Steel Beach

CHAPTER TWENTY

Ezekiel saw the wheel. Moses saw the burning bush. Joe Smith saw the Angel Moroni, and every electro-preacher since Billy Sunday saw a chance at good ratings in prime time and more money than he could lift.

Hayseed farmers, asteroid miners and chronic drug abusers have seen Unidentified Flying Objects and little guys who want to see our leaders. Drunks see pink elephants and brontosaurs and bugs crawling all over everything. The Buddha saw enlightenment and Mohammed must have seen something, though I was never clear just what it was. Dying people see a long tunnel full of light with all the people they hated while they were alive standing at the end of it. The Founding Flack knew a good thing when he saw it. Christians are looking to see Jesus, Walter is looking for a good story, and a gambler is looking for that fourth ace to turn up; sometimes they see these things.

People have been seeing things like that since the first caveman noticed dark shadows stirring out there beyond the light of the campfire, but until the day of the Bicentennial Hildy Johnson had never seen anything.

Give me a sign, O Lord, she had been crying, that I might know Thy shape. And behold, the Lord sent unto her a sign.

A butterfly.

It was a Monarch butterfly, quite lovely in its orange and black, quite ordinary at first glance, except for its location. But upon closer examination I found something on its back, about the size of a gelatin capsule, that looked for all the world like an air tank.

Yes, dear ones, never throw anything away. You don't know when you might need it. I'd had no use for my optic holocam for quite a while, since the Texian isn't equipped to print pictures. But Walter had never asked me to give it back and I'd not gone to the bother of having it removed, so it was still there in my left eye, recording everything I saw, faithfully storing it all until capacity was exhausted, then wiping it to make way for the new stuff. Many a wild-eyed prophet before me would have killed to have a holocam, so he could prove to those doubting bastards he'd really seen those green cocker spaniels get out of the whistling gizmo that landed on the henhouse.

Considering the number of cameras made between the Brownie and the end of the twentieth century, you'd think more intriguing pictures would have been taken of paranormal events, but look for them-I did-and you'll come up with a bucket of space. After that, of course, computers got so good that any picture could be faked.

But the only person I had to convince was myself. The first thing I did, back in the tent, was to secure the data into permanent storage. The second thing I did was to not tell anybody what I'd seen. Part of that was reporter's instinct: you don't blab until the story's nailed down. The rest was admission of the weaknesses flesh is heir to: I hadn't been the soberest of witnesses. But more importantly… this was my vision. It had been granted to me. Not to Cricket, that ingrate, who'd have seen it if he'd said he loved me and thrown his arms around me and told me what a knuckle-headed dope he'd been. Not to Miss Pulitzer Prize Brenda (you think that, just because I gave her the big story, I wasn't jealous? You poor fool, you). Just me.

And Winston. How could I have thought that gorgeous hound was ugly? The third thing I did back in the tent was give that most sublime quadruped a pound of my best sausage, and apologize for not having anything better-like a Pomeranian, or a Siamese.

We're not talking about the butterfly now. That was amazing, but a few wonders short of a nonesuch.

It was an air tank on the insect's back. With suitable enlargement I could make out tiny lines going from it to the wings. The images got fuzzy when I tried to find out where they went. But I could guess: since there was no air for it to fly in, and since it seemed to be flying, I deduced it was kept aloft by reaction power, air squirting from the underside of its wings. Comparing this specimen to one mounted in a museum I noted differences in the carapace. A vacuum-proof shell? Probably. The air tank could dribble oxygen into the butterfly's blood.

None of the equipment I could identify was what you'd call off-the-shelf, but so what? Nanobots can build the most cunning, tiny machines, much smaller than the air tank and regulator and (possibly) gyro I saw. As for the carapace, that shouldn't be too hard to effect with genetic engineering. So somebody was building bugs to live on the surface. So what? All that implied was an eccentric tinkerer, and Luna is lousy with them. And that's just the sort of hare-brained thing they build.

All this research was being done in bed, in Texas.

On my way home from the celebration I'd stopped at a store and bought a disposable computer, television, recorder, and flashlight and put them in my pocket and smuggled them past temporal customs. Easy. Everybody does it, with small items, and the guards don't even have to be bribed. I waited till nightfall, then got in bed and pulled the covers over my head, turned on the light, unrolled the television, dumped the holocam footage into the recorder and wiped all traces of it from my cerebral banks. Then I started scanning the footage frame by frame.

Why all the secrecy? I honestly couldn't have told you at the time. I knew I didn't want the CC to see this material but don't know why I felt it was so important. Instinct, I guess. And I couldn't have guaranteed even these measures would keep him from finding out, but it was the best I could do. Using a throwaway number cruncher instead of hooking in to the mainframe seemed a reasonable way to keep the data away from him, so long as I didn't ever network it with any other system. He's good, but he's not magic.

It was an hour's work to deal with the butterfly and file it under Wonderments, Lepidopterous. Then I moved on to the miracle.

Height: Five foot two. Eyes: of blue. Hair: blonde, almost white, shoulder-length, straight. Complexion: light brown, probably from tanning. Apparent age: ten or eleven (no pubic hair or bust, two prominent front teeth, facial clues). Distinguishing marks: none. Build: slender. Clothing: none.

She could have been much older; a small minority prefer to Peter Pan it through life, never maturing. But I doubted it, from the way she moved. The teeth were a clue, as well. I pegged her for a natural, not modified, she just grew that way.

She was visible for 11.4 seconds, not running hard, not bouncing too high with each step. She seemed to come out of a black hole and fall back into one. I was being methodical about this, so I got everything I could out of those 11.4 seconds before moving on to the frames I was dying to examine: the first one, and the last one.

Item: If she was a ghost, then ghosts have mass. I'd been unable to find her footprints among the thousands of others there on the crater rim (I had noted a lot of the prints had toes, but it meant nothing; lots of kids wear boots that leave prints like bare feet), but the film clearly showed the prints being made, the dust being kicked up. The computer studied the prints and concluded the girl massed about what you'd expect.

Item: She was not completely naked. In a few frames I could see biomagnetic thermosoles on the bottoms of her feet, a damn good idea if you're going to run over the blazing rocks of the surface. There was also a bit of jewelry sticking to her chest, a few inches above the left nipple. It was brass-colored, and shaped more like a pressure fitting than anything else I could think of. Conjecture: Maybe it was a pressure fitting. The snap-on type, universally used to connect air hoses to tanks.

Item: In some of the early frames a slight mist could be seen in front of her face. It looked like moisture freezing, as if she had exhaled. There was no sign of respiration after that.

Item: She was aware of my presence. Between step four and step five she turned her head and looked directly at me for half a second. She smiled. Then she made a goofy face and crossed her eyes.

I made a few more observations, none of them seeming very relevant or shedding any real light on the mystery. Oh, yes: Item: I liked her. Making that face was just the sort of thing I would have done at her age. At first I thought she was taunting me, but I watched it over and over and concluded she was daring me. Catch me if you can, old lady. Doll-face, I plan to.

Then I spent most of the rest of the night analyzing just a few seconds of images before and after her appearance. When I was done I wiped the data from the computer, and for good measure, put it in with the glowing embers of the fire in my kitchen stove. It crackled and popped nicely. Now the only record of my experience was in the little recorder.

I slept with it under my pillow.

Next Friday, after putting the Texian to bed, I went back to Hamilton's and purchased a two-man tent. If that puzzles you, you've never tried to live in a one-man tent. I had it delivered to the rover rental office nearest the old mining road, where I leased a vehicle from their second-hand fleet, paying two months in advance to get the best rate. I had it tanked full of oxygen and checked the battery level and kicked the tires and had them replace a sagging leaf spring, and set off for Delambre.

I set up the tent in the exact spot where we'd been seven days before. Sunday night I struck the tent, having seen nothing at all, and drove back to park the rover in a rented garage.

The Friday after that, I did the same thing.

I spent all my weekends out at Delambre for quite a long time. It was enough that, soon, I had to trade in my nice new suit for a maternity model. If you've never worn one of those, don't even ask. But nothing was going to keep me away from Delambre, not even a developing pregnancy.

It all made sense to me at the time. Looking back, I can see some questions about my behavior, but I think I'd still do it again. But let's try to answer a few of them shall we?

I only spent the weekends at the crater because I still needed Texas to give my life some stability. I still would have kept coming back until the end of the school term because I felt I had a responsibility to those who hired me, and to the children. But the question didn't arise, because I needed the job more than it needed me. Each Sunday evening I found myself longing for my cabin. I guess a true Visionary would have been ashamed of me; you're supposed to drop everything and pursue the Vision.

I did the best I could. Every Friday I couldn't get out of the disney fast enough. I attended no more churches, unburdened my soul to no more quacks.

It's a little harder explaining the pregnancy. A little embarrassing, too. As part of my efforts to experience as much as possible of what life had been like on Old Earth, I had had my menstrual cycle restored. I know it sounds crazy. I'd expected it would be a one-time thing, like the corset, but found it not nearly as onerous as Callie had cracked it up to be. I hadn't intended to let it go on forever, I wasn't that silly, but I thought, I don't know, half a dozen periods or so, then over and out. The rest is really no mystery at all. It's just what happens to fertile nulliparous centenarians who know zip about Victorian methods of birth control, and who are so un-wise as to couple with a guy who swears he's not going to come.

The real mystery came after the rabbit died (I boned up on the terminology after I got the news). Why keep it?

The best I can say is that I'd never ruled out child-bearing as something I might do, some day, some distant day when I had twenty years to spare. Naturally, that day never seemed to dawn. Having a baby is probably something you have to want to do, badly, with an almost instinctual urge that seems to reside in some women and not in others. Looking around me, I had noted there were plenty of women who had this urge. Boy, did they have the urge. I'd never felt it. The species seemed in fine shape in the hands of these breeder women, and I'd never flattered myself that I'd be any good at it, so it was always a matter of someday.

But enough unsuccessful and unplanned and un-understood suicide attempts focuses the mind wonderfully. I realized that if I didn't do it now, I might never do it. And it was the one major human experience I could think of that I might want to have and had not had. And, as I said, I'd been looking for a sign, O Lord, and this seemed like one. A bolt from the blue, not on the order of the Girl and Butterfly, but a portent all the same.

Which simply meant that every Friday on my way to Delambre I gave serious thought to stopping off and having the damn thing taken care of, and every time, so far, had elected to keep it, not exactly by a landslide.

There's an old wives' tale that a pregnant woman should not visit the surface. If that's true, why do they make maternity suits? The only danger is of coming into labor while in the suit, and that's not much of a danger. An ambulance can get you from any point on Luna to a birthing center in twenty minutes. That was not a concern to me. Nor was I neglecting my duties as an incubator. I got roaring drunk that once, but that's easily cured. Each Wednesday I visited a check-up center and was told things were cooking nicely. Each Thursday I dropped by Ned Pepper's office and, if he was sober enough, let him poke me and thump me and pronounce me as fine a heifer as he'd ever come across, and sell me a bottle of yellow elixir which did wonders for my struggling rose bushes.

If I kept it to term, I intended to bear it naturally. (It was a male, but it seems silly to think of an embryo as having a sex.) When I was about twenty it seemed for a while that birthing was soon to be a thing of the past. The large majority of women were rearing their pups in jars, often prominently displayed on the living room coffee table. I watched many a neighbor's blastocyst mature over the years, peering into the scope with all the enthusiasm one usually brings to viewing Uncle Luigi's holos of his trip to Mars. I watched many a mother scratching the bottle and cooing and goo-gooing to her second-trimester fetus. I was present at a few de-cantings, which were often elaborately catered, with hired bands and wrapped presents and the whole megillah.

As is so often the case, it was a fad, not a tide of civilization. Some studies came out suggesting that Screwtops did less well in later life than Bellybusters. Other studies showed the opposite. Studies frequently do that.

I don't read studies. I go with my gut. The pendulum had swung back toward the "healthy mother/child bonding of vaginal delivery" and against the "birth trauma scars a child for life" folks, but my gut told me that, given that I should do this at all, my gut was the proper place for it to grow. And now that my uterus has been heard from, I will thank it to shut up.

The frames recording the girl's appearance and subsequent seeming exit from this dimensional plane revealed several interesting things. She had not materialized out of thin vacuum nor had she fallen out of and back into a black hole. There were images before, and after.

I couldn't make a thing of them, given the low light and the mysterious nature of the transubstantiation. But that's what computers are for. My five-and-dime model chewed on the images of twisted light for a while, and came up with the notion that a human body, wrapped in a perfect flexible mirror, would twist light in just such a way. All you'd see would be distorted reflections of the person's surroundings, so while not rendering one invisible, it sure would make you hard to see. Up close it would be possible to make out a human shape, if you were looking for it. From a distance, forget it. If she stood still, especially against a background as shattered as the Delambre junkyard, there would be no way to find her. I remembered the nagging headache I'd had shortly before her little show. She'd been around before she decided to reveal herself to me.

A search of the library found no technology that could produce anything like what I had observed. Whatever it was, it could be turned off and on very quickly; my holocam's shutter speed was well below a thousandth of a second, and she was wrapped in the mirror in one frame, naked in the next. She didn't take it off, she turned it off.

Looking for an explanation of the other singular thing about her, the ability to run nude, even if for only seven steps, in a vacuum, produced a few tidbits concerning the implantation of oxygen sources to dispense directly into the bloodstream, research that had never borne profitable fruit and had been abandoned as impractical. Hmmmm.

I put myself through a refresher course in vacuum survival. People have lived after exposure of up to four minutes, which is when the brain starts to die. They suffer significant tissue damage, but so what? Infants have lived after even longer periods. You can do useful work for maybe a minute, maybe a bit longer, work like scrambling into an emergency suit. Exposures of five to ten seconds will likely rupture your eardrums and certainly hurt like hell, but do you no other real harm. "The bends" is easily treatable.

So wait a minute, what's all this talk about a miracle? I determined in fairly short order that what I'd seen was almost surely a technical marvel, not a supernatural one. And I was a bit relieved, frankly. Gods are capricious characters, and the biggest part of me had no desire to have it proved that one really existed. What if you saw your burning bush and it turned out the Power behind it was a psychopathic child, like the Christian God? He's God, right? He's proved it and you've got to do what he tells you to do. So what if he asks you to sacrifice your son on an altar to His massive ego, or build a big boat in your back yard, or pimp your wife to the local honcho, blackmail him, and give him a dose of clap? (Don't believe me? Genesis 12: 10-20. You learn the most interesting things in church.)

It didn't diminish the miracle one bit to know it was probably man-made. It excited me all the more. Somewhere out there, in that huge junkyard, somebody was doing things nobody else knew how to do. And if it wasn't in the library, the CC probably didn't know about it, either. Or if he did, he was suppressing it, and if so, why?

All I knew was I wanted to talk to whoever had made it possible for that little girl to wrap herself in a perfect mirror and make a face at me.

Which was easier said than done.

The first four weekends I simply camped out, did very little exploring. I was hoping, since she'd come to me once, she'd do it again. No real reason why she should, but again, why not?

After that I spent more time in my suit. I climbed a few alps of rubble, but there didn't seem much point in it after the first few. It stretched as far as the eye could see; there was no way to search it, or even a small part of it.

No, it seemed to me it was no coincidence the sighting had come at the base of that monument to high hopes, the Starship Robert A. Heinlein. I set about to explore as much of the old hulk as I could, but first I visited the library again and learned something of his history. Herewith, in brief, is the saga of failed dreams:

The Heinlein was first proposed in 2010, by a group known as the L5 Society. It was to be humanity's first interstellar vessel, a remarkable idea when you consider that the Lunar colony at the time was quite small, still struggling year to year for funding. And it was to be another twenty years before the keel was laid, at L5, one of the Trojan libration points of the Earth/Luna system. L5 and L4 enjoyed several decades of prominence before the Invasion, and thrived for almost forty years afterwards. Today they are orbiting junkyards. Economic reasons again.

The ship was half completed when the Invaders came. Work was naturally abandoned in favor of more pressing projects, like survival of the species. When that seemed assured, there was still very little effort to spare for blue-sky projects like the Heinlein.

But work resumed in the year 82, A.I., and went on five or six years before another snag was hit, in the form of the Lunarian Party. The loonies, or Isolationists, or (to their enemies) Appeasers, as they came to be called, had as their main article of faith that mankind should accept its lot as a conquered race and thrive as best it could on Luna and the other inhabited planets. The Invaders had reduced all the works of humanity to less than rubble in the space of three days. Surely this demonstrated, the Loonies reasoned, the Invaders were a different breed of cat altogether. We had been extremely lucky to have survived at all. If we annoyed them again they might come back and finish the job they started.

Rubbish, responded the old guard, who have since come to be known as Heinleiners. Sure they were stronger than us. Sure they had superior technology. Sure they had bigger guns. God's always on the side of bigger guns, and if we want him back on our side, we'd better build even bigger guns. The Invaders, the reasoning went, must be a vastly older race, with vastly older science. But they still shit between two… well, tentacle-heels?

This was the flaw in the Heinleiners' reasoning, said the Loonies. We didn't know if they had bigger guns. We didn't know if they had tentacles or cilia or good honest legs and arms like you and I and God. We didn't know anything. No human had ever seen one and survived. No one had ever photographed one, though you'd think our orbiting telescopes would have; they'd been looking, on and off, for two hundred years, and no one had seen them check out of the little motel known as Earth. They were weird. Their capabilities had thus far admitted of no limits. It seemed prudent to assume they had no limits.

After almost ninety years of jingoism, of rally-round-the-flag rhetoric and sheer pettifogging bombast, this sounded like a good argument to a large part of a population weary of living on a perpetual war footing. They'd been making sacrifices for nearly a century, on the theory that we must be ready to, one, repel attack, and two, rise up in our wrath one glorious day and stomp the bejesus out of those… whatever they were. Live and let live made a whole lot of sense. Stop our puny saber-rattling round the ankles of these giants, and we'll be okay. Speak softly, and screw the big stick.

Eventually all our forward listening posts in near-Earth orbit were drawn back-a move I applaud, by the way, since they'd heard nothing and seen nothing since Invasion Day. It was commanded that no man-made object approach the home planet closer than 200,000 kilometers. The planetary defense system was scaled back drastically, turned to meteoroid destruction, where at least it saw some use.

How all this affected the Heinlein was in the ban on fission and fusion explosive devices. The R.A.H. had been designed as an Orion-type pusher-plate propulsion system, to this day the only feasible drive if you want to get to the stars in less than a thousand years. What you do is chuck A-bombs out of a hole in the back, slam the door, and wait for them to go off. Do that every second or two. The shock wave pushes you.

This needs a big pusher plate-and I'm talking big here-and some sort of shock absorber to preserve the dental work of the passengers. They calculated it could reach about one-twentieth of light-speed-Alpha Centauri in only about eighty years. But it couldn't even leave L5 without bombs, and suddenly there were no more bombs. Work shut down with the main body and most of the shock absorbing system almost complete, still no sign of the massive pusher plate.

For forty years the friends of the Heinlein lobbied for an exception for their big baby, like the one granted to the builders of the first disneylands for blasting purposes. Changing political winds and economic pressure from the Outer Planets Confederation, where most fissionables were mined, and the decline of the L.P. combined to eventually bring a victory. The Heinleiners celebrated and turned to the government for funding… and nobody cared. Space exploration had fallen out of favor. It does, periodically. The argument not to pour all that money down the rathole of space when you could spend it right here on Luna can be a persuasive one to a population more interested in standard of living and crippling taxation and no longer afraid of the Invader boogeyman.

There were attempts to get it going again with private money. The perception was the whole thing had passed its time. It was a white elephant. It became a regular subject in comic monologues.

The ship still had some value as scrap. Eventually someone bought it and strapped on some big boosters and lowered it bodily to the edge of Delambre, where it sits, stripped of anything of worth, to this day.

The first thing I noticed about the Heinlein during my explorations was that it was broken. That is to say, snapped in half. Built strongly to withstand the shocks of its propulsion system, it had never been meant to land on a planet, even one with so weak a gravity field as Luna. The bottom had buckled, and the hull had ruptured about halfway back from the stem.

The second thing I noticed was that, from time to time, lights could be seen from some of the windows high up on the hull.

There were places where one could get inside. I explored several of them. Most led to solidly welded doors. A few seemed to go further, but the labyrinthine nature of the place worried me. I made a few sorties trailing a line behind me so I could find my way out, but during one I felt the line go slack. I followed it back and couldn't determine if I'd simply tied it badly or if it had been deliberately loosened. I made no more entries into the ship. There was no reason to suppose the girl and anyone she lived with would wish me well. In fact, if she did, she certainly would have contacted me by then. I would have to resort to other tactics.

I tried magnetic grapplers and scaled the side of the hull, trying to reach the lighted ports. When I reached them I was seldom sure I had the right one, and in any case, by the time I got there no light could be seen.

It began to seem I was chasing ghosts.

I got discouraged enough that, one Friday night, I decided to stay home for the weekend. I was getting quite big, and while one-sixth gee must make it easier to carry a baby, we're none of us as strong as our Earth-born ancestors were, and I'd become prone to backaches and sore feet.

So I decided to rent a rig and take a trip to Whiz-Bang, the new capitol of Texas. Harry the blacksmith had just got a new Columbus Phaeton-$58.00 in the Sears catalog!-and was happy to let me try it out. (Mail-order was our polite fiction for Modern-Made. There would never be enough disneys to manufacture all the items one needs for survival, there's just too many of them. Most of the things I owned had arrived on the Wells-Fargo wagon, fresh from the computer-run factories.) He hitched a dappled mare he assured me was gentle, and I took off down the road.

Whiz-Bang is in the eastern part of the disney. The interior compresses about two hundred miles worth of environment into a bubble only fifty miles wide, so before I got there I was into a new kind of terrain and climate, one where there was more rainfall and things grew better. Purely by chance I was passing through at the height of the wildflower season. I saw larkspur, phlox, Mexican hat, Indian paintbrush, cornflower, and bluebonnets. Millions and millions of bluebonnets. I stopped the horse and let her graze while I spread my blanket among them and ate a picnic lunch. I can't tell you what a relief it was to get away from the foreboding hulk of the Heinlein and the bitter white rock of the surface, and hear the song of the mockingbird.

I pulled into Whiz-Bang around noon. It's a bigger town than New Austin-which means it has five saloons and we have two. They get more of the tourist trade, which New Austin does not work to attract, which means they have more small shops selling authentic souvenirs, still the main means of livelihood for two out of five Texans. I strolled the streets, nodding to the gentlemen who tipped their hats, stopping to look into each shop window. The merchandise fell into four categories: Mexican, Indian, "Primitive West," and Victorian. The first three were all hand-made in the disney, certified genuine reproductions-with a little fudging: "Indian" artifacts included items from all southwest tribes, not just Comanche and Apache. But there were no totem poles and no plastic papooses.

Suddenly I realized I was looking at the answer, if answer there was. I was standing at the window of a toy shop.

I felt like Santa Claus as I drove once more down the mining road and across the rising rim of Delambre early that Sunday morning. I certainly had a sleighful of toys, in a vac-sack tossed on the passenger seat. It was about two days past full noon.

"On Dasher, on Dancer, on Prancer," I cried. The ride in the country and the new plan of attack had buoyed my spirits, which had been at a low ebb. I stopped the rover and quickly deployed the tent. I spoke not a word but went straight to my work, setting out all my presents… oh, stop that, Hildy. I laughed, which no doubt caused my big round belly to shake like a bowl full of jelly.

What I'd done was first to make a Whiz-Bang toymonger a very happy and much wealthier woman. She'd followed me out of the store, carrying my boxes of trifles, not quite kow-towing, stowing them in the buggy for me. Then I'd driven back to New Austin, pausing only to pick a bunch of bluebonnets, which I mailed to Cricket. No, I hadn't given up yet.

I'd exercised little selection in the toy store, ruling out only the ranks of lead soldiers and most of the dolls. Somehow they just didn't feel right; maybe it was just personal prejudice. But now I sweated the choice of each of the four items I wanted to lure her with.

First was a tin-and-pewter wind-up of a horse pulling a cart, brightly painted in reds and yellows. All little girls like horses, don't they?

Next was a half-meter Mexican puppet in the shape of a skeleton, made of clay and papier-mвchй and corn husks. I liked the way it clattered when I picked it up, dangling from its five strings. It was old and wise.

Then a Kachina doll, even older and wiser, though carved and painted only months ago. I chose it over the sweeter, safer white man's dolls, all porcelain and pouty lips and flounces, because it spoke to me of ancient secrets, unknown ceremonies. It was as brashly pagan as my elusive sprite, she of the funny face. Reading up on it, I found it was even better, as the Kachinas were said to exist among the tribe, but invisible.

And last, my most fortuitous find: a butterfly net, made of bent cane and gauze, with a glass Mason jar, wad of cotton, and bottle of alcohol for the humane euthanizing of specimens. Just the sort of toy parents could put together for a pioneer child, if the child had a biological bent.

None of the toys would be much harmed by vacuum, but the sunshine on the surface is brutal, so I placed them where they'd stay in the shade, near the hull of the Heinlein, and arranged little lights over them so they'd be easy to find. Then I went back to the tent.

I didn't have much time to stay if I was to be back for Monday classes, and I spent that time unprofitably. I couldn't eat anything, and I couldn't read the book I'd brought along. I was excited, worried, and a little depressed. What made me think this would work?

So in the end I struck the tent and took one last tour of my little toy tableau, which once more was undisturbed.

The next week was hell. Many times I thought of looking for a substitute and getting the hell back. You want a measure of my distraction? Elise caught me dealing seconds, and it's been seventy years since that had happened.

But the week did crawl by, faster than any ordinary garden slug, and Friday afternoon I turned the editorial chores over to Charity with instructions to keep the libel suits down to three or four, and broke all records getting out to Delambre.

The Kachina was gone. In its place was something I didn't recognize at first, but quickly realized was a Navajo sand painting. These are made by dribbling different colored sands onto the ground and they can be amazingly detailed and precise. This one wasn't, but I appreciated the effort. It was just a stick figure Indian, with war bonnet and a bow held in one hand, a tipi in the background.

She'd taken the horse and carriage, too, and left a vac-cage about the right size for taking your pet hamster for a stroll on the surface. But inside was a horse. A living horse, ten centimeters high at the shoulder.

I hadn't seen a horselet in years. Callie had given me one for my fifth birthday, not as small as this one. Not long after that people like David Earth had succeeded in getting that sort of gene tinkering outlawed. You could still buy minis on Pluto, but the most that was allowed on Luna these days were perpetual puppies and kittens. When I was young you could still get real exotics, like winged dogs and eight-legged cats.

Somehow I didn't think this beast had been purchased on Pluto. I held the cage up and tapped on the glass, and the horselet looked back at me calmly. I wondered what I was going to do with the damn thing.

The butterfly equipment didn't seem disturbed until I looked at it more closely. Then I saw the monarch at the bottom of the jar, still, apparently dead. I put the jar in my pocket for later examination, left the net where it was, and hurried on to find that my last offering had been taken. The skeleton puppet was gone, and where it had been was a scrap of paper. I picked it up and read the word "thanks," written in pencil.

I pondered all this on the drive back to King City. I didn't know whether to be encouraged or crestfallen. Three of my toys had been taken, and three other toys left in their place. I had never expected this. My hope had been to gradually lure her out with gifts; the idea of trading had never entered my mind.

So it was good that I had finally made contact, of a sort. At least, I hoped it was she who had left the horse, butterfly, and painting. It was still possible another sort of prankster entirely was at work here, but I didn't think so. Each gift told me something, though it was hard to know just how much to read into each one.

The horselet was illegal, so she was telling me she didn't give a damn about the law. The painting, when I examined the photo I took of it, proved to be of a Lipan Apache brave, not just a generic "Indian." That meant to me that she knew the gift came from Texas… and that I lived there? Might she come to me? You're getting too far-fetched, Hildy.

The butterfly was the most interesting of all, and that was why I had not erected the tent but was on my way to Liz's apartment in King City. Of the people I knew, she'd be the most likely to be able to give me the help I needed with no questions asked.

Before I got there I stopped and bought another computer. I used this one to doctor the images from my recorder, completely wiping out the background from those crucial seconds until I had nothing but the nude figure of a girl running against a black background. The impulse to protect the story is a deep one; I had no reason to mistrust Liz, but no reason why she should know everything I knew, either.

I showed her the film and explained what I wanted from her, managing to befuddle her considerably, but when she understood I was answering no questions she said sure, it would be no problem, then stood watching me.

"Now, Liz," I said.

"Sure," she said, and did a double-take. "Oh, you mean right now."

So she called a friend at one of the studios who said, sure, he could do it, no problem, and was about to wire the pictures to him when I said I'd prefer to use the mail. Looking at me curiously, Liz addressed the tape and popped it into the chute, then waited for my next trick.

"What the hell," I said, and got out the butterfly. We both looked at it with the naked eye, handling it carefully, and she wanted to let her computer have a go at it, but I said no, and instead ordered an ordinary magnifying glass, which arrived in ten minutes. We both examined it and found I had been right about the propulsion system. There were hair-fine tubes under the wings, which were somehow attached to the insect's musculature in such a way that flexing the wing caused air to squirt out.

"Looks kind of squirrely to me," Liz pronounced. "I think it'd just fall down and lie there."

"I saw it fly," I said.

"If that'll fly, I'll kiss your ass and give you an hour to draw a crowd." She waited expectantly for my response, but I didn't give her one. It was obvious she was being eaten with curiosity. She tried wheedling a little, then gave it up and turned to the horse. "I might be willing to take this off your hands," she said. "I know somebody who wants one." She tickled it under the chin, and it trotted to the edge of the table where I'd released it, then jumped down. A scale model horse in one-sixth gee is quite spry.

Liz named a price, and I said she was taking bread from the mouths of my children and named another, and she said I must think she just fell off the turnip wagon, and eventually we settled on a price that seemed to please her. I didn't tell her that if she'd asked, I'd have given it to her.

The pictures arrived. I looked at them and told her they'd do nicely, and thanked her for her time and trouble. I left her still trying to find out more about the butterfly.

What I'd obtained from her was a strip of images suitable for installing inside a zoetrope. If you don't know what that is, it's a little like a phenakistoscope, but fancier, though not quite so nice as a praxinoscope. Still at sea? Picture a small drum, open at the top, with slits around the sides. You put the drum on top of a spindle, paste pictures inside it, rotate it, and look through the slits as they move past you. If you've chosen the right pictures, they will appear to move. It's an early version of the motion picture.

I put the strip inside the zoetrope I'd bought at the Whiz-Bang toy store, twirled it, and saw the girl running jerkily. And I'd done it all without the aid of the Lunar computer net known as the CC. With any luck, these images still existed only in my recorder.

I went right back out to Delambre and put the zoetrope in a location where it couldn't be missed. I set up the tent, fixed and ate a light supper, and fell asleep.

I checked it several times during the weekend and always found it still where I'd left it. Sunday night-still daylight in Delambre-I packed the rover and decided to look once more before leaving. I was feeling discouraged.

At first I thought it hadn't been touched, then I realized the pictures had been changed. I knelt and spun the drum, and through the slits I saw the flickering image of myself in my pressure suit, with Winston in his, capering around my legs.

I had a week to think it over. Was she saying she wanted to see the dog? Any dog, or just Winston? Or was she saying anything at all except I see you?

What I had to remember was there was no real hurry to this project, my feelings of impatience notwithstanding. If Winston had to be involved, it would require bringing Liz deeper into my confidence, something I was reluctant to do. So the next weekend I went out armed with four dogs, one from each of the cultures in Texas. There was a brightly painted Mexican one, carved from wood, another simpler wooden pioneer dog, a Comanche camp scene, with dogs, painted on rawhide-the best I could do-and my prize, a brass automaton of a dog that would shuffle up to a fire hydrant and lift its leg.

I set them out on my next visit. As I was crawling into the tent afterwards my phone rang.

"Hello? I said, suspiciously.

"I still say it can't fly."

"Liz? How'd you get this number?"

"You ask me that? Don't start me lying this early in the morning. I got my methods."

I thought about telling her what the CC thought of her methods, and I thought about chewing her out for invading my privacy-since my retirement I'd restricted my telephone to incoming calls from a very short list-but thinking about those things was as far as I got, because as I was talking I'd stood up and turned around, and all four of my new gifts were lined up just outside the tent, looking in at me. I turned quickly, scanning the landscape in every direction, but it was useless. In that mirror skin of hers she might be lying flat no more than thirty meters away and I wouldn't have a prayer.

So what I said was "Never mind that, I was just thinking of you, and that lovely dog of yours."

"Then this is your lucky day. I'm calling from the car, and I'm no more than twenty minutes from Delambre, and Winston is having a wet dream that may concern your left leg, so throw some of that chili on the stove."

"I think you gained two kay since last week," she said when she came into the tent. "When it comes time to whelp that thing, you're gonna have to do it in shifts." I appreciated those remarks so much that I added three peppers to her bowl and miked it hard. Pregnancy is maybe the most mixed blessing I'd ever experienced. On the one hand, there's a feeling I couldn't begin to describe, something that must approach holiness. There's a life growing in your body. When all is said and done, reproducing the species is the only demonstrable reason for existence. Doing so satisfies a lot of the brain's most primitive wiring. On the other hand, you feel like such a sow.

I told her as little as I could get away with, mostly that I'd seen someone out here and that I wanted to get in contact with her. She saw my box of toys: the zoetrope, and the dogs.

"If it's that girl you had the pictures of, and you saw her out here, I'd like to meet her, too."

I had to admit it was. How else was I going to convince her to leave Winston in my care for the rest of the weekend?

We tossed around a few ideas, none of them very good. As she was getting ready to leave she thought of something, pulled a deck of cards from her pocket, and handed them to me.

"I brought these along when I found out where you'd been coming all these weekends." She'd previously told me the story of her detective work, nosing around Texas, finding out from Huck that I always left Friday evening when the paper went to bed-lately even earlier. Rover rental records available to the public, or to people who knew how to get into them, told her where I'd been renting. A bribe to the right mechanic got her access to the odometer of my vehicle, and simple division told her how long a trip I'd been taking each time, but by then she'd been pretty sure it was to Delambre.

"I knew you'd seen something out here during the Bicentennial," she went on. "I didn't know what, but you came back from that last walk looking wilder than an acre of snakes, and you wouldn't tell anybody what it was. Then you show up at my place with those pictures of a girl running through nothing and you won't let me wire 'em or digitize 'em. I expect you got secrets to keep, but I could figure out you were looking for somebody. So if you want to find somebody, what you do is you start playing solitaire, and pretty soon they'll come up and tell you-"

"-to play the black ten on the red Jack," I finished for her.

"You heard it. Well, at least it'll give you something to do." She left, casting a worried eye over her pet, who didn't seem at all disturbed to see her go, and with a final admonition that Winston got his walkies three times a day or he was apt to get mean enough to make a train take a dirt road.

I'd already brought a deck of cards. I usually have one with me, as manipulating them is something to do with my hands at idle moments, better than needlepoint and potentially much more profitable. If you don't practice the moves you find your hands freeze up on you at a critical moment.

But I never play solitaire, and the reason is a little embarrassing. I cheat. Which is all very well for blackjack or five-card stud, but what's the point in solitaire?

Point or not, I eventually found myself laying out a hand.

Pretty soon I got into it. Not the game itself, than which there are few purer wasters of time, but the cards. You have to be able to visualize the order, make them your friends so they'll tell you things. Do it long enough and you'll always know what the next card will be, and you'll know what the cards are that you can't see, as sure as if they were marked on the back.

I did it for a long time, until Winston got up and began to scratch at the wall of the tent. Better get him into his suit before he got frantic, I thought, and looked up into the face of the girl. She was standing there, outside the tent, grinning down at Winston, and she had a telescope tucked under her arm. She looked at me and shook a finger: naughty, naughty.

"Wait!" I shouted. "I want to talk to you."

She smiled again, shrugged her shoulders, and became a perfect mirror. All I could see of her was the distorted reflection of the tent and the ground she stood on. The distortions twisted and flowed and began to dwindle. Pressing my face against the tent wall I could follow her progress for a little while since she was the only moving object out there. She wasn't in any hurry and I thought she looked back over her shoulder, but there was no way to be sure.

I got into my suit quickly, thought it over, and suited Winston, too. I let him out, knowing his ears and sense of smell were totally useless out here but hoping some other doggy sense would give me a lead. He shuffled off, trying to press his nose to the ground as he usually did, succeeding only in getting moondust on the bottom of his helmet. I followed him with my flashlight.

Soon he stopped and tried to press his face to the surface with more than his usual doggedness. I knelt and looked at what he was trying to pick up. It was a bit of spongy material that crumbled in my glove when I lifted it. I laughed aloud; Winston looked up, and I patted the top of his helmet.

"I might have know you wouldn't miss food, even if you can't smell it," I told him. And we set off together, following the trail of breadcrumbs.