Gone for the day, gone for good (or gone for bad), Jubal did not know. Duke had been present at dinner the night before, had not shown up for breakfast. Neither event was noteworthy in Harshaw’s loosely coupled household and no one else appeared to have missed Duke. Jubal himself would not ordinarily have noticed unless he had had occasion to yell for Duke. But this morning Jubal had, of course, noticed . . . and he had refrained from shouting for Duke at least twice on occasions when he normally would have done so.

Jubal looked glumly across the pool, watched Mike attempt to perform a dive exactly as Dorcas had just performed it, and admitted to himself that he had not shouted for Duke when he needed him, on purpose. The truth was that he simply did not want to ask the Bear what had happened to Algy. The Bear might answer.

Well, there was only one way to cope with that sort of weakness. “Mike! Come here.”

“Yes, Jubal.” The Man from Mars got out of the pool and trotted over like an eager puppy, waited. Harshaw looked him over, decided that he must weigh at least twenty pounds more than he had on arrival . . . and all of it appeared to be muscle. “Mike, do you know where Duke is?”

“No, Jubal.”

Well, that settled it; the boy didn’t know how to lie—wait, hold it! Jubal reminded himself of Mike’s computer-like habit of answering exactly the question asked . . . and Mike had not known, or had not appeared to know, where that pesky box was, once it was gone. “Mike, when did you see him last?”

“I saw Duke go upstairs when Jill and I came downstairs, this morning when time to cook breakfast.” Mike added proudly, “I helped cooking.”

“That was the last time you saw Duke?”

“I am not see Duke since, Jubal. I proudly burned toast.”

“I’ll bet you did. You’ll make some woman a fine husband yet, if you aren’t careful.”

“Oh, I burned it most carefully.”

“Jubal—”

“Huh? Yes, Anne?”

“Duke grabbed an early breakfast and lit out for town. I thought you knew.”

“Well,” Jubal temporized, “he did say something about it. I thought he intended to leave after lunch today. No matter, it’ll keep.” Jubal realized suddenly that a great load had been lifted from his mind. Not that Duke meant anything to him, other than as an efficient handyman—no, of course not! For many years he had avoided letting any human being be important to him—but, just the same, he had to admit that it would have troubled him. A little, anyhow.

What statute was violated, if any, in turning a man exactly ninety degrees from everything else?

Not murder, not as long as the lad used it only in self-defense or in the proper defense of another, such as Jill. Possibly the supposedly obsolete Pennsylvania laws against witchcraft would apply . . . but it would be interesting to see how a prosecutor would manage to word an indictment.

A civil action might lie—Could harboring the Man from Mars be construed as “maintaining an attractive nuisance?” Possibly. But it was more likely that radically new rules of law must evolve. Mike had already kicked the bottom out of both medicine and physics, even though the practitioners of such were still innocently unaware of the chaos facing them. Harshaw dug far back into his memory and recalled the personal tragedy that relativistic mechanics had proved to be for many distinguished scientists. Unable to digest it through long habit of mind, they had taken refuge in blind anger at Einstein himself and any who dared to take him seriously. But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.

Harshaw recalled that his grandfather had told him of much the same thing happening in the field of medicine when the germ theory came along; many older physicians had gone to their graves calling Pasteur a liar, a fool, or worse—and without examining evidence which their “common sense” told them was impossible.

Well, he could see that Mike was going to cause more hooraw than Pasteur and Einstein combined—squared and cubed. Which reminded him—“Larry! Where’s Larry?”

“Here, Boss,” the loudspeaker mounted under the eaves behind him announced. “Down in the shop.”

“Got the panic button?”

“Sure thing. You said to sleep with it on me. I do. I did.”

“Bounce up here to the house and let me have it. No, give it to Anne. Anne, you keep it with your robe.”

She nodded. Larry’s voice answered, “Right away, Boss. Count down coming up?”

“Just do it.” Jubal looked up and was startled to find that the Man from Mars was still standing in front of him, quiet as a sculptured figure. Sculpture? Yes, he did remind one of sculpture . . . uh—Jubal searched his memory. Michelangelo’s “David,” that was it! Yes, even to the puppyish hands and feet, the serenely sensual face, the tousled, too-long hair. “That was all I wanted, Mike.”