* * * * *
The woman who faced me may have been as young as twenty-two, but
she didn't look it. That shocked look, which comes with the first
realization that youth has slipped quietly away downstream in the
middle of the night, and left nothing but frightening rocks of middle
age to show cold and gray in the hard light of dawn, was like the
validation stamp of Time itself in her wide, wise eyes. And her voice
wasn't young any more, either.
"Well? And what did I do now?"
"I beg your pardon?" I said.
"You're Mobile Security, aren't you? Or is that badge you're wearing
just something to cover a hole in your shirt?"
"Yes, I'm Security, but does it have to mean something?" I asked. "All
I did was knock on your door."
"I heard it." Her lips were curled slightly at one corner.
I worked up a smile for her and let her see it for a few seconds before
I answered: "As a matter of fact, I don't want to see _you_ at all. I
didn't know you lived here and I don't know who you are. I'm not even
interested in who you are. It's the little boy who just went in here
that I was interested in. The little Martian boy, I mean."
Her eyes spread as though somebody had put fingers on her lids at the
outside corners and then cruelly jerked them apart.
"Come in," she almost gasped.
I followed her. When I leaned back against the plain door, it closed
protestingly. I looked around. It wasn't much of a room, but then you
couldn't expect much of a room in a little ghost of a place like this.
A few knickknacks of the locality stood about on two tables and a
shelf, bits of rock with streak-veins of fused corundum; not bad if you
like the appearance of squeezed blood.
There were two chairs and a large table intended to match the chairs,
and a rough divan kind of thing made of discarded cratings which had
probably been hauled here from the International Spaceport, ten miles
to the West. In the back wall of the room was a doorway that led dimly
to somewhere else in the house. Nowhere did I see the little boy. I
looked once again at the woman.
"What about him?" she whispered.
Her eyes were still startled.
I smiled reassuringly. "Nothing, lady, nothing. I'm sorry I upset you.
I was just being nosy is all, and that's the truth of it. You see, the
little boy went by me a while ago and he was whistling. He whistles
remarkably well. I asked him what the name of the tune was and he told
me it was the 'Calm' from William Tell. He also told me his mother had
taught him."
Her eyes hadn't budged from mine, hadn't flickered. They might have
been bright, moist marbles glued above her cheeks.