"I didn't think so."
"You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child," Steinhart
went on doggedly. "You were a solitary, a lonely child."
Kimball was watching the sky again.
Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. "We know so little about the
psychology of space-flight, Kim----"
Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the
murmur of the command car's engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny
sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.
"You're glad to be leaving, aren't you--" Steinhart said finally. "Happy
to be the first man to try for the planets----"
Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull
rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.
They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of
the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered
in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.
* * * * *
_Kimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted
middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the
pebbled shore of the River Iss.
They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and
seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he
could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze
came up.
"Kimm-eeeee--"
They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far
down the river. "Kimmmmm--eeeeeeeeee--"
He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear
the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.
He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their
voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.
"Where is that little brat, anyway?"
"He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find
him----"
"Playing with that old faucet--" Mimicry. "'My rad-ium pis-tol----'"
"Cracked--just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you
AN-swer!"
Something died in him. It wasn't a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He
looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren't really his sisters. They
were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John
Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies
for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the
shifting light of the two moons.
"Kimmmm--eeee Mom's going to be mad at you! Answer us!"
If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would
come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords
clashing----
"He's up there in that clump of willows--hiding!"
"Kimmy! You come down here this instant!"
The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into
sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He
shivered, not with horror now. With cold.