* * * * *
The sun blazed down on the desert just as it had yesterday and would do
tomorrow. Biddy sat on the dozing Buck and looked across the rocks at
the place she'd first seen the doorway. It had taken a lot of courage
to come back here after being so scared before and after nobody had
believed her. They'd said there hadn't been any door at all--that she'd
only been make-believing.
And maybe--just maybe--they had been right, because there wasn't any
door there now.
Biddy urged Buck on up the slope. She went fearfully at first, then
with more courage because everything looked very quiet and peaceful,
really. Maybe the horrid people from the Eastern Bloc had realized how
silly it was--trying to blow up our station--and had packed up and gone
home. It wasn't scary at all now. Biddy urged Buck right up to the wall
and he stood there with his eyes half-closed catching a nap. And that
was good because you couldn't fool animals about people. If there had
been anyone around, Buck would have known, all right.
"Hello, little girl."
A chill went through Biddy. Not the cold kind, the tickly kind, as she
turned and saw the man. Buck turned and saw him too and then went back
to sleep.
The speaker was a man and Biddy wondered how on earth she could have
missed him. He was sitting on a rock beside the place the doorway had
been and while Biddy wanted to be scared and thought she ought to be
scared, she wasn't able to feel that way about the man at all.
He got up from his rock and stood there smiling at her. He was very
tall--taller than Pop who was no shorty himself--and had a kind of
yellow hair that was thick and curly. There seemed to be a shiny circle
around the hair but then Biddy saw that was just the sun and the way
the man was standing.
It was hard to say how old the man really was. He was about like Pop,
but in some ways he seemed a lot younger than that and in some ways
much older. It was very confusing. He was kind of slim but he had a
lot of muscle too--probably the way Davey Crockett would look with his
shirt off maybe.