeat,” she said prissily, tossing her head.

“Oh, cut it out!” I was suddenly dreadfully weary of trying to be polite to the McVeys of this world. “Stop tying on that kind of an act. You could teach a stevedore-” I bit my lips and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McVey, but this is no time to hold back. What did he say? What excuse did he give?”

“He didn’t give any excuse,” she snapped. “He just-just-” Her heavy cheeks mottled with color. “He called names.”

“Oh.” Anna and I exchanged glances.

“But what on earth got into him?” I asked. “There must be some reason-“

“Well,” Anna squirmed a little. “After all what can you expect-?”

“From a background like that?” I snapped. “Well, Anna, I certainly expected something different from a background like yours!”

Anna’s face hardened and she gathered up her things. “I’ve known him longer than you have,” she said quietly.

“Longer,” I admitted, “but not better. Anna,” I pleaded, leaning toward her, “don’t condemn him unheard.”

“Condemn?” She looked up brightly. “I didn’t know he was on trial.”

“Oh, Anna.” I sank back in my chair. “The poor kid’s been on trial, presumed guilty of anything and everything, ever since he arrived in town, and you know it.”

“I don’t want to quarrel with you,” Anna said. “I’d better say good night.”

The door clicked behind her. Mrs. McVey and I measured each other with our eyes. I had opened my mouth to say something when I felt a whisper of a motion at my elbow. Twyla stood under the naked flood of the overhead light, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes shadowed by the droop of her lashes as she narrowed her glance against the glare.

“What did you buy his clothes with?” Her voice was very quiet.

“None of your business, young lady,” Mrs. McVey snapped, reddening.

“This is almost the end of the month,” Twyla said. “Your check doesn’t come till the first. Where did you get the money?”

“Well!” Mrs. McVey began to hoist her bulk out of the chair.

“I don’t have to stay here and have a sassy snip like this-“

Twyla swept in closer-so close that Mrs. McVey shrank back, her hands gripping the dusty overstuffed arms of the chair.

“You never have any of the check left after the first week,” Twyla said. “And you bought a purple nylon nightgown this month. It took a week’s pay-“

Mrs. McVey lunged forward again, her mouth agape with horrified outrage.

“You took his money,” Twyla said, her eyes steely in her tight young face. “You stole the money he was saving!” She whirled away from the chair, her skirts and hair flaring. “Someday-” she said with clenched teeth, “someday I’ll probably be old and fat and ugly, but heaven save me from being old and fat and ugly and a thief!”

“Twyla!” I warned, truly afraid that Mrs. McVey would have a stroke then and there.

“Well, she is a thief!” Twyla cried. “The Francher kid has been working and saving almost a year to buy-” she faltered, palpably feeling the thin ice of betraying a confidence, “to buy something. And he had almost enough! And she must have gone snooping around-“

“Twyla!” I had to stop her.

“It’s true! It’s true!” Her hands clenched rebelliously.

“Twyla.” My voice was quiet but it silenced her.

“Good-by, Mrs. McVey,” I said. “I’m sorry this happened.”

“Sorry!” she snorted, rearing up out of her chair. “Sour old maids with never a chick or child of their own sticking their noses into decent people’s affairs—” She waddled hastily to the door. She reached for the doorknob, her eyes narrow and venomous over her shoulder. “I got connections. I’ll get even with you.” The door shuddered as it emphasized her departure.

I let the McVey sweep out of my mind.

“Twyla,” I took her cold hands in mine, “you’d better go on home. I’ve got to figure out how to find the Francher kid.”

The swift movement of her hands protested. “But I want-“

“I’m sorry, Twyla. I think it’d be better.”

“Okay.” Her shoulders relaxed in acquiescence.

Just as she left, Mrs. Somanson bustled in. “Y’ better come on out to the table and have a cup of coffee,” she said. I straightened wearily.

“That McVey! She’d drive the devil to drink,” she said cheerfully. “Well, I guess people are like that. I’ve had more teachers over the years say that it wasn’t the kids they minded but the parents.” She shooed me through the door and went to the kitchen for the percolator. “Now I was always one to believe that the teacher was right-right or wrong-” Her voice faded out in a long familiar story that proved just the opposite of what she’d said, as I stared into my cup of coffee, wondering despairingly where in all this world I could find the Francher kid. After the episode of the gossip I had my fears. Still, oftentimes people who react violently to comparatively minor troubles were seemingly unshaken by really serious ones-a sort of being at a loss for a proportionate emotional reaction.

But what would he do? Music-music-he’d planned to buy the means for music and had lost the wherewithal. Now he had nothing to make music with. What would he do first? Revenge-or find his music elsewhere? Run away? To where? Steal the money? Steal the music? Steal!

I snapped to awareness, my abrupt movement slopping my cold coffee over into the saucer. Mrs. Somanson was gone. The house was quiet with the twilight pause, the indefinable transitional phase from day to night.

This time it wouldn’t be only a harmonica! I groped for my crutches, my mind scrabbling for some means of transportation.

I was reaching for the doorknob when the door flew open and nearly bowled me over.

“Coffee! Coffee!” Dr. Curtis croaked, to my complete bewilderment. He staggered over, all bundled in his hunting outfit, his face ragged with whiskers, his clothes odorous of campfires and all out-of-doors, to the table and clutched the coffeepot. It was very obviously cold.

“Oh, well,” he said in a conversational tone. “I guess I can survive without coffee.”

“Survive what?” I asked.

He looked at me a moment, smiling, then he said, “Well, if I’m going to say anything about it to anyone it might as well be you, though I hope that I’ve got sense enough not to go around babbling indiscriminately. Of course it might be a slight visual hangover from this hunting trip-you should hunt with these friends of mine sometime-but it kinda shook me.”

“Shook you?” I repeated stupidly, my mind racing around the idea of asking him for help in finding the Francher kid.

“A somewhatly,” he admitted. “After all there I was, riding along, minding my own business, singing, lustily if not musically, ‘A Life on the Ocean Waves,’ when there they were, marching sedately across the road.”

“They?” This story dragged in my impatient ears.

“The trombone and the big bass drum,” he explained.

“The what!” I had the sensation of running unexpectedly into a mad tangle of briars.

“The trombone and the big bass drum,” Dr. Curtis repeated.

“Keeping perfect time and no doubt in perfect step, though you couldn’t thump your feet convincingly six feet off the ground. Supposing, of course, you were a trombone with feet, which this wasn’t.”

“Dr. Curtis,” I grabbed a corner of his hunting coat. “Please, please? What happened? Tell me! I’ve got to know.”

He looked at me and sobered. “You are taking this seriously, aren’t you?” he said wonderingly.

I gulped and nodded.

“Well, it was about five miles above the Half Circle Star Ranch, where the heavy pine growth begins. And so help me, a trombone and a bass drum marched in the air across the road, the bass drum marking the time-though come to think of it, the drumsticks just lay on top. I stopped the jeep and ran over to where they had disappeared. I couldn’t see anything in the heavy growth there, but I swear I heard a faint Bronx cheer from the trombone. I have no doubt that the two of them were hiding behind a tree, snickering at me.” He rubbed his hand across his fuzzy chin. “Maybe I’d better drink that coffee, cold or not.”

“‘Dr. Curtis,” I said urgently, “can you help me? Without waiting for questions? Can you take me out there? Right now?” I reached for my coat. Wordlessly he helped me on with it and opened the door for me. The day was gone and the sky was a clear aqua around the horizon, shading into rose where the sun had dropped behind the hills. It was only a matter of minutes before we were roaring up the hill to the junction. I shouted over the jolting rattle.

“It’s the Francher kid,” I yelled. “I’ve got to find him and make him put them back before they find out.”

“Put who back where?” Dr. Curtis shouted into the sudden diminution of noise as we topped the rise, much to the astonishment of Mrs. Frisney, who was pattering across the intersection with her black umbrella protecting her from the early starshine.

“It’s too long to explain,” I screamed as we accelerated down the highway. “But he must be stealing the whole orchestra because Mrs. McVey bought him a new suit, and I’ve got to make him take them back or they’ll arrest him, then heaven help us all.”

“You mean the Francher kid had that bass drum and trombone?” he yelled.

“Yes!” My chest was aching from the tension of speech. “And probably all the rest.”

I caught myself with barked knuckles as Dr. Curtis braked to a sudden stop.

“Now look,” he said, “let’s get this straight. You’re talking wilder than I am. Do you mean to say that that kid is swiping a whole orchestra?”

“Yes, don’t ask me how. I don’t know how, but he can do it-” I grabbed his sleeve. “But he said you knew! The day you left on your trip, I mean, be said you knew someone who would know. We were waiting for you!”

“Well, I’ll be blowed!” he said in slow wonder. “Well, dang me!” He ran his hand over his face. “So now it’s my turn!” He reached for the ignition key. “Gangway, Jemmy!” he shouted.

“‘Here I come with another! Yours or mine, Jemmy? Yours or mine?”

It was as though his outlandish words had tripped a trigger. Suddenly all this strangeness, this out-of-stepness became a mad foolishness. Despairingly I wished I’d never seen Willow Creek or the Francher kid or a harmonica that danced alone or Twyla’s tilted side glance, or Dr. Curtis or the white road dimming in the rapid coming of night. I huddled down in my coat, my eyes stinging with weary hopeless tears, and the only comfort I could find was in visualizing myself twisting my hated braces into rigid confetti and spattering the road with it.

I roused as Dr. Curtis braked the jeep to a stop.

“It was about there,” he said, peering through the dusk.

“It’s mighty deserted up here-the raw end of isolation. The kid’s probably scared by now and plenty willing to come home.”

“Not the Francher kid,” I said. “He’s not the run-of-the-mill type kid.”

“Oh, so!” Dr. Curtis said. “I’d forgotten.”

Then there it was. At first I thought it the evening wind in the pines, but it deepened and swelled and grew into a thunderous magnificent shaking chord-a whole orchestra giving tongue. Then, one by one, the instruments soloed, running their scales, displaying their intervals, parading their possibilities. Somewhere between the strings and woodwinds I eased out of the jeep.

“You stay here,” I half whispered. “I’ll go find him. You wait.”

It was like walking through a rainstorm, the notes spattering all around me, the shrill lightning of the piccolos and the muttering thunder of the drums. There was no melody, only a child running gleefully through a candy store, snatching greedily at everything, gathering delight by the handful and throwing it away for the sheer pleasure of having enough to be able to throw it.

I struggled up the rise above the road, forgetting in my preoccupation to be wary of unfamiliar territory in the half-dark. There they were, in the sand hollow beyond the rise-all the instruments ranged in orderly precise rows as though at a recital, each one wrapped in a sudden shadowy silence, broken only by the shivery giggle of the cymbals which hastily stilled themselves against the sand.

“Who’s there?” He was a rigid figure, poised atop a boulder, arms half lifted.

“Francher,” I said.

“Oh.” He slid through the air to me. “I’m not hiding any more,” be said. “I’m going to be me all the time now.”

“Francher,” I said bluntly, “you’re a thief.”

He jerked in protest. “I’m not either-“

“If this is being you, you’re a thief. You stole these instruments.”

He groped for words, then burst out: “They stole my money! They stole all my music.”

” ‘They’?” I asked. “‘Francher, you can’t lump people together and call them ‘they.’ Did I steal your money? Or Twyla-or Mrs. Frisney-or Rigo?”

“Maybe you didn’t put your hands on it,” the Francher kid said. “But you stood around and let McVey take it.”

“That’s a guilt humanity has shared since the beginning. Standing around and letting wrong things happen. But even Mrs. McVey felt she was helping you. She didn’t sit down and decide to rob you. Some people have the idea that children don’t have any exclusive possessions but what they have belongs to the adults who care for them. Mrs. McVey thinks that way. Which is quite a different thing from deliberately stealing from strangers. What about the owners of all these instruments? What have they done to deserve your ill will?”

“They’re people,” he said stubbornly. “And I’m not going to be people any more.” Slowly he lifted himself into the air and turned himself upside down. “See,” he said, hanging above the hillside. “People can’t do things like this.”

“No,” I said. “But apparently whatever kind of creature you have decided to be can’t keep his shirttails in either.”

Hastily he scrabbled his shirt back over his hare midriff and righted himself. There was an awkward silence in the shadowy hollow, then I asked:

“What are you going to do about the instruments?”

“Oh, they can have them back when I’m through with them-if they can find them,” he said contemptuously. “I’m going to play them to pieces tonight.” The trumpet jabbed brightly through the dusk and the violins shimmered a silver obbligato.

“And every downbeat will say ‘thief,’” I said. “And every roll of the drums will growl ‘stolen.’”

“I don’t care, I don’t care!” he almost yelled. ” ‘Thief’ and ‘stolen” are words for people and I’m not going to be people any more, I told you!”

“What are you going to be?” I asked, leaning wearily against a tree trunk. “An animal?”

“No sir.” He was having trouble deciding what to do with his hands. “I’m going to be more than just a human.”

“Well, for a more-than-human this kind of behavior doesn’t show very many smarts. If you’re going to be more than human you have to be thoroughly a human first. If you’re going to be better than a human you have to be the best a human can be, first-then go on from there. Being entirely different is no way to make a big impression on people. You have to be able to outdo them at their own game first and then go beyond them. It won’t matter to them that you can fly like a bird unless you can walk straight like a man, first. To most people different is wrong. Oh, they’d probably say, “My goodness! How-wonderful!’ when you first pulled some fancy trick, but-” I hesitated, wondering if I were being wise, “but they’d forget you pretty quick, just as they would any cheap carnival attraction.”

He jerked at my words, his fists clenched.

“You’re as bad as the rest.” His words were tight and bitter.

“You think I’m just a freak-“

“I think you’re an unhappy person, because you’re not sure who you are or what you are, but you’ll have a much worse time trying to make an identity for yourself if you tangle with the law.”

“The law doesn’t apply to me,” he said coldly. “Because I know who I am-“

“Do you, Francher?” I asked softly. “Where did your mother come from? Why could she walk through the minds of others? Who are you, Francher? Are you going to cut yourself off from people before you even try to find out just what wonders you are capable of? Not these little sideshow deals, but maybe miracles that really count.” I swallowed hard as I looked at his averted face, shadowy in the dusk. My own face was congealing from the cold wind that had risen, but he didn’t even shiver in its iciness, though he had no jacket on. My lips moved stiffly.

“Both of us know you could get away with this lawlessness, but you know as well as I do that if you take this first step you won’t ever be able to untake it. And, how do we know, it might make it impossible for you to be accepted by your own kind-if you’re right in saying there are others. Surely they’re above common theft. And Dr. Curtis is due back from his hunting trip. So close to knowing-maybe-“I didn’t know your mother, Francher, but I do know this is not the dream she had for you. This is not why she endured hunger and hiding, terror and panic places-“

I turned and stumbled away from him, making my way back to the road. It was dark, horribly dark, around me and in me as I wailed soundlessly for this My Child. Somewhere before I got back Dr. Curtis was helping me. He got me back into the jeep and pried my frozen fingers from my crutches and warmed my hands between his broad-gloved palms.

“He isn’t of this world, you know,” he said. “At least his parents or grandparents weren’t. There are others like him. I’ve been hunting with some of them. He doesn’t know, evidently, nor did his mother, but he can find his People. I wanted to tell you to help you persuade him-“

I started to reach for my crutches, peering through the dark, then I relaxed. “No,” I said with tingling lips. “It wouldn’t be any good if he only responded to bribes. He has to decide now, with the scales weighted against him. He’s got to push into his new world. He can’t just slide in limply. You kill a chick if you help it hatch.”

I dabbled all the way home at tears for a My Child, lost in a wilderness I couldn’t chart, bound in. a captivity from which I couldn’t free him.

Dr. Curtis saw me to the door of my room. He lifted my averted face and wiped it.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I promise you the Francher kid will be taken care of.”

“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes against the nearness of his. “By the sheriff if they catch him. They’ll discover the loss of the orchestra any minute now, if they haven’t already.”

“You made him think,” he said. “He wouldn’t have stood still for all that if you hadn’t.”

“Too late,” I said. “A thought too late.”

Alone in my room I huddled on my bed, trying not to think of anything. I lay there until I was stiff with the cold, then I crept into my warm woolly robe up to my chin. I sat in the darkness there by the window, looking out at the lacy ghosts of the cottonwood trees, in the dim moonlight. How long would it be before some kindly soul would come blundering in to regale me with the latest about the Francher kid?

I put my elbows on the window sill and leaned my face on my hands, the heels of my palms pressing against my eyes. “Oh, Francher My Child, My lonely lost Child-“

“I’m not lost.”

I lifted a startled face. The voice was so soft. Maybe I had imagined…

“No, I’m here.” The Francher kid stepped out into the milky glow of the moon, moving with a strange new strength and assurance, quite divorced from his usual teen-age gangling.

“Oh, Francher-” I couldn’t let myself sob, but my voice caught on the last of his name.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I took them all back.”

My shoulders ached as the tension ran out of them.

“I didn’t have time to get them all back in the hall but I stacked them carefully on the front porch.” A glimmer of a smile crossed his face. “I guess they’ll wonder how they got out there.”

“I’m so sorry about your money,” I said awkwardly.

He looked at me soberly. “I can save again. I’ll get it yet. Someday I’ll have my music. It doesn’t have to be now.”

Suddenly a warm bubble seemed to be pressing up against my lungs. I felt excitement tingle clear out to my fingertips. I leaned across the sill. “Francher,” I cried softly, “you have your music. Now. Remember the harmonica? Remember when you danced with Twyla? Oh, Francher. All sound is is vibration.

“You can vibrate the air without an instrument. Remember the chord you played with the orchestra? Play it again, Francher!”’ He looked at me blankly, and then it was as if a candle had been lighted behind his face. “Yes!” he cried. “Yes!”

Softly-oh, softly-because miracles come that way, I heard the chord begin. It swelled richly, fully, softly, until the whole back yard vibrated to it-a whole orchestra crying out in a whisper in the pale moonlight.

“But the tunes!” he cried, taking this miracle at one stride and leaping beyond it. “I don’t know any of the tunes for an orchestra!”

“There are books,” I said. “Whole books of scores for symphonies and operas and-“

“And when I know the instruments better!” Here was the eager alive voice of the-Francher-kid-who-should-be. “Anything I hear-” The back yard ripped raucously to a couple of bars of the latest rock ‘n’ roll, then blossomed softly to an “Adoramus Te” and skipped to “The Farmer in the Dell.” “Then someday I’ll make my own-” Tremulously a rappoor threaded through a melodic phrase and stilled itself.

In the silence that followed the Francher kid looked at me, not at my face but deep inside me somewhere.

“Miss Carolle!” I felt my eyes tingle to tears at his voice.

“You’ve given me my music!” I could hear him swallow. “I want to give you something.” My hand moved in protest, but he went on quickly, “Please come outside.”

“Like this? I’m in my robe and slippers.”

“They’re warm enough. Here, I’ll help you through the window.”

And before I knew it I was over the low sill and clinging dizzily to it from the outside.

“My braces,” I said, loathing the words with a horrible loathing. “My crutches.”

“No,” the Francher kid said. “You don’t need them. Walk across the yard, Miss Carolle, all alone.”

“I can’t!” I cried through my shock. “Oh, Francher, don’t tease me!”

“Yes, you can. That’s what I’m giving you. I can’t mend you but I can give you that much. Walk.”

I clung frantically to the sill. Then I saw again Francher and Twyla spiraling down from the treetops, Francher upside down in the air with his midriff showing, Francher bouncing Balance Rock from field to field.

I let go of the till. I took a step. And another, and another. I held my hands far out from my tides. Glorious freedom from clenched hands and aching elbows! Across the yard I went, every step in the milky moonlight a paean of praise. I turned at the fence and looked back. The Francher kid was crouched by the window in a tight huddle of concentration. I lifted onto tiptoe and half skipped, half ran back to the window, feeling the wind of my going lift my hair back from my cheeks. Oh, it was like a drink after thirst! Like food after famine! Like gates swinging open!

I fell forward and caught at the window till. And cried out inarticulately as I felt the old bonds clamp down again, the old half-death seize hold of me. I crumpled to the ground beside the Francher kid. His tormented eyes looked into mine, his face pale and haggard. His forearm went up to wipe his sweat-drenched face. “I’m sorry,” he panted. “That’s all I can do now.”

My hands reached for him. There was a sudden movement, so quick and so close that I drew my foot back out of the way.

I looked up, startled. Dr. Curtis and a shadowy someone else were standing over us. But the surprise of their being there was drowned in the sudden upsurge of wonderment.

“It moved!” I cried. “My foot moved. Look! Look! It moved!” And I concentrated on it again-hard, hard! After laborious seconds my left big toe wiggled.

My hysterical laugh was half a shout. “One toe is better than none!” I sobbed. “Isn’t it, Dr, Curtis? Doesn’t that mean that someday-that maybe-?”

He had dropped to his knees and he gathered my frantic hands into his two big quiet ones.

“It might well be,” he said. “Jemmy will help us find out.”

The other figure knelt beside Dr. Curtis. There was a curious waiting kind of silence, but it wasn’t me he was looking at. It wasn’t my hands he reached for. It wasn’t my voice that cried out softly.

But it was the Francher kid who suddenly launched himself into the arms of the stranger and began to wail, the wild noisy crying of a child-a child who could be brave as long as he was completely lost but who had to dissolve into tears when rescue came.

The stranger looked over the Francher kid’s head at Dr. Curtis. “He’s mine,” he said. “But she’s almost one of yours.”

It could all have been a dream, or a mad explosion of imagination of some sort; but they don’t come any less imaginative than Mrs. McVey, and I know she will never forget the Francher kid. She has another foster child now, a placid plump little girl who loves to sit and listen to woman-talk-but the Francher kid is indelible in the McVey memory. Unborn generations will probably hear of him and his shoes.

And Twyla-she will carry his magic to her grave, unless (and I know she sometimes hopes prayerfully) Francher someday goes back for her.

Jemmy brought him to Cougar Canyon, and here they are helping him sort out all his many gifts and capabilities-some of which are unique to him-so that he will be able, finally, to fit into his most effective slot in their scheme of things. They tell me that there are those of this world who are developing even now in the footsteps of the People. That’s what Jemmy meant when he told Dr. Curtis I was almost one of his.

And I am walking. Dr. Curtis brought Bethie. She only touched me softly with her hands and read me to Dr. Curtis. And I had to accept it then-that it was mostly myself that stood in my own way. That my doctor had been right: that time, patience and believing could make me whole again.

The more I think about it the more I think that those three words are the key to almost everything.

Time, patience and believing-and the greatest of these is believing.

VI

LEA SAT in the dark of the bedroom and swung her feet over the edge of the bed. She groped for and shrugged into robe and huddled it around her. She went softly to the window and sat down on the broad sill. A lopsided moon rolled in the clouds above the hills, and all the Canyon lay ebony and ivory under its lights. Lea could see the haphazard dotting of houses that made up the community. All were dark except for one far window near the creek cliff.

Suddenly the whole scene seemed to take a sharp turn, completely out of focus. The hills and canyons became as strange as though she were looking at a moonscape or the hidden hills of Venus. Nothing looked familiar; even the moon suddenly became a leering frightening thing that could come closer and closer and closer. Lea hid her face in the bend of her elbow and drew her knees up sharply to support her shaking arms.

“What am I doing here?” she whispered. “What on earth am I doing here? I don’t belong here. I’ve got to get away. What have I to do with all these-these-creatures? I don’t believe them! I don’t believe anything. It’s madness. I’ve gone mad somewhere along the way. This must be an asylum. All these evenings-just pooling madnesses to see if a sanity will come out of it!”

She shuddered and lifted her head slowly, reluctantly opening her eyes. Determinedly she stared at the moon and the hills and the billowing clouds until they came back to familiarity. “A madness,” she whispered. “But such a comforting madness. If only I could stay here forever-” Wistful tears blurred the moon. “If only, if only!

“Fool!” Lea buried her face fiercely on her knees again. “Make up your mind. Is this or isn’t this insanity? You can’t have it both ways-not at one time.” Then the wistful one whispered, “If this is insanity-I’ll take it anyway. Whatever it is it makes a wonderful kind of sense that I’ve never been able to find before. I’m so tired of suspecting everything. Miss Carolle said the greatest was believing. I’ve got to believe, whether I’m mistaken or not.” She leaned her forehead against the cold glass of the window, her eyes intent on the far light. “I wonder what their wakefulness is,” she sighed.

She shivered away from the chin of the glass and rested her cheek on her knees again.

“‘But it is time,” she thought. “Time for me to take a hand in my drifting. That’s all it is, my staying here. Drifting in the warm waters of prebirth. Oh, it’s lovely here. No worries about earning a living. No worries about what to do. No wondering which branch of the Y in the road to take. But it can’t last.” She turned her face and looked up at the moon. “Nothing is forever,” she smiled wryly, “though unhappiness comes pretty close to it.

“How long can I expect Karen to take care of me? I’m no help to anyone. I have nothing to contribute. I’m a drag on her whatever she does. And I can’t-how can I ever get cured of anything in such a protected environment? I’ve got to go out and learn to look the world full in the face.” Her mouth twisted.

“And even spit in its eye if necessary.”

“Oh, I can’t, I can’t,” one of her wailed. “Pull the ground up over me and let me be quit of everything.”

“Shut up!” Lea answered sternly. “I’m running things now. Get dressed. We’re leaving.”

She dressed hastily in the darkness beyond the reach of the moonlight, tears flooding down her face. As she bent over to slip her shoes on she crumpled against the bed and sobbed deep wrenching sobs for a moment, then finished dressing. She put on her own freshly laundered clothes. She shrugged into her coat-“nearly new”-and gathered up her purse.

“Money-” she thought. I have no money—

She dumped the purse on the bed. The few articles clinked on the bedspread. “I threw everything else away before I left-” able at last to remember having without darkness descending upon her, “and spent my last dollar-” She opened her billfold and spread it wide. “Not a cent.”

She tugged out the miscellany of cards in the card compartment-little rectangles out of the past. “Why didn’t I throw these out, too? Useless-” She started to cram them back blindly into the compartment, but her fingers hesitated on a projecting corner. She pulled out a thin navy-blue folder.

“Well! I did forget! My traveler’s checks-if there’s anything left.” She unsnapped the folder and fingered the thin crisp sheaf. “Enough,” she whispered. “Enough for running again-” She dumped everything back into her purse, then she opened the top dresser drawer. A faint blue light touched the outline of her face. She picked up the koomatka and turned it in her hand. She closed her fingers softly over it as she tore the margin from a magazine on the dresser top. She scrawled on it, “Thank you,” and weighted the scrap of paper with the koomatka.

The shadows were so black, but she was afraid to walk in the light. She stumbled down from the house toward the road, not letting herself think of the miles and miles to be covered before reaching Kerry Canyon or anywhere. She had just reached the road when she started convulsively and muffled a cry against her clenched fists. Something was moving in the moonlight. She stood paralyzed in the shadow.

“Oh, hi!” came a cheerful voice, and the figure turned to her. “Just getting ready to leave. Didn’t know anyone was going in, this trip. You just about got left. Climb in-“

Wordlessly Lea climbed into the battered old pickup.

“Some old jalopy, isn’t it?” The fellow went on blithely, slamming the door and hooking it shut with a piece of baling wire. “I guess if you keep anything long enough it’ll turn into an antique. This turned long ago! That’s the only reason I can think of for their keeping it.”

Lea made a vague noise and clutched the side of the car grimly as it took off and raced down the road a yard above the white gravelly surface.

“I haven’t noticed you around,” the driver said, “but then there’s more people here than ever in the history of the Canyon with all this excitement going on. It’s my first visit. It’s comforting somehow, knowing there are so many of us, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.” Lea’s voice was a little rusty. “It’s a wonderful feeling.”

“Nuisance, though, having to make all our trips in and out by night. They say that they used to be able to lift at least across Jackass Flat even in the daytime and then wheel in the rest of the way. But it’s getting mighty close to dude season and we have to be more careful than during the winter. Travel at night. Wheel in from Widow’s Peak. Lousy road, too. Takes twice as long. Have you decided yet?”

“Decided?” Lea glanced at him in the moonlight.

“Oh, I know I have no business asking,” he smiled, “but it’s what everyone is wondering.” He sobered, leaning his arms on the steering wheel. “I’ve decided. Six times. Thought I’d finally decided for sure. Then comes a moonlight night like this-” He looked out over the vast panorama of hills and plains and far reaches-and sighed.

The rest of the trip was made in silence. Lea laughed shakily at her own clutching terror as the wheels touched down with a thud on the road near Widow’s Peak. After that, conversation was impossible over the jolting bumping bouncing progress of the truck.

They arrived at Kerry Canyon just as the sunlight washed across the moon. The driver unhooked the door for her and let her out into the shivery dawn.

“We’re in and out almost every morning and evening,” he said. “You coming back tonight?”

“No.” Lea shivered and huddled into her coat. “Not tonight.”

“Don’t be too long,” the driver smiled. “It can’t be much longer, you know. If you get back when no truck’s in, just call Mmm. Karen’s Receptor this week. Bethie next. Someone’ll come in to get you.”

“Thank you,” Lea said. “Thanks a lot.” And she turned blindly away from his good-by.

The diner next to the bus stop was small and stuffy, clumsy still with the weight of the night, not quite awake in the bare drafty dawn. The cup of coffee was hot but hurried, and a little weak. Lea sipped and set it down, staring into its dark shaken depths.

“Even if this is all,” she thought, “if I’m never to have any more of order and peace and sense of direction-why, I’ve at least had a glimpse, and some people never get even that much.

I think I have the key now-the almost impossible key to my locked door. Time, patience and believing-and the greatest of these is believing.”

After a while she sipped again, not looking up, and found that the coffee had cooled.

“Hot it up for you?” A new waitress was behind the counter, briskly tying her apron strings. “Bus’ll be along in just a little while.”

“Thank you.” Lea held out her cup, firmly putting away the vision of a cup of coffee that had steamed gently far into the morning, waiting, patient.

Time is a word-a shadow of an idea; but always, always, out of the whirlwind of events, the multiplicity of human activities or the endless boredom of disinterest, there is the sky

-the sky with all its unchanging changeableness showing the variations of Now and the stability of Forever. There are the stars, the square-set corners of our eternities that wheel and turn and always find their way back. There are the transient tumbled clouds, the windy wisps of mares’ tails, the crackling mackerel skies and the romping delightful tumult of the thunderstorms. And the moon-the moon that dreams and sets to dreaming-that mends the world with its compassionate light and makes everything look as though newness is forever.

On such a night as this…

Lea leaned on the railing and sighed into the moonlight. “Was it two such moons ago or only one that she bad been on the bridge or fainting in the skies or receiving in the crisp mountain twilight love’s gift of light from a child? She had shattered the rigidness of her old time-pattern and had not yet confined herself in a new one. Time had not yet paced itself into any sort of uniformity for her.

Tomorrow Grace would be hack from her appendectomy, back to her job at the Lodge, the job Lea had been fortunate enough to step right into. But now this lame little temporary refuge would be gone. It meant another step into uncertainty. Lea would be free again, free from the clatter of the kitchen and dining room, free to go into the bondage of aimlessness again.

“Except that I have come a little way out of my darkness into a twilight zone. And if I take this next step patiently and believingly-“

“It will lead you right back to the Canyon-” The laughing voice came softly.

Lea whirled with an inarticulate cry. Then she was clutching Karen and crying, “Oh, Karen! Karen!”

“Watch it! Watch it!” Karen laughed, her arms tender around Lea’s shaken shoulders. “Don’t bruise the body! Oh, Lea! It’s good to see you again! This is a better suicide-type place than that bridge.” Her voice ran on, covering Lea’s struggle for self-possession. “Want me to push you over here? Must be half a mile straight down. And into a river, yet-a river with water.”

“Wet water,” Lea quavered, releasing Karen and rubbing her arm across her wet cheeks. “And much too cold for comfortable dying. Oh, Karen! I was such a fool! Just because my eyes were shut I thought the sun had been turned off. Such a f-fool” She gulped.

“Always last year a fool,” Karen said. “Which isn’t too bad if this year we know it and aren’t the same kind of fool. When can you come back with me?”

“Back with you?” Lea stared. “You mean back to the Canyon?”

“Where else?” Karen asked. “For one thing you didn’t finish all the installments-“

“But surely by now-“

“Not quite yet,” Karen said. “You haven’t even missed one. The last one should be ready by the time we get back. You see, just after you left-Well, you’ll hear it all later. But I’m so sorry you left when you did. I didn’t get to take you over the hill-“

“But the hill’s still there, isn’t it?” Lea smiled. “The eternal hills-?”

“Yes,” Karen sighed. “The hill’s still there but I could take anyone there now. Well, it can’t be helped. When can you leave?”

“Tomorrow Grace will be back,” Lea said. “I was lucky to get this job when I did. It helped tide me over-“

“As tiding-over goes it’s pretty good,” Karen agreed. “But it isn’t a belonging-type thing for you.”

Lea shivered, suddenly cold in the soul, fearing a change of pattern. “It’ll do.”

“Nothing will do,” Karen said sharply, “if it’s just a make-do, a time-filler, a drifting. If you won’t fill the slot you were meant to you might as well just sit and count your fingers. Otherwise you just interfere with everything.”

“Oh, I’m willing to try to fill my slot. It’s just that I’m still in the uncomfortable process of trying to find out what rating I am in whose category, and, even if I don’t like it much, I’m beginning to feel that I belong to something and that I’m heading somewhere.”

“Well, your most immediate somewhere is the Canyon,” Karen said. “I’ll be by for you tomorrow evening. You’re not so far from us as the People fly! Your luggage?”

Lea laughed. “I have a toothbrush now, and a nightgown.”

“Materialist!” Karen put out her forefinger and touched Lea’s cheek softly. “The light is coming back. The candle is alight again.”

“Praised be the Power.” The words came unlearned to Lea’s lips.

“The Presence be with you.” Karen lifted to the porch railing, her back to the moon, her face in shadow. Her hands were silvered with moonlight as she reached out to touch Lea’s two shoulders in farewell.

Before moonrise the next night Lea stood on the dark porch hugging her small bundle to her, shivering from excitement and the wind that strained icily through the pinion trees on the canyon’s rim. The featureless bank of gray clouds had spread and spread over the sky since sundown. Moonrise would be a private thing for the upper side of the growing grayness. She started as the shadows above her stirred and coagulated and became a figure.

“Oh, Karen,” she cried softly, “I’m afraid. Can’t I wait and go by bus? It’s going to rain. Look-look!” She held her hand out and felt the sting of the first few random drops.

“Karen sent me.” The deep amused voice shook Lea back against the railing. “She said she was afraid your toothbrush and nightgown might have compounded themselves. For some reason or other she seems to have suddenly developed a Charley horse in her lifting muscles. Will I do?”

“But-but-” Lea clutched her bundle tighter. “I can’t lift! I’m afraid! I nearly died when Karen transported me last time. Please let me wait and go by bus. It won’t take much longer. Only overnight. I wasn’t even thinking when Karen told me last night.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m going to cry,” she choked, “or cuss, and I don’t do either gracefully, so please go. I’m just too darn scared to go with you”

She felt him pry her bundle gently out of her spasmed fingers.

“It’s not all that bad,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Darn you People!” Lea wanted to yell. “Don’t you ever understand? Don’t you ever sympathize?”

“Sure we understand.” The voice held laughter. “And we sympathize when sympathy is indicated, but we don’t slop all over everyone who has a qualm. Ever see a little kid fall down? He always looks around to see whether or not he should cry. Well, you looked around. You found out and you’re not crying, are you?”

“No, darn you!” Lea half laughed. “But honestly I really am too scared-“

“Well-say, my name is Deon in case you’d like to personalize your cussing. Anyway we have ways of managing. I can sleep you or opaque my personal shield so you can’t see out-only you’d miss so much either way. I should have brought the jalopy after all.”

“The jalopy?” Lea clutched the railing.

“Sure, you know the jalopy. They weren’t planning to use it tonight.”

“if you were thinking I’d feel more secure in that bucket of bolts-” Lea hugged her arms above the elbows. “I’d still be afraid.”

“Look.” Deon lifted Lea’s bundle briskly. “It’s going to rain in about half a minute. We’re a long way from home. Karen’s expecting you tonight and I promised her. So let’s make a start of some kind, and if you find it unbearable we’ll try some other way. It’s dark and you won’t be able to see-“

A jab of lightning plunged from the top of the sky to the depth of the canyon below them, and thunder shook the projecting porch like an explosion. Lea gasped and clutched Deon.

His arms closed around her as she buried her face against his shoulder, and she felt his face pressed against her hair.

“I’m sorry,” she shuddered, still clinging. “I’m scared of so many things.”

Wind whipped her skirts about her and stilled. The tumultuous threshing of the trees quieted, and Lea felt the tension drain out. She laughed a little and started to lift her head. Deon pressed it back to his shoulder.

“Take it easy,” he said. “We’re on our way.”

“Oh!” Lea gasped, clutching again. “Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes,” Deon said. “Don’t bother to look. Right now you couldn’t see anything anyway. We’re in the clouds. But start getting used to the idea. We’ll be above them soon and the moon is full. That you must see.”

Lea fought her terror and slowly, slowly, it withdrew before a faint dawning wonder. “Oh!” she thought. “Oh!” as Karen’s forgotten words welled softly up out of memory-“arms remember when eyes forget.” “Oh, my goodness!” And her eyes flew open only to wince shut again against the outpouring of the full moon.

“Wasn’t it-didn’t you-?” she faltered, peering narrowly up into Dean’s moon-whitened face.

“That’s just what I was going to ask you,” Deon smiled.

“Seems to me I should have recognized you before this, but remember, the first time I ever saw you you were neck-deep in water and stringy in the hair-one piece of it was plastered across your nose-and Karen didn’t even clue me!”

“But look now! Just look now!”

They had broken out of the shadows, and Lea looked below her at the serene tumble of clouds-the beyond-words wonder of a field of clouds under the moon. It was a beauty that not only fed the eyes but made all the senses yearn to encompass it and comprehend it. It sorrowed her not to be able to fill her arms with it and hold it so tight that it would melt right into her own self.

Silently the two moved over acres and acres of the purity of curves, the ineffable delight of depth and height and changing shadows-a world, whole and complete in itself, totally unrelated to the earth below in the darkness.

Finally Lea whispered, “Could I touch one? Could I actually put my hands into one of those clouds?”

“Why, sure,” Deon said. “But, baby, it’s cold out there. We have considerable altitude to get over the storm. But if you like-“

“Oh, yes!” Lea breathed. “It would be like touching the hem of heaven!”

Not even feeling the bite of cold when Deon opened the shield, Lea reached out gently to touch the welling flank of the cloud. It closed over her hands, bodiless, beautiful, as intangible as light, as insubstantial as a dream, and, like a dream, it dissolved through her fingers. As Deon closed the shield again, Lea found herself gasping and shivering. She looked at her hands and saw them glisten moistly in the moonlight. She looked up at Deon, turning in his arms. “Share my cloud,” she said, and touched his cheek softly.

It was hard to gauge time, moving above a wonderland of clouds like that below them, but it didn’t seem very long before Deon’s voice vibrated against Lea’s cheek where it rested against his shoulder. “We’re going down now. Stand by for turbulence. We’ll probably get tossed around a little.”

Lea stirred and smiled. “I must have slept. I’m only dreaming all this.”

“Pleasant dreams?”

“Pleasant dreams.”

“Here we go! Hang on!”

Lea gasped as they plunged down toward the whiteness. All the serenity and beauty was gone with the snuffing out of the moon. Darkness and tumult were all around them. Wind grabbed them roughly and tossed them raggedly through the clouds, up, impossibly fast, down, incredibly far, twisting and tumbling, laced about by lightning, shaken by the blare of thunder, deafened-even though protected-by the myriad shrieking voices of the wind.

“It’s death!” Lea thought frantically. “Nothing can live! It’s madness! It’s chaos!”

And then, in the middle of the terrifying tumult, she became conscious of warmth and shelter and, more personally, the awareness of someone-the nearness of another’s breathing, the strength of arms.

“This,” she thought wistfully, “must be like that love Karen mentioned. Out there all the storms of the world. In here, strength, warmth and someone else.”

A sudden down-draft flung them bodily out of the storm cloud, spinning them down to a staggering landing in the depth of Cougar Canyon, finally scraping them to a halt roughly against a yellow pine.

“Hoosh!” Deon leaned against the trunk and sagged. “Now I’m glad I didn’t take the jalopy. That would have unscrewed every bolt in it. Thunderstorms are violent!”

“I should say so.” Lea stirred in the circle of his arms. “But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. It’d be better than cussing or crying any time! Such wonderful slam-banging!” She stepped away from him and looked around.

“Where are we?” She prodded with her foot at the edge of a long indentation that ran darkly in the bright flush of lightning across the flat.

“Just over the hill from the schoolhouse.”

“Over the hill?” Lea looked around her in startled interest.

“But there’s nothing here.”

“How true.” Deon kicked a small clod into the darkness.

“Nothing here but me. And this time last week I’d have sworn-Oh, well-“

“You had me worried.” The two jumped, startled at the sudden voice from the darkness above. “I thought maybe you might have been dumped miles away or maybe that Lea’s toothbrush had slowed you down. Everyone’s waiting.” Karen touched down on the flat beside them.

“Then it came?” Deon surged forward eagerly. “Did it work? What was-?”

Karen laughed. “Simmer down, Deon. It arrived. It works. The Old Ones have called the Gathering and it’s all ready to go except for three empty seats we’re not filling. Alley-ooop!”

And Lea found herself snatched into the air and over the hill beyond the flat before she could gasp or let fear catch up with her. And she was red-cheeked and laughing, her hair sparkling with the first of a sudden shower, when they landed on the school porch and let the sudden snarl of thunder and shout of wind push them through the door. They threaded their way through the chattering groups and found seats. Lea looked over at the corner where she usually sat-almost afraid she might see herself still sitting there, hunched over the miserly counting of the coins of her misery.

She felt wonder and delight flood out into her arms and legs, and could hardly contain a wordless cry of joy. She spread her fingers on both hands, reaching, reaching openhanded, for what might be ahead.

“Darkness will come again,” she admitted to herself. “This is just a chink in my prison-a promise of what is on the other side of me. But, oh! how wonderful-how wonderful!” She curled her fingers softly to hold a handful of the happiness and found it not strange that another hand closed warmly over hers. “These are people who will listen when I cry. They will help me find my answers. They will sustain me in the long long way that I must grope back to find myself again. But I’m not alone! Never alone again!”

She let everything but the present moment shudder away on a happy shaken sigh as she murmured with the Group, “We are met together in Thy Name.”

No one was at the desk. In the middle of it was the same small gadget, or one very like it, that had always been there. Valancy, tenderly burdened on one arm with the flannelly bundle of Our Baby, leaned over and touched the gadget.

“I told you it would arrive okay.” The voice came so lifelike that Lea involuntarily searched the front of the room for the absent speaker.

“And I’m to have the last say, after all.

“Well, I suppose you’d like a theme, just to round out things for you-so here it is.

“‘For ye shall pass over Jordan to go in to possess the land which the Lord your God giveth you and ye shall possess it and dwell therein….’ “

JORDAN

I GUESS I was the first to see it-the bright form among the clouds above Baldy. There seemed to be no interval of wondering or questioning in my mind. I knew the moment I caught the metallic gleam-the instant the curl-back of the clouds gave a brief glimpse of a long sleek curve. I knew and I gave a shout of delight. Here it was! What more direct answer to a prayer could any fellow want? Just like that! My release from rebellion, the long-awaited answer to my protests against restrictions! There above me was release! I emptied my two hands of the gravel I had made of two small rocks during the time I had brooded on my boulder, dusted my palms against my Levi’s and lifted myself above the brush. I turned toward home, the tops of the underbrush ticking off the distance against my trailing toes. But oddly I felt a brief remote pang-almost of-regret?

As I neared the Canyon I heard the cry and saw one after another of the Group shoot upward toward Baldy. I forgot that momentary pang and shot upward with the rest of them. And my hands were among the first to feel the tingly hot-and-cold sleekness of the ship that was cooling yet from the heat of entry into the atmosphere. It was only a matter of minutes before the hands of the whole Group from the Canyon bore the ship downward from the clouds to the haven of the pine flats beyond Cougar-bore it rejoicing, singing an almost forgotten welcome song of the People.

Still tingling to the song I rushed to Obla’s house, bringing, as always, any new event to her, since she could come to none.

“Obla! Obla!” I cried as I slammed in through her door.

“They’ve come! They’ve come! They’re here! Someone from the New Home-Then I remembered, and I went in to her mind. The excitement so filled my own mind that I didn’t even have to verbalize for her before she caught the sight. Through my wordlessly sputtering delight I caught her faint chuckle.

“Bram, the ship couldn’t have rainbows around it and be diamond-studded from end to end!”

I laughed, too, a little abashed. “No, I guess not,” I thought back at her. “But it should have a halo on it!”

Then for the next while I sat in the quiet room and relived every second of the event for Obla: the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feel of everything, including a detailed description of the-haloless-ship. And Obla, deaf, blind, voiceless, armless, legless, Obla who would horrify most any outsider, lived the whole event with me, questioned me minutely, and finally lifted her unheard voice with the rest of us in the song of welcome.

“Obla.” I moved closer to her and looked down at the quiet scarred face, framed in the abundance of dark vigorous hair.

“‘Obla, it means the Home, the real Home. And for you-“

“And for me-” Her lips tightened and her eyelids flattened. Then the curtain of her hair swirled across her face as she hid herself from my eyes. “Perhaps a kinder world to hide this hideous-“

“Not hideous!” I cried indignantly.

Her soft chuckle tickled my mind. “Well, not, anyway,” she said. “You’ll have to admit that the explosion didn’t leave much of me-” Her hair flowed back from her face and spread across the pillow.

“The part of you that counts!” I exclaimed.

“On Earth you need a physical container. One that functions. And just once I wish that-” Her mind blanked before I could catch her wish. The glass of water lifted from the bedside stand and hovered at her month. She drank briefly. The glass slid back to its place.

“‘So you’re all afire to blast off?” her thought teased. “Back to civilization! Farewell to the rugged frontier!”

“‘Yes, I am,” I said defiantly. “Yon know how I feel. It’s criminal to waste lives like ours. If we can’t live to capacity here let’s go Home!”

“To which Home?” she questioned. “The one we knew is gone. What is the new one like?’”

“Well-” I hesitated, “I don’t know. We haven’t communicated yet. But it must be almost like the old Home. At least it’s probably inhabited by the People, our People.”

“Are you so sure we’re still the same People?” Obla persisted.

“Or that they are? Time and distance can change-“

“Of course we’re the same,” I cried. “That’s like asking if a dog is a dog in the Canyon just because he was born in Socorro.”

“I had a dog once,” Obla said. “A long time ago. He thought he was people because he’d never been around other dogs. It took him six months to learn to bark. It came as quite a blow to him when he found out he was a dog.”

“‘If you mean we’ve deteriorated since we came-“

“You chose the dog, not I. Let’s not quarrel. Besides I didn’t say that we were the dog.”

“Yeah, but-“

“Yeah, but-” she echoed, amused, and I laughed.

“Darn you, Obla, that’s the way most of my arguments with you end-yeah-but, yeah-but!”

“Why don’t they come out?” I rapped impatiently against the vast seamless bulk, shadowy above me in the night. “What’s the delay?”

“You’re being a child, Bram,” Jemmy said. “They have their reasons for waiting. Remember this is a strange world to them. They must be sure-“

“Sure!” I gestured impatiently. “We’ve told them the air’s okay and there’s no viruses waiting to snap them off. Besides they have their personal shields. They don’t even have to touch this earth if they don’t want to. Why don’t they come out?”

“Bram.” I recognized the tone of Jemmy’s voice.

“Oh, I know, I know,” I said. “Impatience, impatience. Everything in its own good time. But now, Jemmy, now that they’re here, you and Valancy will have to give in. They’ll make you see that the thing for us People to do is to get out completely or else get in there with the Outsiders and clean up this mess of a world. With this new help we could do it easily. We could take over key positions-“

“No matter how many have come-and we don’t know yet how many there are,” Jemmy said, “this ‘taking over’ isn’t the way of the People. Things must grow. You only graft in extreme cases. And destroy practically never. But let’s not get involved in all that again now. Valancy-“

Valancy slanted down, the stars behind her, from above the ship. “Jemmy.” Their hands brushed as her feet reached the ground. There it was again. That wordless flame of joy, that completeness as they met, after a long ten minutes’ separation. That made me impatient, too. I never felt that kind of oneness with anyone.

I heard Valancy’s little laugh. “Oh, Bram,” she said, “do you have to have your whole dinner in one gulp? Can’t you be content to wait for anything?”

“It might be a good idea for you to do a little concentrated thinking,” Jemmy said. “They won’t be coming out until morning. You stay here on guard tonight-“

“On guard against what?” I asked.

“Against impatience,” Jemmy said, his voice taking on the Old One tone that expected obedience without having to demand it. Amusement had crept back into his voice before his next sentence. “For the good of your soul, Bram, and the contemplation of your sins, keep watch this whole night. I have a couple of blankets in the pickup.” He gestured, and the blankets drifted through the scrub oak. “There, that’ll hold you. till morning.”

I watched the two of them meet with the pickup truck above the thin trickle of the creek. Valancy called back, “Thinking might help, Bram. You should try it.”

A startled night bird flapped dismally ahead of them for a while, and then the darkness took them all.

I spread the blankets on the sand by the ship, leaning against the smooth coolness of its outer skin, marveling anew at its seamlessness, the unbroken flow along its full length. Somewhere there had to be an exit, but right now the evening light ran uninterrupted from glowing end to glowing end.

Who was in there? How many were in there? A ship of this size could carry hundreds. Their communicator and ours had spoken briefly together, ours stumbling a little with words we remembered of the Home tongue that seemed to have changed or fallen out of use, but no mention of numbers was made before the final thought: “We are tired. It’s a long journey. Thanks be to the Power, the Presence and the Name that we have found you. We will rest until morning.”

The drone of a high-flying turbo-jet above the Canyon caught my ear. I glanced quickly up; Our unlight still humped itself up over the betraying shine of the ship. I relaxed on the blankets, wondering-wondering ….

It was so long ago-back in my grandparents’ day-that it all happened. The Home, smashed to a handful of glittering confetti-the People scattered to every compass point, looking for refuge. It was all in my memory, the stream of remembrance that ties the People so strongly together. If I let myself I could suffer the loss, the wandering, the tedium and terror of the search for a new world. I could live again the shrieking incandescent entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the heat, the vibration, the wrenching and shattering. And I could share the bereavement, the tears, the blinding maiming agony of some of the survivors who made it to Earth. And I could hide and dodge and run and die with all who suffered the settlement period-trying to find the best way to fit in unnoticed among the people of Earth and yet not lose our identity as the People.

But this was all the past-though sometimes I wonder if anything is ever past. It is the future I’m impatient for. Why, look at the area of international relations alone. Valancy could sit at she table at the next summit conference and read the truth behind all the closed wary sparring faces-truth naked and blinding as the glint of the moon on the edge of a metal door-opening-opening ….

I snatched myself to awareness. Someone was leaving the ship. I lifted a couple of inches off the sand and slid along quietly in the shadow. The figure came out, carefully, fearfully. The door swung shut and the figure straightened. Cautious step followed cautious step; then, in a sudden flurry of movement, the figure was running down the creek bed-fast! Fast! For about a hundred feet, and then it collapsed, face down into the sand.

I streaked over and hovered. “Hi!” I said.

Convulsively the figure turned over and I was looking down into her face. I caught her name-Salla.

“Are you hurt?” I asked audibly.

“No,” she thought. “No,” she articulated with an effort. “I’m not used to-” she groped, “running.” She sounded apologetic, not for being unused to running but for running. She sat up and I sat down. We acquainted each other with our faces, and I liked very much what I saw. It was a sort of restatement of Valancy’s luminously pale skin and dark eyes and warm lovely mouth. She turned away and I caught the faint glimmer of her personal shield.

“You don’t need it,” I said. “It’s warm and pleasant tonight.”

“But-” Again I caught the embarrassed apology.

“Oh, surely not always!” I protested. “What a grim deal. Shields are only for emergencies!”

She hesitated a moment and then the glimmer died. I caught the faint fragrance of her and thought ruefully that if I had a-fragrance?-it was probably compounded of barnyard, lumber mill and supper hamburgers.

She drew a deep cautious breath. “Oh! Growing things! Life everywhere! We’ve been so long on the way. Smell it!”

Obligingly I did, but was conscious only of a crushed manzanita smell from beneath the ship.

This is a kind of an aside, because I can’t stop in my story at every turn and try to explain. Outsiders, I suppose, have no parallel for the way Salla and I got acquainted. Under all the talk, under all the activity and busy-ness in the times that followed, was a deep underflow of communication between us. I had felt this same type of awareness before when our in-gathering brought new members of the Group to the Canyon, but never quite so strongly as with Salla. It must have been more noticeable because we lacked many of the common experiences that are shared by those who have occupied the same earth together since birth. That must have been it.

“I remember,” Salla said as she sifted sand through slender unused-looking hands, “when I was very small I went out in the rain.” She paused, as though for a reaction. “Without my shield,” she amplified. Again the pause. “I got wet!” she cried, determined, apparently, to shock me.

“Last week,” I said, “I walked in the rain and got so wet that my shoes squelched at every step and the clean taste of rain was in my mouth. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. There’s something so quiet about rain. Even when there’s wind and thunder there’s a stillness about it. I like it.”

Then, shaken by hearing myself say such things aloud, I sifted sand, too, a little violently at first.

She reached over with a slender milky finger and touched my hand. “Brown,” she said. Then, “Tan,” as she caught my thought.

“The sun,” I said. “We’re out in the sun so much, unshielded, that it browns our skins or freckles them, or burns the living daylight out of us if we’re not careful.”

“Then you still live in touch of Earth. At Home we seldom ever-” Her words faded and I caught a capsuled feeling that might have been real cozy if you were born to it, but…

“How come?” I asked. “What’s with your world that you have to shield all the time?” I felt a pang for my pictured Eden ….

“We don’t have to. At least not any more. When we arrived at the new Home we had to do a pretty thorough renovating job. We-of course this was my grandparents-wanted it as nearly like the old Home as possible. We’ve done wonderfully well copying the vegetation and hills and valleys and streams, but-” guilt tinged her words, “it’s still a copy-nothing casual and-and thoughtless. By the time the new Home was livable we’d got into the habit of shielding. It was just what one did automatically. I don’t believe Mother has gone unshielded outside her own sleep-room in all her life. You just-don’t-“

I sprawled my arm across the sand, feeling it grit against my skin. Real cozy, but…

She sighed. “One time-I was old enough to know better, they told me-one time I walked in the sun unshielded. I got muddy and got my hands dirty and tore my dress.” She brought out the untidy words with an effort, as though using extreme slang at a very prim gathering. “And I tangled my hair so completely in a tree that I had to pull some of it out to get free.” There was no bravado in her voice now. Now she was sharing with me one of the most precious of her memories-one not quite socially acceptable among her own.

I touched her hand lightly, since I do not communicate too freely without contact, and saw her.

She was stealing out of the house before dawn-strange house, strange landscape, strange world-easing the door shut, lifting quickly out into the grove below the house. Her flame of rebellion wasn’t strange to me, though. I knew it too well myself. Then she dropped her shield. I gasped with her because I was feeling, as newly as though I were the First in a brand-new Home, the movement of wind on my face, on my arms. I was even conscious of it streaming like tiny rivers between my fingers. I felt the soil beneath my hesitant feet, the soft packed clay, the outline of a leaf, the harsh stab of gravel, the granular sandiness of the water’s edge. The splash of water against my legs was as sharp as a bite into lemon. And wetness! I had no idea that wetness was such an individual feeling. I can’t remember when first I waded in water, or whether I ever felt wetness to know consciously, “This is wetness.” The newness! It was like nothing I’d felt before.

Then suddenly there was the smell of crushed manzanita again, and Salla’s hand had moved from beneath mine.

“Mother’s questing for me,” she whispered. “She has no idea I’m here. She’d have a quanic if she knew. I must go before she gets no answer from my room.”

“When are you all coming out?”

“Tomorrow, I think, Laam will have to rest longer. He’s our Motiver, you know. It was exhausting bringing the ship into the atmosphere. More so than the whole rest of the trip. But the rest of us-“

“How many?” I whispered as she glided away from me and up the curve of the ship.

“Oh,” she whispered back, “there’s-” The door opened and she slid inside and it closed.

“Dream sweetly,” I heard soundlessly, then astonishingly, the touch of a soft cheek against one of my cheeks, and the warm movement of lips against the other. I was startled and confused, though pleased, until with a laugh I realized that I had been caught between the mother’s questing and Salla’s reply.

“Dream sweetly,” I thought, and rolled myself in my blankets.

Something wakened me in the empty hours before dawn. I lay there feeling snatched out of sleep like a fish out of water, shivering in the interval between putting off sleep and putting on awakeness.

“I’m supposed to think,” I thought dully. “Concentrated thinking.”

So I thought. I thought of my People, biding their time, biding their time, waiting, waiting, walking when they could be flying. Think, think what we could do if we stopped waiting and really got going. Think of Bethie, our Sensitive, in a medical center, reading the illnesses and ailments to the doctors. No more chance for patients to hide behind imaginary illnesses. No wrong diagnoses, no delay in identification of conditions. Of course there are only one Bethie and the few Sorters we have who could serve a little less effectively, but it would be a beginning.

Think of our Sorters, helping to straighten people out, able to search their deepest beings and pry the scabs off ancient cankers and wounds and let healing into the suffering intricacies of the mind.

Think of our ability to lift, to transport, to communicate, to use Earth instead of submitting to it. Hadn’t Man been given dominion over Earth? Hadn’t he forfeited it somewhere along the way? Couldn’t we help point him back to the path again?

I twisted with this concentrated restatement of all my questions. Why couldn’t this all be so now, now!

But, “No,” say the Old Ones. “Wait,” says Jemmy. “Not now,” says Valancy.

“But look!” I wanted to yell. “They’re headed for space! Trying to get there on a Pogo stick. Look at Laam! He brought that ship to us from some far Homeland without lifting his hand, without gadgets in his comfortable motive-room. Take any of us. I myself could lift our pickup high enough to need my shield to keep me breathing. I’ll bet even I in one of those sealed high-flying planes could take it to the verge of space, just this side of the escape rim. And any Motiver could take it over the rim and the hard part is over. Of course, though all of us can lift we have only two Motivers, but it would be a start!”

But, “No,” say the Old Ones. “Wait,” says Jemmy. “Not now,” says Valancy.

All right, so it would be doing violence to the scheme of things, grafting a third arm onto an organism designed for two. So the Earth ones will develop along our line someday-look at Peter and Dita and that Francher kid and Bethie. So someday when it is earned they will have it. So-let’s go, then! Let’s find another Home. Let’s take to space and leave them their Earth. Let’s let them have their time-if they don’t die of it first. Let’s leave. Let’s get out of this crummy joint. Let’s go somewhere where we can be ourselves all the time, openly unashamed!

I pounded my fists on the blanket, then ruefully wiped the flecks of sand from my lips and tongue and grunted a laugh at myself. I caught my breath, then relaxed.

“Okay, Davy,” I said, “what are you doing out so early?”

“I haven’t been to bed,” Davy said. drifting out of the shadows. “Dad said I could try my scriber tonight. I just got it finished.”

“That thing?” I laughed up at him. “What could you scribe at night?”

“Well-” Davy sat down in the air above my blanket, rubbing his thumbs on the tiny box he was holding. “I thought it might be able to scribe dreams, but it won’t. Not enough verbalizing in them. I checked my whole family and used up half my scribe tape. Gotta make some more today!”

“Nasty break,” I said. “Back to the drawing boards, boy.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Davy said. “I tried it on your dreams-” He flipped up out of my casual swipe at him. “But I couldn’t get anything. So I ran a chill down your spine-“

“You rat,” I said, too lazy to resent it very much. “That’s why I woke up so hard and quick.”

“Yup,” he said, drifting back over me. “So I tried it on you awake. More concentrated thought patterns.”

“Hey!” I sat up slowly. “Concentrated thought?”

“Take this last part.” Davy drifted up again. There was a quacking gabble. “Ope!” he said. “Forgot the slowdown. Thoughts are fast. Now-“

And clearly and minutely, the way a voice sometimes sounds from a telephone receiver, I heard myself yelling, “Let’s leave, let’s get out of this crummy joint-“

“Davy!” ! yelled, hunching myself upward, encumbered as I was with blankets.

“Watch it! Watch it!” he cried, holding the scriber away from me as we tumbled in the air. “Group interest! I claim Group interest! With the ship here now-“

“Group interest, nothing!” I said as I finally got my hands on the scriber. “You’re forgetting privacy of thought-and the penalty for violation thereof.” I caught his flying thought and pushed the right area on the box to erase the record.

Dagnab!” said Davy, disgruntled. “My first invention and you erase my first recording on it.”

“Nasty break!” I said. Then I tossed the box to him. “But say!” I reached up and pulled him down to me. “Obla! Think about Obla and this screwy gadget!”

“Yeah!” His face lighted up, then blanked as he was snatched along by the train of thought. “Yeah! Obla-no audible voice

-” He had already forgotten me before the trees received him.

It wasn’t that I had been ashamed of my thoughts. It was only that they sounded so-so naked, made audible. I stood there, my hands flattened against the beautiful ship and felt my conviction solidify. “Let’s go. Let’s leave. If there isn’t room for us on this ship we can build others. Let’s find a real Home somewhere. Either find one or build one.”

I think it was at that moment that I began to say good-by to Earth, almost subconsciously beginning to sever the ties that bound me to it. Like the slow out-fanning of a lifting wing, the direction of my thoughts turned skyward. I lifted my eyes.

“This time next year,” I thought, “I won’t be watching morning lighting up Old Baldy.”

By midmorning the whole of the Group, including the whole Group from Bendo, which had been notified, was waiting on the hillside near the ship. There was very little audible speech and not much gaiety. The ship brought back too much of the past, and the dark streams of memory were coursing through the Group. I latched onto one stream and found only the shadows of the Crossing in it. “But the Home,” I interjected, “the Home before!”

Just then a glitter against the bulk of the ship drew our attention. The door was opening. There was a pause, and then there were the four of them, Salla and her parents and another older fellow. The slight glintings of their personal shields were securely about them, and, as they winced against the downpouring sun, their shields thickened above their heads and took on a deep blue tint.

The Oldest, his blind face turned to the ship, spoke on a Group stream.

“Welcome to the Group.” His thought was organ-toned and cordial “Thrice welcome among us. You are the first from the Home to follow us to Earth. We are eager for the news of our friends.”

There was a sudden babble of thoughts. “Is Anna with you? Is Mark? Is Santhy? Is Bediah?”

“Wait, wait-” The Father lifted his arms imploringly. “I cannot answer all of you at once except by saying-there are only the four of us in the ship.”

“Four!” The astonished thought almost lifted an echo from Baldy.

“Why, yes,” answered-he gave us his name-Shua. “My family and I and our Motiver here, Laam.”

“Then all the rest-?” Several of us slipped to our knees with the Sign trembling on our fingers.

“Oh no! No!” Shun was shocked. “No, we fared very well in our new Home. Almost all your friends await you eagerly. As you remember, ours was the group living adjacent to yours on the Home. Our Group and two others reached our new Home. Why, we brought this ship empty so we could take you all Home!”

“Home?” For a stunned moment the word hung almost visibly in the air above us.

Then, “Home!” The cry rose and swelled and broke to audibility as the whole Group took to the sky as one. It was such a jubilant ecstatic cry that it shook an echo sufficient to frighten a pair of blue jays from a clump of pines on the flat.

“Why they must all think the way I do!” I thought, astonished, as I joined in the upsurge and the jubilant chorus of the wordless Homeward song. Then I flatted a little as I wondered if any of them shared with me the sudden pang I had felt before. I tucked it quickly away, deep enough so that only a Sorter would be able to find it, and quickly cradled the Francher kid in my lifting-he hadn’t learned to go much beyond the treetops yet, and the Group was leaving him behind ….

“There’s four of them,” I thought breathlessly at Obla. “Only four. They brought the ship to take us Home.”

Obla turned her blind face to me. “To take us all? Just like that?”

“Well, yes,” I replied, frowning a little. “I guess just like that-whatever that means.”

“After all I suppose castaways are always eager for rescue,” Obla said. Then, gently mocking, “I suppose you’re all packed?”

“I’ve been packed almost since I was born. Haven’t I always been talking about getting out of this bind that holds us back?”

“You have,” Obla thought. “Exhaustively talked about it. Put your hand out the window, Bram. Take a handful of sun.” I did, filling my palm with the tingling brightness. “Pour it out.” I tilted my hand and felt the warm flow of escaping light. “No more Earth sun ever again,” she said. “Not ever!”

“Darn you, Obla, cut it out!” ! cried.

“You weren’t so entirely sure yourself, were you? Even after all your protestations. Even in spite of that big warm wonder growing inside you.”

“Warm wonder?” Then I felt my face heat up. “Oh,” I said awkwardly. “That’s only natural interest in a stranger-a stranger from Home!” I felt excitement mounting. “Just think, Obla! From Home!”

“A stranger from Home.” Obla’s thought was a little sad.

“Listen to your words, Brain. A stranger from Home. Whenever have People been strangers to one another?”

“You’re playing with words now. Let me tell you the whole thing-“

I have used Obla for a sounding board ever since I can remember. I have no memory of her physically complete. I became conscious of her only after her disaster and mine. The same explosion that maimed her took my parents. They were trying to get some Outsiders out of a crashed plane and didn’t quite make it. Some of my most grandiose schemes have echoed hollow and empty against the listening receptiveness of Obla. And some of my shyest thoughts have grown to monumental strength with her uncritical acceptance of them. Somehow, when you hear your own ideas, crisply cut for transmission, they are stripped of anything extraneous and stand naked of pretensions, and then you can get a decent perspective on them.

“Poor child,” she cut in when I told her of Salla’s hair being caught. “Poor child, to feel that pain is a privilege-“

“Better that than having pain a way of life!” I flashed. “Who should know better than you?”

“Perhaps, perhaps. Who is to say which is better-to hunger and be fed, or to be fed so continuously that you never know hunger? Sometimes a little fasting is good for the soul. Think of a cold drink of water after an afternoon in the hayfield.”

I shivered at the delicious recollection. “Well, anyway …” and I finished the account for her. I was almost out of the door before I suddenly realized that I hadn’t mentioned Davy at all! I went back and told her. Before I was half through her face twisted and her hair swirled protectively over it. When I finished I stood there awkwardly, not knowing exactly what to do. Then I caught a faint echo of her thought. “A voice again….” I think a little of my contempt for gadgets died at the moment. Anything that could pleasure Obla …

I thought I was troubled about whether we should go or stay, until the afternoon I found all the Blends and In-gathereds sitting together on the boulders above Cougar Creek. Dita was trailing the water from her bare toes, and all the rest were concentrating on the falling of the drops as though there were some answer in them. The Francher kid was making a sharp crystal scale out of their falling. I came openly so there was no thought of eavesdropping, but I don’t think they were fully aware that I was there.

“But for me-” Dita drew her knees up to her chest and clasped her wet feet in her hands, “for me it’s different. You’re Blends, or all of the People. But I’m all of Earth. My roots are anchored in this old rock. Think what it would mean to me to say good-by to my world. Think back to the Crossing-” A ripple of discomfort moved through the Group. “You see? And yet, to stay-to watch the People go, to know them gone-” She laid her cheek against her knees.

The quick comfort of the others enveloped her, and Low moved to the boulder beside her.

“It’d be as bad for us to leave,” he said. “Sure, we’re of the People, but this is the only Home we’ve known. I didn’t grow up in a Group. None of us did. All of our roots are firmly set here, too. To leave-“

“What has the New Home to offer that we don’t have here?” Peter started a little whirlpool in the shallow stream below.

“Well-” Low stilled the whirlpool and spoke into a lengthening silence, “ask Bram. He’s all afire to blast off.” He grinned over his shoulder at me.

“The new Home is our world,” I said, drifting over to them, gathering my scattered thoughts. “We would be among our own. No more concealment. No more trying to fit in where we don’t fit. No more holding back, holding back, when we could be doing so much.”

I could feel the surge and swirl of thoughts around me-each person aligning himself to the vision of the Home. Without any further word they all left the creek, absorbed in the problem. As they slowly scattered there was not an echo of a thought. Everyone was shutting himself up with his own reactions.

All the peace and tranquility of Cougar Canyon was gone. Oh, sure, the light still slanted brightly through the trees at dawn, the wind still stirred the branches in the hot quiet afternoons and occasionally whipped up little whirlwinds to dance the dried leaves in a brief flurry of action, and the slender new moon was cleanly bright in the evening sky-but it was all overlaid with a big question mark.

I couldn’t settle to anything. Halfway through ripping a plank at the mill I’d think, “Why bother? We’ll be gone soon.” And then the spasm of acute pleasure and anticipation would somehow turn to the pain of bereavement and I’d feel like clutching a handful of sawdust and-well-sobbing into it.

And late at night, changing the headgates to irrigate another alfalfa field, I’d kick the moss-slick wet boards and think exultantly, “When we get there we won’t have to go through this mumbo-jumbo. We’ll rain the water where and when we want it!”

Then again, I’d lie in the edge of the hot sun, my head in the shade of the cottonwoods, and feel the deep soaking warmth to my very bone, smell the waiting dusty smell of the afternoon, feel sleep wrapping itself around my thoughts and hear the sudden creaking cries of the red-winged blackbirds in the far fields, and suddenly know that I couldn’t leave it. Couldn’t give up Earth for any thing or any place.

But there was Salla. Showing her Earth was like nothing you could ever imagine. For instance it never occurred to her that things could hurt her. Like the day I found her halfway across Furnace Flat, huddled under a pinion pine, cradling her bare feet in her hands and rocking with pain.

“Where are your shoes?” It was the first thing I could think of as I hunched beside her.

“Shoes?” She caught the picture from me. “Oh, shoes. My-sandals-are at the ship. I wanted to feel this world. We shield so much at home that I couldn’t tell you a thing about textures there. But the sand was so good the first night, and water is wonderful, I thought this black glowing smoothness and splinteredness would be a different sort of texture.” She smiled ruefully. “It is. It’s hot and-and-“

I supplied a word, “Hurty. I should think so. This shale flat heats up like a furnace this time of day. That’s why it’s called Furnace Flat.”

“I landed in the middle of it, running. I was so surprised that I didn’t have sense enough to lift or shield.”

“Let me see.” I loosened her fingers and took one of her slender white feet in my hand. “Adonday Veeah!” I whistled. Carefully I picked off a few loose flakes of bloodstained shale.

“You’ve practically blistered your feet, too. Don’t you know the sun can be vicious this time of day?”

“I know now.” She took her feet back and peered at the sole. “Look! There’s blood!”

“Yep. That’s usual when you puncture your skin. Better come on back to the house and get those feet taken care of.”

“Taken care of?”

“Sure. Antiseptic for the germs, salve for the burns. You won’t go hunting for a day or two. Not with your feet, anyway.”

“Can’t we just no-bi and transgraph? It’s so much simpler.”

“Indubitably,” I said, lifting sitting as she did and straightening up in the air above the path. “‘If I knew what you were talking about.” We headed for the house.

“Well, at Home the Healers-“

“This is Earth,” I said. “We have no Healers as yet. Only in so far as our Sensitive can help out those who know about healing. It’s mostly a do-it-yourself deal with us. And who knows, you might be allergic to us and sprout day lilies at every puncture. It’ll probably worry your mother-“

“Mother-” There was a curious pause. “Mother is annoyed with me already. She feels that I’m definitely undene. She wishes she’d left me Home. She’s afraid I’ll never be the same again.”

“Undene?” I asked, because Salla had sent out no clarification with the term.

“Yes,” she said, and I caught at visualization until light finally began to dawn.

“Well! We don’t exactly eat peas with our knives or wipe our noses on our sleeves! We can be pretty couth when we set our minds to it.”

“I know, I know,” she hastened to say, “but Mother-well, you know some mothers.”

“Yes, I know. But if you never walk or climb or swim or anything like that what do you do for fun?”

“It’s not that we never do them. But seldom casually and unthinkingly. We’re supposed to outgrow the need for childish activities like that. We’re supposed to be capable of more intellectual pleasures.”

“Like what?” I held the branches aside for her to descend to the kitchen door, and nearly kinked my shoulder trying to do that and open the door for her simultaneously. After several false starts and stops and a feeling of utter foolishness, like the one you get when you try to dodge past a person who tries to dodge past you, we ended up at the kitchen table with Salla gasping at the smart of the Merthiolate. “Like what?” I repeated.

“Hoosh! That’s quite a sensation.” She loosened her clutch on her ankles and relaxed under the soothing salve I spread on her reddened feet.

“Well, Mother’s favorite-and she does it very well-is Anticipating. She likes roses.”

“So do I,” I said, bewildered, “but I seldom Anticipate in connection with them.”

Salla laughed. I liked to hear her laugh. It was more nearly a musical phrase than a laugh. The Francher kid, the first time he heard it, made a composition of it. Of course neither he nor I liked it very much when the other kids in the Canyon, revved it up and used it for a dance tune, but I must admit it had quite a beat …. Well, anyway, Salla laughed.

“You know, for two people using the same words we certainly come out at different comprehensions. No-what Mother likes is Anticipating a rose. She chooses a bud that looks interesting-she knows all the finer distinctions-then she makes a rose, synthetic, as nearly like the real bud as she can. Then, for two or three days, she sees if she can anticipate every movement of the opening of the real rose by opening her synthetic simultaneously, or, if she’s very adept, just barely ahead of the other.” She laughed again. “It’s one of our family stories-the time she chose a bud that did nothing for two days, then shivered to dust. Somehow it had been sprayed with destro. Mother’s never quite got over the humiliation.”

“Maybe I’m being undene,” I said, “but I can’t see spending two days watching a rose bud.”

“And yet you spent a whole hour just looking at the sky last evening. And four of you spent hours last night receiving and displaying cards. You got quite emotional over it several times.”

“Umm-well, yes. But that’s different. A sunset like that, and the way Jemmy plays-” I caught the teasing in her eyes and we laughed together. Laughter needs no interpreter, at least not our laughter.

Salla took so much pleasure in sampling our world that, as is usual, I discovered things about our neighborhood I hadn’t known before. It was she who found the cave, became she was curious about the tiny trickle of water high on the slope of Baldy.

“Just a spring,” I told her as we looked up at the dark streak that marked a fold in the massive cliff.

“Just a spring,” she mocked. “In this land of little water is there such a thing as just a spring?”

“It’s not worth anything,” I protested, following her up into the air. “You can’t even drink from it.”

“It could ease a heart hunger, though. The sight of wetness in an arid land.”

“It can’t even splash,” I said as we neared the streak.

“No,” Salla said, holding her forefinger to the end of the moisture. “But it can grow things.” Lightly she touched the minute green plants that clung to the rock wall and the dampness.

“Pretty,” I said perfunctorily. “But look at the view from here.”

We turned around, pressing our backs to the sheer cliff, and looked out over the vast stretches of red-to-purple-to-blue ranges of mountains, jutting fiercely naked or solidly forested or speckled with growth as far as we could see. And lazily, far away, a shaft of smelter smoke rose and bent almost at right angles as an upper current caught it and thinned it to haze. Below, fold after fold of the hills hugged protectively to themselves the tiny comings and goings and dwelling places of those who had lost themselves in the vastness.

“And yet,” Salla almost whispered, “if you’re lost in vast enough vastness you find yourself-a different self, a self that has only Being and the Presence to contemplate.”

“True,” I said, breathing deeply of sun and pine and hot granite. “But not many reach that vastness. Most of us size our little worlds to hold enough distractions to keep us from having to contemplate Being and God.”

There was a moment’s deep silence as we let our own thoughts close the subject. Then Salla lifted and I started down.

“Hey!” I called. “That’s up!”

“I know it,” she called. “And that’s down! I still haven’t found the spring!”

So I lifted, too, grumbling at the stubbornness of women, and arrived even with Salla just as she perched tentatively on a sharp spur of rock on the edge of the vegetation-covered gash that was the beginning of the oozing wetness. She looked straight down the dizzy thousands of feet below us.

“What beautiful downness!” she said, pleasured.

“If you were afraid of heights-’”

She looked at me quickly. “Are some people? Really?”

“Some are. I read one, one time. Would you care to try the texture of that?” And I created for her the horrified frantic dying terror of an Outsider friend of mine who hardly dares look out of a second-story window.

“Oh, no!” She paled and clung to the scanty draping of vines and branches of the cleft. “No more! No more!”

“I’m sorry. But it is a different sort of emotion. I think of it every time I read-‘neither height nor depth nor any other creature.’ Height to my friend is a creature-a horrible hovering destroyer waiting to pounce on him.”

“It’s too bad;’ Salla said, “that he doesn’t remember to go on to the next phrase, and learn to lose his fear-“

By quick common consent we switched subjects in midair.

“This is the source,” I said. “Satisfied?”

“No.” She groped among the vines. “I want to see a trickle trickle, and a drop drop from the beginning.” She burrowed deeper.

Rolling my eyes to heaven for patience, I helped her hold back the vines. She reached for the next layer-and suddenly wasn’t there.

“Salla!” I scrabbled at the vines. “Salla!”

“H-h-here,” I caught her subvocal answer.

“Talk!” I said as I felt her thought melt out of my consciousness.

“I am talking!” Her reply broke to audibility on the last word. “And I’m sitting in some awfully cold wet water. Do come in.” I squirmed cautiously through the narrow cleft into the darkness and stumbled to my knees in icy water almost waist-deep.

“It’s dark,” Salla whispered, and her voice ran huskily around the place.

“Wait for your eyes to change,” I whispered back, and, groping through the water, caught her hand and clung to it. But even after a breathless sort of pause our eyes could not pick up enough light to see by-only faint green shimmer where the cleft was.

“Had enough?” I asked. “Is this trickly and drippy enough?” I lifted our hands and the water sluiced off our elbows.

“I want to see,” she protested.

“Matches are inoperative when they’re wet. Flashlight have I none. Suggestions?’”

“Well, no. You don’t have any Glowers living here, do you?”

“Since the word rings no bell, I guess not. But, say!” I dropped her hand and, rising to my knees, fumbled for my pocket. “Dita taught me—or tried to after Valancy told her how come—” I broke off, immersed in the problem of trying to get a hand into and out of the pocket of skin-tight wet Levi’s.

“I know I’m an Outlander,” Salla said plaintively, “but I thought I had a fairly comprehensive knowledge of your language.”

“Dita’s the Outsider that we found with Low. She’s got some Designs and Persuasions none of us have. There!” I grunted, and settled back in the water. “Now if I can remember.”

I held the thin dime between my fingers and shifted all those multiples of mental gears that are so complicated until you work your way through their complexity to the underlying simplicity. I concentrated my whole self on that little disc of metal. There was a sudden blinding spurt of light. Salla cried out, and I damped the light quickly to a more practical level.

“I did it!” I cried. “I glowed it first thing, this time! It took me half an hour last time to get a spark!”

Salla was looking in wonder at the tiny globe of brilliance in my hand. “‘And an Outsider can do that?”

“Can do!” I said, suddenly very proud of our Outsiders.

“And so can I, now! There you are, ma’am,” I twanged. “Yore light, yore cave-look to yore little heart’s content.”

I don’t suppose it was much as caves go. The floor was sand, pale, granular, almost sugarlike. The pool-out of which we both dripped as soon as we sighted dry land-had no apparent source, but stayed always at the same level in spite of the slender flow that streaked the cliff. The roof was about twice my height and the pool was no farther than that across. The walls curved protectively close around the water. At first glance there was nothing special about the cave. There weren’t even any stalactites or stalagmites-just the sand and the quiet pool shimmering a little in the light of the glowed coin.

“Well!” Salla sighed happily as she pushed back her heavy hair with wet hands. “This is where it begins.”

“Yes.” I closed my hand around the dime and watched the light spray between my fingers. “Wetly, I might point out.”

Salla was scrambling across the sand on all fours.

“It’s high enough to stand,” I said, following her.

“I’m being a cave creature,” she smiled back over her shoulder. “Not a human surveying a kingdom. It looks different from down here.”

“Okay, troglodyte. How does it look down there?”

“Marvelous!” Salla’s voice was very soft; “Bring the light and look!”

We lay on our stomachs and peered into the tiny tunnel, hardly a foot across, that Salla had found. I focused the light down the narrow passageway. The whole thing was a lacy network of delicate crystals, white, clear, rosy and pale green, so fragile that I held my breath lest they break. The longer I looked the more wonder I saw-miniature forests and snowflakelike laciness, flights of fairy steps, castles and spires, flowers terraced up gentle hill sides and branches of blossoms almost alive enough to sway. An arm’s length down the tunnel a quietly bright pool reflected the perfection around it to double the enchantment.

Salla and I looked at each other, our faces so close together that we were mirrored in each other’s eyes-eyes that stated and reaffirmed: Ours-no one else in all the universe shares this spot with us.

Wordlessly we sat back on the sand. I don’t know about Salla, but I was having a little difficulty with my breathing, because, for some odd reason, it seemed necessary to hold my breath to shield from being as easily read as a child.

“Let’s leave the light,” Salla whispered. “It’ll stay lighted without you, won’t it?”

“Yeah. Indefinitely.”

“Leave it by the little cave. Then we’ll know it’s always lighted and lovely.”

We edged our way out of the cleft in the cliff and hovered there for a minute, laughing at our bedraggled appearance. Then we headed for home and dry clothes.

“I wish Obla could see the cave,” I said impulsively. Then wished I hadn’t because I caught Salla’s immediate displeased protest.

“I mean,” I said awkwardly, “she never gets to see-” I broke off. After all she wouldn’t be able to see any better if she were there. I would have to be her eyes.

“Obla.” Salla wasn’t vocalizing now. “She’s very near to you.”

“She’s almost my second self.”

“A relative?”

“No. Only as souls are related.”

“I can feel her in your thoughts so often. And yet-have I ever met her?”

“No. She doesn’t meet people.” I was holding in my mind the clean uncluttered strength of Obla; then again I caught Salla’s distressed protest and her feeling of being excluded, before she shielded. Still I hesitated. I didn’t want to share. Obla was more an expression of myself than a separate person. An expression that was hidden and precious. I was afraid to share-afraid that it might be like touching a finger to a fragile chemical fern in the little tunnel, that there wouldn’t even be a ping before the perfection shivered to a shapeless powder.

Two weeks after the ship arrived a general Group meeting was called. We all gathered on the flat around the ship. It looked like a field day at first, with the flat filled with laughing lifting children playing tag above the heads of the more sedate elders. The kids my age clustered at one side, tugged toward playing tag, too, but restrained because after all you do outgrow some things-when people are looking. I sat there with them, feeling an emptiness beside me. Salla was with her parents.

The Oldest was not there. He was at home struggling to contain his being in the broken body that was becoming more and more a dissolving prison. So Jemmy called us to attention.

“Long-drawn periods of indecision are not good,” he said without preliminary. “The ship has been here two weeks. We have all faced our problem-to go or to stay. There are many of us who have not yet come to a decision. This we must do soon. The ship will up a week from today. To help us decide we are now open to brief statements pro or con.”

There was an odd tightening feeling as the whole Group flowed into a common thought stream and became a single unit instead of a mass of individuals.

“I will go.” It was the thought of the Oldest from his bed back in the Canyon. “The new Home has the means to help me, so that the years yet allotted to me may be nearly painless. Since the Crossing-” He broke off, flashing an amused.

” ‘Brief’!”

“I will stay.” It was the voice of one of the young girls from Bendo. “We have only started to make Bendo a place fit to live in. I like beginnings. The new Home sounds finished, to me.”

“I don’t want to go away,’ a very young voice piped. “My radishes are just coming up and I hafta water them all the time. They’d die if I left.” Amusement tippled through the Group and relaxed us.

“I’ll go.” It was Matt, called back from Tech by the ship’s arrival. “In the Home my field of specialization has developed far beyond what we have at Tech or anywhere else. But I’m coming back.”

“There can be no free and easy passage back and forth between the Home and Earth,” Jemmy warned, “for a number of very valid reasons.”

“I’ll chance it,” Matt said. “I’ll make it back.”

“I’m staying,” the Francher kid said. “‘Here on Earth we’re different with a plus. There we’d be different with a minus. What we can do and do well won’t be special there. I don’t want to go where I’d be making ABC songs. I want my music to go on being big.”

“I’m going,” Jake said, his voice mocking as usual. “I’m through horsing around. I’m going to become a solid citizen. But I want to go in for-” His verbalization stopped, and all I could comprehend was an angular sort of concept wound with time and space as with serpentine. I saw my own blankness on the faces around me and felt a little less stupid. “See,” Jake said. “That’s what I’ve been having on the tip of my mind for a long time. Shua tells me they’ve got a fair beginning on it there. I’ll be willing to ABC it for a while for a chance at something like that.”

I cleared my throat. Here was my chance to broadcast to the whole Group what I intended to do! Apparently I was the only one seeing the situation clearly enough. “I-“

It was as though I’d stepped into a dense fog bank. I felt as though I’d gone blind and dumb at one stroke. I had a feeling of being torn like a piece of paper. I lost all my breath as I became vividly conscious of my actual thoughts. I didn’t want to go! I was snatched into a mad whirlpool of thoughts at this realization. How could I stay after all I’d said? How could I go and know Earth no more? How could I stay and let Salla go? How could I go and leave Obla behind? Dimly I heard someone else’s voice finishing:

“… because Home or no Home, this is Home to me!”

I closed my gaping wordless mouth and wet my dry lips. I could see again-see the Group slowly dissolving-the Bendo Group gathering together under the trees, the rest drifting away from the flat. Low leaned across the rock. “S’matter, feller?” he laughed. “Cat got your tongue? I expected a blast of eloquence from you that’d push the whole Group up the gangplank.”

“Bram’s bashful!” Dita teased. “He doesn’t like to make his convictions known!”

I tried a sort of smile. “Pity me, people,” I said. “Before you stands a creature shorn of convictions, nekkid as a jay bird in the cold winds of indecision.”

“Fresh out of long-johns,” Peter said, sobering. “But there’s plenty of sympathy available.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Noted and appreciated.”

I couldn’t take my new doubt and indecision, the new tumult and pain to Obla-not when she was so much a part of it, so I took them up into the hills. I perched like a brooding buzzard on the stone spur outside the little cave, high above the Canyon. Wildly, until my throat ached and my voice croaked, I railed against this world and its limitations. Hoarsely I whispered over all the lets and hindrances that plagued us-that plagued me. And, infuriatingly, the world and all its echoes placidly paced my every argument with solid rebuttal. I was hearing with both ears now, one for my own voice, one for the world’s reply. And my voice got fainter and fainter, and Earth’s voice wasn’t a whisper any more.

“Nothing is the way it should be!” I hoarsely yelled my last weary assault at the evening sky.

“And never will be, short of eternity,” replied the streak of sunset crimson.

“But we could do so much more-“

“Whoever heard of bread made only of leaven?” replied the first evening star.

“We’re being wasted,” I whispered.

“So is the wheat when it’s broadcast in the field,” answered the fringe of pines on the crest of a far hill.

“But Salla will go. She’ll be gone-“

And nothing answered-only the wind cried and a single piece of dislodged gravel rattled down into the darkness.

“Salla!” I cried. “Salla will be gone! Answer that one if you can!” But the world was through with answers. The wind became very busy humming through the dusk.

“Answer me!” I had only a whisper left.

“I will.” The voice was very soft but it shook me like a blast of lightning. “I can answer.” Salla eased lightly down on the spur beside me. “Salla is staying.”

“Salla!” I could only clutch the rock and stare.

“Mother had a quanic when I told her,” Salla smiled, easing the tight uncomfortable emotion. “I told her I needed a research paper to finish my Level requirements and that this would be just perfect for it.

“She said I was too young to know my own mind. I said finishing high in my Level would he quite a feather in her cap-if you’ll pardon the provincialism. And she said she didn’t even know your parents.” Salla colored, her eyes wavering.

“I told her there had been no word between us. That we were not Two-ing. Yet. Much.”

“It doesn’t have to be now!” I cried, grabbing both her hands.

“Oh, Salla! Now we can afford to wait!” And I yanked her off the spur into the maddest wildest flight of my life. Like a couple of crazy things we split and resplit the air above Baldy, soaring and diving like drunken lightning. But all the time part: of us was moving so far, so fast, another part of us was talking quietly together, planning, wondering, rejoicing, as serenely as if we were back in the cave again, seeing each other in quiet reflective eyes. Finally darkness closed in entirely and we leaned exhausted against each other, drifting slowly toward the canyon floor.

“Obla-” I said, “let’s go tell Obla.” There was no need to shield any part of my life from Salla any more. In fact there was a need to make it a cohesive whole, complete with both Obla and Salla.

Obla’s windows were dark. That meant no one was visiting her. She would be alone. I rapped lightly on the door-my own particular rap.

“Bram? Come in!” I caught welcome from Obla.

“I brought Salla,” I said. “Let me turn the light on.” I stepped in.

“Wait-“

But simultaneously with her cry I flipped the light switch.

“Salla,” I started, “this is-“

Salla screamed and threw her arm across her eyes; a sudden overflooding of horrified revulsion choked the room, and Obla was fluttering in the far upper corner of the room-hiding-hiding herself behind the agonized swirl of her hair, her broken body in the twisting of her white gown, pressing itself to the walls, struggling for escape, her startled physical and mental anguish moaning almost audibly around us.

I grabbed Salla and yanked her out of the room, snapping the light off as we went. I dragged her out to the edge of the yard where the canyon walls shot upward. I flung her against the sandstone wall. She turned and hid her face against the rock, sobbing. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her.

“‘How could you!” I gritted between my teeth, outraged anger thickening my words. “Is that the kind of people the Home is turning out now? Counting arms and legs and eyes more than the person?” Her tumbling hair whipped across my chin. “Permitting rejection and disgust for any living soul? Aren’t you taught even common kindness and compassion?” I wanted to hit her-to hit anything solid to protest this unthinkable thing that had been done to Obla, this unhealable wounding.

Salla snatched herself out of my grasp and hovered just out of reach, wet eyes glaring angrily down at me.

“It’s your fault, too!” she snapped, tears flowing. “I’d have died rather than do a thing like that to Obla or anyone else-if I had known! You didn’t tell me. You never visualized her that way-only strength and beauty and wholeness!”

“Why not!” I shot back angrily, lifting-level with her. “That’s the only way I ever see her any more. And trying to shift the blame-“

“It is your fault! Oh, Bram!” And she was crying in my arms. When she could speak again between sniffs and hiccoughs she said, “‘We don’t have people like that at Home. I mean, I never saw a-an incomplete person. I never saw scars and mutilation. Don’t you see, Bram? I was holding myself ready to receive her, completely-because she was part of you. And then to find myself embracing-” She choked. “Look-look, Bram, we have transgraph and-and regeneration-and no one ever stays unfinished.”

I let go of her slowly, lost in wonder. “Regeneration? Transgraph?”

“Yes, yes!” Salla cried. “She can have back her legs. She can have arms again. She can have her beautiful face again. She may even get back her eyes and her voice, though I don’t know for sure about that. She can be Obla again, instead of a dark prison for Obla.”

“No one told us.”

“No one asked.”

“‘Common concern.”

“I’ll ask then. Have you any dobic children? And cases of cazerinea? Any trimorph semia? It’s not that we don’t want to ask. How are we to know what to ask? We’ve never even heard of a-a basket case.” She took the word from me. “It just didn’t occur to us to ask.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, drying her eyes with the palms of my hands, lacking anything better. “I should have told you.” My words were but scant surface indications of my deep abject apology.

“Come,” she said, pulling away from me. “We must go to Obla-now-right now.”

It was Salla who finally coaxed Obla back down to her bed. It was Salla who held the broken weeping face against her slight young shoulder and poured the healing balms of her sorrow and understanding over Obla’s wounds. And it was Salla who told Obla of what the Home held for her. Told her and told her and told her, until Obla finally believed.

All three of us were limp and weary by then, and all three content just to sit for a minute, so the explosion of Davy into the room was twice the shock it ordinarily would have been.

“Hi, Bram! Hi, Salla! Hey, Obla! I got it fixed now. It won’t hiss on the s’s any more and you can trip the playback yourself. Here.” He plopped onto her pillow the little cube I recognized as his scriber. “Try it out. Go on. Try it out on Bram.”

Obla turned her face until her cheek felt the cube. Salla looked at me in wonderment and then at Obla. There was a brief pause and then a slight click and I heard, tiny but distinct, the first audible word I’d ever heard from Obla.

“Bram! Oh, Bram! Now I can go with you. I won’t be left behind. And when we get to the Home I’ll be whole again! Whole again!”

Through my shock I heard Davy say, “You didn’t even use one s, Obla! Say something essy, so’s I can check it.”

Obla thought I was going to the Home! She expected me to go with her! She didn’t know I’d decided to stay. That we were going to stay. I met Salla’s eyes. Our communication was quick and complete before the small voice said, “Salla, my sweet sister! I trust that’s sufficiently ‘essy’!” And I heard Obla’s laugh for the first time.

So, somewhere way back there, there is a tiny cave with a dime glowing in it, keeping in trust a preciousness between Salla and me-a candle in the window of memory. Somewhere way back there are the sights and sounds, the. smells and tastes, the homeness of Earth. For a while I have turned my back on the Promised Land. For our Jordan was crossed those long years ago. My trouble was that I thought that wherever I looked, just because I did the looking, was the goal ahead. But all the time, the Crossing, shimmering in the light of memory, had been something completed, not something yet to reach. My yearning for the Home must have been a little of the old hunger for the fleshpots that haunts any pioneering effort.

And Salla … Well, sometimes when I’m not looking she looks at me and then at Obla. And sometimes when she isn’t looking I look at her and then at Obla. Obla has no eyes, but sometimes when we aren’t looking she looks at me and then at Salla.

Things will happen to all three of us before Earth swells again in the portholes. but whatever happens Earth will swell in the portholes again-at least for me. And then I will truly be coming Home.

Zoltan 1.0