The other four started to close in. Smith did not want to twist them. He felt that Jubal would be more pleased with him if he simply stopped them. But stopping a thing, even an ash tray, is work—and Smith did not have his body at hand. An Old One could have managed it, all four together, but Smith did what he could do, what he had to do.

Four feather touches—they were gone.

He felt more intense wrongness from the direction of the car on the ground and went at once to it—grokked to a quick decision, and car and pilot were gone.

He almost overlooked the car riding cover patrol in the air. Smith started to relax when he had disposed of the car on the ground—when suddenly he felt wrongness and trouble increase, and he looked up.

The second car was coming in for a landing right where he was.

Smith stretched his time sense to his personal limit and went to the car in the air, inspected it carefully, grokked that it was as choked with utter wrongness as the first had been . . . tilted it into neverness. Then he returned to the group by the pool.

All his friends seemed quite excited; Dorcas was sobbing and Jill was holding her and soothing her. Anne alone seemed untouched by the emotions Smith felt seething around him. But wrongness was gone, all of it, and with it the trouble that had disturbed his meditations earlier. Dorcas, he knew, would be healed faster and better by Jill than by anyone—Jill always grokked a hurting fully and at once. Disturbed by emotions around him, slightly apprehensive that he might not have acted in all ways rightly at the point of cusp—or that Jubal might so grok him—Smith decided that he was now free to leave. He slipped back into the pool, found his body, grokked that it was still as he had left it, unharmed—slipped it back on.

He considered contemplating the events at the cusp. But they were too new, too recent; he was not ready to enfold them, not ready to praise and cherish the men he had been forced to move. Instead he returned happily to the task he had been on. “Sherbet” . . . “Sherbetlee” . . . “Sherbetzide”—

He had reached “Tinwork” and was about to consider “Tiny” when he felt Jill’s touch approaching him. He unswallowed his tongue and made himself ready, knowing that his brother Jill could not remain very long under water without distress.

As she touched him, he reached out, took her face in his hands and kissed her. It was a thing he had learned to do quite lately and he did not feel that he grokked it perfectly. It had the growing-closer of the water ceremony. But it had something else, too . . . something he wanted very much to grok in perfect fullness.



16

Jubal Harshaw did not wait for Gillian to dig her problem child out of the pool; he left instructions for Dorcas to be given a sedative and hurried to his study, leaving Anne to explain (or not explain) the events of the last ten minutes. “Front!” he called out over his shoulder.

Miriam turned and caught up with him. “I guess I must be ‘front,’” she said breathlessly. “But, Boss, what in the—”

“Girl, not one word.”

“But, Boss—”

“Zip it, I said. Miriam, about a week from now we’ll all sit down and get Anne to tell us what we really did see. But right now everybody and his cousins will be phoning here and reporters will be crawling out of the trees—and I’ve got to make a couple of calls first. I need help. Are you the sort of useless female who comes unstuck when she’s needed? That reminds me—Make a note to dock Dorcas’s pay for the time she spent having hysterics.”

Miriam gasped. “Boss! You just dare do that and every single one of us will quit cold!”

“Nonsense.”

“I mean it. Quit picking on Dorcas. Why, I would have had hysterics myself if she hadn’t beaten me to it.” She added, “I think I’ll have hysterics now.”

Harshaw grinned. “You do and I’ll spank you. All right, put Dorcas down for a bonus for ‘extra hazardous duty.’ Put all of you down for a bonus. Me, especially. I earned it.”

“All right. But who pays your bonus?”

“The taxpayers, of course. We’ll find a way to clip—Damn!” They had reached his study door; the telephone was already demanding attention. He slid into the seat in front of it and keyed in. “Harshaw speaking. Who the devil are you?”

“Skip the routine, Doc,” a face answered cheerfully. “You haven’t frightened me in years. How’s everything going?”

Harshaw recognized the face as belonging to Thomas Mackenzie, production manager-in-chief for New World Networks; he mellowed slightly. “Well enough, Tom. But I’m rushed as can be, so—”